RunCore Develops Self-Destructive Solid-State Drive.

RunCore, a supplier of solid-state drives, this week unveiled InVincible solid-state drive, which is the world's first and only SSD that features physical self destruction feature. Besides typical elimination of all data through overwriting, the InVincible SSD can completely destroy the data by physically destroying memory and other chips inside the drive by burning chips down physically.

The RunCore InVincible SSDs do not offer leading-edge performance: they can read data at up to 240MB/s speed and write data at up to 140MB/s speed. The drives use Serial ATA-II interface and can use single-level cell (SLC) or multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory. But the drives can operate in rather unprecedented temperature range - between -45°C and +95°C - and support brutal ways to erase the data to keep it from obtaining by unauthorized people.

The RunCore InVincible SSDs allow to protect sensitive data from third party access in two ways with a single click. One method is an intelligent elimination of all the data by overwriting the entire disk with meaningless code. This overwrite-deletion method ensures that there is no way to potentially recover previous data stored to the device, effectively setting the SSD back to factory default. Still, there are various data recovery devices not available commercially which can, perhaps, recover data even after overwriting. A less subtle method is the physical destruction of memory chips inside SSD by applying an over-current to the NAND flash memory and thereby physically destroying them.

RunCore positions its InVincible SSDs for aerospace, military and general industrial applications, it is unclear whether the company plans to sell such SSDs to general public and whether the company will be allowed to do so.