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.
