Hands-on with Runcore's Xapear RFID Portable SSD

Computex Taipei 2011 - One of our final stops for the show this year was with Runcore who was naturally showing off a bunch of its newest SSD, but one new toy that caught our eye was the Xapear.



The Xapear is a USB 2.0 portable SSD storage device that comes in MLC flash up to 128GB and SLC flash up to 64GB and should offer maximum USB 2.0 performance up to 36MB/s. We really hope to see Runcore come out with a USB 3.0 performance to take full advantage of their SSDs that sit inside the device.

What is rather cool about the Xapear is that a SIM card can be installed into the device that accepts SMS text commands such as "kill", "destroy" and so on which instruct the device to immediately remove all data if you misplace the drive or it is stolen. Runcore being a Chinese company sell this drive to the Chinese army and you can imagine it would be popular with the remote erase feature and impressive data access security provided by the RFID encryption.



Two keys are provided with the Xapear - by default there is a public folder that anyone can access and to enable access to the secure private folder, you need one of the keys to unlock that area of the drive. This drive is only selling in China at the moment, but with enough interest from global, Runcore may start shipping to other regions around the world.