It feels like most of the time there are the same names over and over again but every once in a while someone new does jump into the mix. The brand Fantom Drives isn’t new to the industry, they and their parent company Micronet Technology have been around since 1988 but even after all of that time today is the first time that we have had a Fantom Drives product come into the office. Today I’m going to check out the Fantom Drives Venom8, a PCIe Gen 4 NVMe M.2 SSD. I’m going to take a closer look at the drive to see what it is all about then put it through our test suite, so let’s dive in and see how it performs!

Product Name: Fantom Drives Venom8 2TB

Review Sample Provided by: Fantom Drives

Written by: Wes Compton

Amazon Affiliate Link: HERE

Photos and Features

The Fantom Drives Venom8 is extremely unique in its packaging compared to any other M.2 SSD that I have had come in with it coming in a metal tin for its main packaging. It has a silver tin with a black background on the sticker on top. That sticker has the Fantom Drives logo up top and the Venom8 model name featured in the biggest font. Below that they do let you know that this is an M.2 drive and PCIe Gen 4 x4. Around on the back, it has a smaller white sticker which has the UPC and serial number bar codes as well as the drive capacity which our sample is the 2TB model.

Once you open up the silver tin the Fantom Drives Venom8 has a Venom8 sticker as well as a card asking for your time for a review of their product and to let them know if you have any questions on the drive. More surprising though is the black tin inside. That’s right the drive comes inside of a metal tin which is inside of another metal tin. The drive isn’t going to get damaged, that’s for sure! Along with the sticker and card, there is also a small product manual which is rare to see with any SSDs these days. Then inside of the black tin, the drive comes sitting in foam with a cutout for the drive.

As for the drive itself, the Fantom Drives Venom8 has a black PCB which these days are relatively standard. Fantom Drives just has a standard full-length sticker sitting across the drive, they haven’t gone crazy with a heatsink or even the thin metal stickers that a few drives have been using recently. The sticker matches what we saw on the packaging with a black background and a yellow theme used on an accent that runs the length of the sticker, on the Fantom Drives branding, and in the Venom in the Venom8 model name. They also have the drive capacity on this sticker as well as the model number as well.

The back of the Venom8 has a full-length sticker as well. This one is just black and white and is where you will find all of the certification logos as well as the serial number for your specific drive. They also have the drive capacity and model number here as well. They also warn that if removed that the warranty is void, but we know that isn’t the case in some locations including the states, and either way I’m taking the stickers off to look under them to see what is going on.

The first two pictures below are from the back side of the Venom8 and the other two are from the front. Fantom Drives has put the entire drive to use with both sides being filled. The back side of the drive has four NAND chips with IA7BG94AYA etched on them. These are Micron 176 layer 3D NAND which is TLC. Having four here and four on the front for the 1TB capacity means that each is 256 GB in capacity. In the middle right up next to one of the NAND is a smaller SK HYNIX DDR4 chip with H5AN8G6NCJ etched in it as well as the SK Hynix branding. These are DDR4 8GB ram chips used for the cache on the Venom8. Around on the front side of the drive, it has the same layout with four more NAND and one DDR4 cache. This side has a lot more going on for resisters and two Phison-branded chips. The tiny Phison chip is the PS6108-22 which is there for power management. Then the larger chip is the PS5018-E18-41 which is the flash controller which also gives the Venom8 its PCIe 4.0 support.

Test Rig and Procedures

Performance

Before getting into testing the Fantom Drives Venom8 I did check the drive out using CrystalDiskInfo just to confirm that it was connected using the correct interface. It was connected at PCIe 4.0 x4 so we are good there. I also like to do this to document the firmware revision we are running on for testing because those do change from time to time as well.

My first round of testing was to run the Fantom Drives Venom8 through Crystal Disk Mark 8. Sequential testing is usually a best-case scenario and is what companies use for their specifications and on the front of the box to advertise drive speeds which in the case of the Fantom Drives Venom8 the box didn’t have the drive speed listed but the specifications do and those say the Venom8 should see up to 7400 MB/s for its reads and 6900 MB/s for its writes. Below I have the drives labeled in orange if they are PCIe 4.0 and blue for older 3.0 drives for reference. The Fantom Drives Venom8 did 6989 MB/s for its read speeds and 4132 MB/s for the writes which the write performance was significantly off of advertised but the read speeds weren’t too bad putting it up ahead of any of the other drives tested.

While testing in CrystalDiskMark 8 I did also check out the drive’s IOPS performance with the random 4k queue depth of 32 and 1 thread results. I stacked the read and write performance together here because I do believe that the overall drive performance is important, not just one result or the other. The Venom8 did well on its read speeds with it being the second fastest tested but its write speeds when combined put it down in the bottom half of the drives tested.

In AS SSD, I skipped over the standard test because it is very similar to the CrystalDiskMark tests I prefer to check out one of its sub-tests, the copy benchmark. This moves three files, one that is an ISO, one that is a program, and then a game, and times how long each takes. With these being timed, lower is better here. I have all three results stacked to see which drives are best overall. The Venom8 was the fastest of all of the drives tested here when all of the results were combined. Its program file transfer speed makes up most of that as well as the ISO transfer speed being tied for first as well. The game file transfers on the other hand were in line with the other fast drives but about half of the faster drives were faster.

