runcore 1.8" pata zif

[Cghullquist]

I'm trying to get a replacement. I believe this unit has a sector flaw somewhere. Here's a summary of my experience:

I wanted to use it for my new Lenovo U110 ultraportable to replace its native 128GB Toshiba 1.8” ZIF HD. The Lenovo came with Vista preloaded on the HD, and I wanted to install Windows 7 RC on the new SSD, which installed without problem and ran beautifully except for occasional and very annoying disk freezes lasting upwards of from 3 minutes to over an hour leaving the drive LED continuously lit, the mouse operational and OS apparently still working but with extremely few clock cycles such that responses would take many minutes. When I was finally able to get Task Manager up during a freeze and look at processes it showed System Idle at 99% and only task manager and explorer getting an occasional 1%. Performance showed essentially no activity and memory usage and only 250 MB (the U110 has 3GB RAM). This suggested that the drive itself was trying to perform some type of operation, either load leveling or just buffer overflow producing incessant hardware interrupts.

I did notice that the freezing would most often occur during periods of heavy disk writing activity such as copying in a file > 1 GB in size, like videos, or a large folder with many files totaling > 1 GB. It seems that the SSD controller becomes overwhelmed with the throughput, bogs down, and then time’s out. Sometimes it will recover after a while, but most of the time after 15-20 minutes patience succumbs to frustration and a forced reboot solves the problem—but not without risks: once the disk got corrupted and a checkdisk was forced by Windows on reboot finding a slew of broken file fragments.

A review of the Tweak Town Runcore forum entries revealed that quite a number of other Runcore customers were experiencing the same “stuttering” and freezes, several also mentioning the continuously lit HD LED. I continued to search for a solution and thought I had found it at the OCZ forums: eliminating disk optimizations like prefetch, indexing, automatic defragging, etc. I implemented all of these plus disabling 8.3 file names, windows disk caching, last file access logging and the NTSF Change Journal, search indexing, and in Windows 7 superprefetch. Also disabled the pagefile. But the freezing continued unabated.

I then came across a discussion of proper partition alignments for SSD’s, downloaded the tools (diskpar.exe and a cloning program), reset the partition offset to 64 bytes and tried to restore the original disk image created by the cloning program and it failed after about a minute into the restore at about 1%. Several attempts to reformat with various small block sizes from 512 to 4096 bytes as recommended by various users still did not allow the cloned image to be restored, always failing at the same location.

I then decided to install Windows XP, for which Lenovo also supplies drivers. This, too, went smoothly and, of course with no drivers installed it would boot up in 10 seconds! After installing all the drivers and everything functional it slowed to 30 seconds. After applying the tweaks to eliminate disk optimizations again, and installing Office 2007, performance really took a hit. Bootup now took a full minute; file copies were significantly slower (only 100mb a minute) albeit without freezing, even with multi-gigabyte sized folders, just extremely slow. Windows 7 had copied much faster but I had to be careful to copy folders incrementally.

The pitifully poor performance with XP made me give up on that OS as a viable solution and I decided to try a 128 byte offset (as also recommended in the forums) to see if perhaps the Windows 7 image file would restore to the drive. It didn’t, failing to “write” at the 1 minute point as before. I then attempted to just re-install Windows 7 and endure/avoid the freezing as best I could, because the performance was so much better.
But 3 attempts to install resulted in freezing every time at the 85% file expansion point.

Now I’ve gone back to the original Toshiba drive and successful restored the Windows 7 image file to it. This has led me to conclude that the SSD is just not functional in any practical usage or is defective.

[ltavel]

I'm experiencing exactly the same troubles as you decribed :
I purchased 128GB SSD 1.8" PATA ZIF drive from runcore to replace a Toshiba drive on my Tablet (Motion LE1700) with a brand new Windows Seven Utilmate installation (RTM release).

My Tablet freeze for a while, specially if I read/write a large volume of data on this SSD drive, the last time it freezed I was trying to move a large amount of mails (about 1.3GB) with Outlook from one pst file to another.

