Specifications, Pricing and Availability

As an actual manufacturer of SSDs, Comay can do quite a bit to customize their products. Their pricing is very good as well, but we'll get into that story in a few paragraphs. The Comay Venus Pro 3 can be configured and ordered a number of ways, but the minimum order directly from the factory is 100 units. The sample we're looking at today is a 120GB drive that uses 128GB of IMFT third generation 25nm synchronous flash. If you had the means and when I say that I mean the money, you could order this same drive with 0 provisioning (128GB capacity available), standard consumer 7% provisioning (120GB available) or enterprise spec 28% provisioning (100GB available). Those options are just for this one drive and there are several others based on raw capacity.

The configuration you find for sale will really depend on which company ordered the drives for resale. A company in Canada called Synetic Inc carries a limited stock of Comay SSDs and our friends at My Digital Discount are also considering carrying the drives. The prices are so good that three of my local friends are in the process of ordering 100 240GB drives that will make it to their personal RAID arrays and the left over drives will hit EBay, for $1 per GB. Obviously I can't go around and publicly state the direct factory pricing, but I will say that the prices are better than anyone else's direct prices I've seen to date... and we've got the inside scoop on just about every company's price lists, at least the ones they give to smaller retail / e-tail resellers. So, at the moment you're going to have some issues finding Comay SSDs, but that should change over the coming weeks.

When it comes to add-ons, accessories and features the list is long in some areas and short in others. The Venus Pro 3 does not ship with a desktop adapter bracket, but Comay does have a nice utility for monitoring, optimizing and updating the firmware to their SSDs. You also get a nice paper manual that covers installation, best BIOS settings and general install options.

On the features side we've already mentioned the CapXX Supercap that keeps your data safe in the event of a power loss to the drive. The Comay Venus Pro 3 also uses another feature ported from enterprise class SSDS, overload protection. Several years ago lightening hit a power line just outside of my bedroom window as I was standing right by the glass. I might not be able to dunk anymore, but that day my head was inches from the ceiling! The computers were all alright except for the 56K model (I said several years ago). When I removed the model the main chip actually had a piece of the black silicon cover chipped out of it. I'm not saying that the Comay Venus Pro 3 will be able to survive after a shot like that, but the overload protection is designed to stop abnormal voltages from entering into the drive. A more realistic scenario would in a notebook that has an issue with the voltage regulator.

Let's take a look at the drive and see some benchmarks!