Performance

I didn’t really have high hopes when jumping into the performance of the tiny Pro IV PATA ZIF. The drive is limited right out of the hole due to its ZIF interface, but people with first gen MacBook Air’s and other small form factor laptops and devices from before Intel introduced the Ultrabook standard all still need drives. In this case, with the 512GB model especially RunCore is able to offer the large capacity that newer laptops have available to old models. The ZIF interface is of course limited to PATA speeds, even though it is an SSD. Because of that I didn’t go with the performance tests that we normally use on SSD’s because comparing this to a new SATA 3 drive wouldn’t be all that fair. So what I have done is test the drive using a SATA to ZIF adapter and then retested using the USB 2.0 interface that RunCore provided.

As you can see, it’s not the performance numbers that we would want to see from  a SATA 3 drive, but considering the interface the Pro IV PATA ZIF performed up to par. It’s very disappointing that they didn’t provide a USB 3.0 interface to give better speeds via USB 3.0 as this could be a great pocket USB drive if that was the case.

More importantly you have to consider what people who need a ZIF SSD have currently. The fastest ZIF hard drives are all 4200RPM drives with some even being slower than that. The MacBook Air for example came with a 60 gig 4200 RPM hard drive, I can’t imagine how painful that would be to use considering what we are used to today. Going from that to a much larger 256 or 512 GB SSD with four times the performance would be amazing.