It's also quite impossible to get back from a Sleep or Hibernate mode.

What is Runcore answer about this major issue ?

[ntrance]

Have you guys tried the solutions in this thread:
Zif cable specification for 64GB Pata 1.8"

[ltavel]

No, because on my Tablet PC this is a specific cable which turns 90° two times with another kind of connector on the motherboard.

It is not possible to use the straight cable provided by Runcore with the SSD drive.

[ntrance]

I know it is not the optimal solution, but did you also try limiting IDE interface to UDMA 4 as described by kaldek?

[ltavel]

Not yet, I'll do and let you know.

[Slicster]

Hi,
I read this whole thread and my question doesn't have anything to do with the issues you're having or have had but I'd like to know a few things...

I'm planning on purchasing a RunCore 1.8 ZIF SSD for a HP Compaq 2510p which is the same type of small laptop as your IBM. I would like to know if you can possible provide pictures of what the RunCore ZIF cable that comes with the SSD looks like. If not, can you have a look at the picture I attached and tell me if the disk will fit well with its cable into that slot?

I read a bunch of stuff about the cable having to be twisted but it looks like in my HP the connection is direct so I'm hoping the RunCore cable will fit well. I don't have the original HP connector because we lost the original disk so I need one that will fit.

Any info will be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[simes_pep]

I have a HP 2510p now running very well on a RunCore Pro IV 128GB SSD (had some problems with the previous Pro III model, but all fixed with the IV device).

You need to reuse the HP ZIF cable & connector as the rectangle fitting is unique to this machine.

So once you have Cloned your HDD to the new SSD (in the provided caddy) unhook the ZIF cable by flicking up the small bar at the base of the connector on the Toshiba HDD (you may need to remove the sticky strip) and pull out the ZIF connector to the HDD.
You then just reinsert the ZIF connector into the SSD device (RunCore Red label down, Product ID & S/N label upmost) and then reconnect the rectanglur connector and position the SSD in the space, and refit the bracket to retain the SSD device. Boot up, to check operation, and then refit the case and you should be good to go.

Performance of the SDD is very good with just over 80 MB/s read and 60 MB/s write reported with CrystalDiskMark.

Simon.

[Cghullquist]

I returned my original RunCore SSD to MDD and finally received a replacement Pro IV RCP-IV-Z1828-C but now it is not recognized by my Lenovo BIOS at all. Tried both sides of the cable. Nothing.
Works fine in the supplied external USB enclosure. Was able to clone it with my existing Toshiba drive in the Lenovo U110 and everything is there when I look at in the USB case as an external drive, but will not show up at all when installed in the laptop.

This is VERY discouraging. I see that others have a similar problem in using it in a Mac Book Air and their solution was to exchange it for another version of the drive with a new SATA to PATA bridge chip.

Interestingly, the Lenovo actually has a SATA controller on its MB, and connects to the Toshiba ZIF connector with its own proprietary active cable with undoubtedly an embedded chip that serves as a SATA to PATA bridge! Seems like I should be using a SATA drive and connect directly to the mother board. This is a nightmare. Anyone got a solution here? Or is it time to send it back yet once again?

[Cghullquist]

GOOD NEWS! At least for now.
Discovered a recommendation by RunCore Marketing that the problem with these Pro IV drives not being recognized by some laptops is that it is set by default to be in cable select mode. By removing one of the surface mount resistors (R49) it will be set to Master and then will be recognized by BIOS.

Well, I opened up the case, unsoldered R49 and rmoved it (itsy bitsy !!), put it all back together, re-installed it in my Lenovo U110 and PRESTO! It booted up! in 24 seconds no less! (from the Lenovo flash screen to Windows 7 logon screen).

Now, we'll see if this drive will last longer than 2 weeks before showing signs of failure....
So far, so good. I've applied all the OCZ mods as before and it's remarkable how much faster life is with an SSD!