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.

	PCIe 3.0	PCIe 4.0
Crystal Disk Mark 8 - Read	SEQ1M Q8T1	SEQ128K Q32T1	RND4K Q32T16	RND4K Q1T1
WD Blue SN550 1TB	2444.53	2077.36	1075.88	57.88
Sabrent Rocket Q4 2TB	4939.59	2871.47	1034.52	74.53
Corsair MP400 1TB	3432.77	1889.56	713.28	61.42
Corsair Force MP600 2TB	4828	1543.31	901.83	41.49
Sabrent Rocket 4.0 Plus 1TB	6468.33	2712.53	455.24	54.68
Crucial P5 Plus 1TB	6697.19	4358.63	1113.7	69.76
Kingston FURY Renegade 2TB	6592.75	3093.11	1085.23	55.14
Patriot P400 1TB	5036.9	3518.47	1059.71	88.06
WD Blue SN570 1TB	3569.34	2681.32	1046.46	65.75
WD Black SN770 1TB	5223.32	4958.17	1034.35	82.24
MSI Spatium M480 Play 2TB	6979.03	4267.59	1315.25	81.22
Viper Gaming VPR400	5163.46	3880.75	1030.81	85.35
Crucial P3 Plus 2TB	5041.44	2799.96	1107.97	56.56
Crucial P3 2TB	3511.18	2379.76	957.63	45.42
Fantom Drives Venom8 2TB	6989.96	4216.08	1086.16	79.59

 

	PCIe 3.0	PCIe 4.0
Crystal Disk Mark 8 - Write	SEQ1M Q8T1	SEQ128K Q32T1	RND4K Q32T16	RND4K Q1T1
WD Blue SN550 1TB	2007.63	2006.4	776.4	290.25
Sabrent Rocket Q4 2TB	3633.71	2568.7	920.84	385.73
Corsair MP400 1TB	2021.09	2017.63	1196.42	262.36
Corsair Force MP600 2TB	992.38	982.78	996.22	276.26
Sabrent Rocket 4.0 Plus 1TB	5241.89	5225.25	921.51	402.26
Crucial P5 Plus 1TB	5025.83	4880.38	884.12	240.78
Kingston FURY Renegade 2TB	6899.76	5831.06	1083.12	367.6
Patriot P400 1TB	4830.94	4813.27	846.34	307.12
WD Blue SN570 1TB	3147.13	2893.72	909.47	234.17
WD Black SN770 1TB	4983.07	4980.59	1149.36	295.13
MSI Spatium M480 Play 2TB	6870.73	5863.14	1062.32	357.02
Viper Gaming VPR400	4780.82	4775.74	838	285.02
Crucial P3 Plus 2TB	4388.26	4387.54	989.42	2967.35
Crucial P3 2TB	3244.52	2712.72	630.77	261.09
Fantom Drives Venom8 2TB	4132.6	5850.19	844.52	315.7

 

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.

Windows 11 File Transfers	Movies	Pictures	Documents
WD Blue SN550 1TB	852	937	2.42
Sabrent Rocket Q4 2TB	2720	1140	5.75
Corsair MP400 1TB	2140	996	2.57
Corsair Force MP600 2TB	1250	816	2.83
Sabrent Rocket 4.0 Plus 1TB	2120	254	1.63
Crucial P5 Plus 1TB	2060	1030	5.2
Kingston FURY Renegade 2TB	2330	857	2.58
Patriot P400 1TB	2070	981	2.86
WD Blue SN570 1TB	602	992	5.14
WD Black SN770 1TB	2260	605	2.52
MSI Spatium M480 Play 2TB	1930	905	5.62
Viper Gaming VPR400	2360	1300	2.61
Crucial P3 Plus 2TB	2240	1080	6.92
Crucial P3 2TB	1990	1100	6.46
Fantom Drives Venom8 2TB	1750	1190	4.45

 

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.