Introduction

Today we will be taking a look at a unique solid state drive, the Comay Venus Pro 240GB. Comay is the SSD division of the parent company CoreRise. CoreRise is based in China and is one of the largest manufacturers of SSD’s in the world. After taking a close look at these drives and the company itself what stands out about CoreRise is definitely their unmatched dedication to QUAILTY. Their product testing is second to none and the quality of their product is noticeably a cut above the rest.

The Venus Pro 3 is the first consumer SATA 3 Solid State Drive with "Power Loss Protection" and "Overload" functions. Usually we see those features only offered in very expensive enterprise drives. From the moment you remove the drive from the anti-static wrapper you can just feel the quality of the workmanship this drive has. The drive has a nice heft to it. The next thing you notice is the finely machined aluminum enclosure, by far the nicest I have ever seen. The quality of this drive is the kind of thing that goes far beyond the visual attractiveness of the product and becomes something felt.

Comay burn-in tests every drive to assure quality and reliability so you won’t be getting a drive that will bomb out on you. The drive I received had been tested with 1.3TB of data that was erased. This attests to Comay’s desire to provide the consumer with a bullet proof drive. Comay is well aware of the problems that 6Gb/s LSI SandForce controlled drives have occasionally been plagued by and, have taken extreme measures to ensure that the Venus Pro 3 will not experience these problems. Their back-up power design will prevent the drive from losing its firmware which has caused many a 2281 drive to become “Bricked”. The Venus Pro  has also been tested to be problem free from sleep-wake up cycles to 10,000 repetitions.

The Venus Pro was shipped to me with 5 series firmware. This is the firmware that brought a new level of performance to the LSI SandForce Processor. Previous to the 5 series firmware SandForce drives were limited to about 80,000 Vantage. The 5 series brought in much higher performance resulting in Vantage scoring of about 85,000 plus. Sounds great? Right? Well not so fast. Because of the way RWL fill tests with Vantage only this lab and one other we know of discovered that there is a major flaw in the 5 series firmware. TRIM does not function PERIOD. We have been in contact with SandForce regarding this matter and they are working on a solution we expect will be released in short order. With this in mind I am going to run the benchmarks in a different order which will expose the TRIM problem. Then I will be running the rest of the benchmarks after the drive is put into a state where TRIM will not recover Vantage scoring so we can observe the effects of this state on most of the benchmarks. The revised benching/filling order will be as follows:

• HD Tune Pro
• AIDA access time testing
• Secure Erase
• Vantage
• Vantage fill testing (which will bring the TRIM issue to the surface)
• Then the following benchmarks in order and only run once each and in rapid succession:
• ATTO
• Anvil Testing
• CrystalDiskMark
• AS SSD scoring and transfer test
• Passmark

I feel this will give the best assessment of this drives performance with the 5 series firmware having no TRIM.