Comay Venus Pro 3 128GB Solid State Drive Review (Page 1)

Introduction

A few days ago we introduced you to the Data Memory Systems' Celerity 6G Plus SSD. At the time I mentioned that we are in the process of tracking down products from SSD manufactures that are not well known. Our goal is to find the hidden treasures out there, the diamonds in the rough. Today we actually found one!

Comay, the SSD division for Chinese based company CoreRise, is a true SSD manufacturer with a production facility. Comay is the largest SSD manufacturer that you've never heard of, I guarantee it. To put the Comay product line into perspective, they are the only company listed on SandForce's website that even remotely comes close to the number of models released by OCZ Technology. Both companies list 16 different products at the time of writing.

Comay manufactures both consumer and enterprise SSDs, a bit of an oddity these days. Their flagship consumer drive, the Venus Pro 3 though is a mix between consumer pricing and enterprise power features. Today we're looking at the 120GB drive and in two weeks we'll look at the 240GB model.

At the start of the second SandForce Revolution, when the first SATA III SF-2281 drives started to emerge, we previewed the OCZ Vertex 3 Pro. This was a similar SSD, but marketed straight to the enterprise customer. The Vertex 3 Pro never actually made it to market, at least not under with Vertex branding. The difference between the Vertex 3 Pro and the Vertex 3 was a small capacitor dubbed a supercap.

The CapXX Supercap is like a small rechargeable battery or more specifically a capacitor which to everyone other than an engineer would just be considered a battery. The Supercap is fairly small, but it holds enough power to keep the SandForce Flash Processor Unit (FPU or controller) and the NAND flash powered on long enough to write the data stored in the controllers buffers. So, if your computer loses power or the SSD loses power, your buffered data is retained. That's not the only enterprise tech the Comay Venus Pro 3 uses. Let's take a look at the specifications.