Shades of Mission Impossible.
RunCore SSD, a Chinese maker of solid state drives (SSDs), today unveiled a drive that with the push of a button self-destructs, wiping your data from the NAND flash chips inside.
The new InVincible, is an internal 2.5-in SATA SSD that comes with the option of either consumer-grade, multi-level cell (MLC) flash or data-center-grade single-level cell (SLC) flash memory. The drive is also capable of operating at temperatures ranging from 95 degrees to minus 45 degree Celsius, the company said.
What really sets the drive apart, however, is its unique self-destruct feature.
The SSD ships with a separate cable that has a SATA interconnect on one end and two buttons, red and green, on the other. When a user presses the green button, it activates a feature that overwrites all data on the SSD with meaningless code. That resets the SSD, allowing it to be reused.
When the red button is pressed, the drive is destroyed through the use of an electrical surge that literally fries the NAND flash chips inside.
In a video demonstration, when the red button is pushed, the drive actually smokes as the electrical surge pulses through it. A look inside the drive reveals toasted NAND flash chips.
The InVincible self-destruct feature in action.
“The RunCore InVincible product series is catering to embedded computer systems requiring high-speed serial switched fabric interconnects for rugged design implementation and more flexible power ranges, delivering optimized storage options — particularly in mission-critical fields such aerospace, military and general industrial applications,” the company said in a statement.
The drive sports rather average SSD performance of 240MB/sec for sequential reads and 140MB/sec for writes.
The company declined to name a price for the drive.
Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian or subscribe to Lucas’s RSS feed. His e-mail address is [email protected].
