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.

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Live Pricing: HERE

Author Bio
garfi3ld
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.

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