RunCore Launches SSD With A Self-Destruct Button

This week, Chinese storage company RunCore has launched the InVincible SSD – an unusual hard drive with a Mission Impossible –style physical self destruction feature.

Every product from the InVincible series has two hardware buttons – green and red. One of them will launch “intelligent elimination”, overwriting all the data with meaningless gibberish. The other will physically ruin the hard drive with a surge of electricity, rendering it completely useless and producing clouds of smoke in the process.

This message will self-destruct in five seconds

RunCore is a young Chinese company, established in 2007. It makes solid state storage products for both corporate and consumer markets, and claims to own 60 percent of the domestic SSD industry patents.

InVincible is advertised as the solution primarily designed for the defence industries. It can protect sensitive data from third party access in two ways. The green button will “zero” format the hard drive, making all data stored on the device unrecoverable. It pretty much resets the SSD back to factory default.

The red button is a lot less subtle method of keeping your information out of enemy’s hands. When pressed, it applies an over-current to the NAND flash memory, thereby physically destroying it and turning your hard drive into a useless brick.

The process even produces smoke, which you can observe here, and in our picture below, though on a somewhat disappointing scale compared with what emerged in the classic TV series when Jim Phelps heard the words “this tape will self destruct in five seconds.”

InVincible is available in 1.8” and 2.5” form factors, with capacity ranging from 16 to 256 GB. It is connected trough the SATA II interface with 240 MB/s reading and 140 MB/s writing speeds, rather sluggish by SSD standards.

“With the RunCore InVincible you now have a highly advanced data protection solution for most demanding professional usage which is also suited for the private sector where data security is becoming an ever more important concern,” says RunCore.

One question remains unanswered: why capitalise the V in InVincible?

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