Specifications, Availability and Pricing

In the specifications we will be looking at four different part numbers that make up the Pro IV Series products. As you can see, these can be broken down into two groups, the smaller 32 and 64GB drives that feature 32MB of cache and the two larger drives, the 128 and 256GB variants that use 64MB of cache. The main difference between all of the drives other than cache size is speed. The fastest of the four drives is the 128GB version and it outperforms the 256GB drive by a small margin in write speed.

Obviously price is going to play a significant role in your purchasing decision. The MSRP for the new Pro IV drives break down to 149.99 (23GB), 259.99 (64GB), 599.99 (128GB) and 999.99 (256GB). At the last minute we received the street prices from My Digital Discount, a large U.S. seller of RunCore products and their prices will be closer to 139.99 (32GB), 249.99 (64GB), 479.99 (128GB) and 899.99 (256GB). Over time I hope to see the drives decrease even more for the consumer market, but only time will tell. As more of RunCore's resellers start to get products in we may see further reductions. It is important to remember that the Pro IV is still a prosumer product built with tighter tolerances than most SSDs yet competes with the OCZ Vertex on price and performance.

RunCore has managed to add additional value to their Pro IV series by including an external hard disk enclosure with each drive. We didn't receive an enclosure with our samples since they are still being manufactured. Also included is a USB 2.0 cable and a 15 Day evaluation of Acronis software. Acronis is used to clone your current boot drive and works very well. Hardware reviewers have been using it for years and it is considered one of the key tools of the trade. Essentially what Runcore has done is made it extremely easy for you to plug the drive into your notebook or desktop, run the software and ten minutes later be ready to swap the drives.