Next up with PassMark Performance Test 10, I ran their combined synthetic benchmark to get a look at their DiskMark rating. The Venom8 didn’t perform so hot here with its score of 26266 putting it below the Crucial P3 Plus and in the bottom half of the results.

I then changed my focus back over to IOPS performance and ran the Fantom Drives Venom8 in Anvil’s Storage Benchmark focusing on the 4k queue depth of 16 results from the main test. The read IOPS for the Venom8 were in line with the top drives but not the fastest of the bunch but it did surprisingly well on the write IOPS which when combined put it right in the middle of the pack.

Sticking with Anvil’s Storage Utilities I did a few more tests. Here I wanted to check out how the drive would react to different queue depths so with the file size set to 4K I ran tests ramping up double each time starting at 1 and up to 128 for reads and 64 for writes. This lets us see if the controller gets overloaded. For the read queue depth tests the Fantom Drives Venom8 starts as one of the fastest drives tested. It falls behind slightly in the middle but doesn’t fall off in the last two tests like some of the other drives putting it up in the top three. For the write test id didn’t start off as well running in the middle of the pack and it continued that until the queue depth of 32 and 64 tests where it ramped up. The M480 and the Renegade were still significantly faster up top but it did put the Venom8 in third place up top.

For ATTO Benchmark I set it to a queue depth of just 1 but ramped up the file size slowly to see how it would affect performance. For the read test in ATTO, the Venom8 started off doing well but at the 8MB/12MB range in both the write and read tests, it dropped off down to almost nothing and then started to make its way back up. This is a shame because up to that point, it was in the lead in the write test and was running with the top pack in the read test.

Next up I wanted to look at more real-world performance and for this, I started with PCMark 10 which has an overall full system benchmark for storage and then one focused on data storage drives. In the full system drive benchmark, the Venom8 is a little behind some of the other newer PCIe Gen 4 drives with its score of 2796 but it is still faster than drives like the P400 and the Rocket 4.0 Plus. For the data drive test, the Venom8 scored a 4473 which still puts it in 5^th place as well.

Next, up for more real-world resting, I did our file transfer tests. You don’t get any more real-world than this. For each drive, I copied the folder filled with files to the drive tested documenting what its transfer rate is near the end of the transfer. I used three file types, movies which are large single files, a folder filled with RAW and JPG photos, and then a folder filled with word documents. Starting with the movie files the Venom8 transferred them at 1750 but started off faster than that. This was a little low compared to the other PCIe 4.0 drives. It made up the difference in the pictures test with a transfer speed of 1190 MB/s and being the fastest of the drives tested. Last up for the documents which are a lot more demanding the Venom8 did 4.45 MB/s which is right in the middle of the pack for transfer speeds compared to the drives tested.

Before finishing up I also ran the Fantom Drives Venom8 using AIDA64’s linear read disk benchmark for 30 minutes to heat things up to see what the thermals for the drive would look like. The center-mounted flash controller took most of the beating with the workload and you can see that is the hotspot. Without a heatsink that stayed the warmest spot but there is some heat transfer out to the closest NAND and the DDR4 but not enough to worry about.

Overall and Final Verdict

With the Fantom Drives Venom8 tested and having taken a closer look at the drive we can finally step back and run through the pros and cons of the drive. The most interesting thing to come from the Venom8 has to be the packaging. I’ve never seen an M.2 drive come in a metal tin before let alone a tin within a tin. It certainly makes the drive feel premium compared to other drives. As for the drive itself, the black PCB and full-length stickers on both sides are about as standard as they come and will work with any motherboard setup, unlike drives with fancy heatsinks. The Venom8 is a PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe drive which itself puts it up in with some of the fastest drives on the market. The performance that I saw in our testing was hit and miss a little bit, coming up a little short compared to the potential speeds listed in the specifications. But I was impressed with the file transfer times in AS SSD and even when it didn’t perform as well it is still an extremely fast drive. It just runs in the middle of the pack with similarly configured drives. Fantom Drives gave the Venom8 Micron 176 layer 3D TLC NAND along with the Phison E18 controller as well as on the drive cache which is getting rarer these days. It did struggle in Passmark as well as the weird performance drop I saw in the middle of ATTO so there is room for improvement.

As for pricing which is what makes or breaks an SSD. The Venom8 is priced at $174.95 right now on Amazon. This makes it a surprisingly good value when you start to compare it with other Gen 4 drives with high 6000 to mid 7000 MB/s, read speeds and the same 2TB capacity as our test drive. There are a few options at around $160 but most other similar drives start at $187 and higher. This is good because the Fury Renegade is in that range and performed better, but the Venom8 ends up being a nice value drive when it comes to high-end Gen 4 drives.

Live Pricing: HERE

Author Bio

Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org

Editor-in-chief

You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.