we see a lot of Wild Tech around here but this this is the wildest we've seen
in a long time like here's a question you need to ask yourself how many ssds
do you need in your computer one
two three how
about 21 of them that's right we got it
the Apex storage x21 it's absolutely
cramp packed full of m.2 slots Each of
which contains a Sab Rock ET 4 plus 88
TB SSD that's right friends I'm holding
a casual 168 tab of storage and this
thing is so fast it shocked even the CEO of Apex storage just like I'm going to
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careful have you ever held 150 terabytes
in the palm of your hand these things are worth more than my car and my car is
new it's a 21 yeah he is a pretty good car kind of a car
guy all right really the star of the show is this though there are only three
of these cards in existence but if the buzz around it is anything to go by
there's soon to be a lot more of them unlike some PCIe slot-based ssds the
Apex storage x21 allows you to mix and match any commodity m.2 drives that you
want and even upgrade them down the line because all you're doing is taking this
PCIe by6 Gen 4 slot and splitting it up
to all the attached drives and oh boy can you attach a lot of drives this
controller at its heart can apparently handle up to a 100 PCI E lanes and the
best part is you can install this in any m board you don't need a server board
that supports PCI slot bifurcation all
of that's handled on board and another feature I'm really excited about is that
apparently you can hot swap the ssds on
the board I don't want to do that we're going to have to try that don't want to
do that we're going to have to try that I mean sabrent would want us to shout
out sabr by the way they asked us hey if we send you those drives can you guys
mention Us in the video I was like I will suck on your toes for this many
drives so uh you'll find them Linked In the video description it's an SSD but it
actually takes up as much space in your computer as a GPU and has the same
number of power connectors okay there's six pin PCIe instead of 8 Pin PCIe but
still how much power does this thing draw I don't think it's that much oh my
God right I knew that I knew that these are over $1,000 but still it just didn't
register yeah holy crap crap so what are they
hold on a second what are they doing here this looks like it's got to be at
least a PCIe by8 link this has got to be
another PCIe by 16 actually looking closer at the layout of the
daughterboard that makes sense this top slot here is routed to these four and
these four on the back so a total of eight drives to this 6X slot and these
four here are routed to the other one that gives us a probable total of two
lanes per Drive which might seem like oh that's a bottleneck cuz this rocket 8
tab can do 7 GB a second and that's only 3 and a half but when we consider that
the system is accessing all these drives through a single PCIe by6 slot I don't
think it's going to be a major factor for performance that is something we
could test though by running a speed test on just one drive installed in the
card we should do that hey oh sure yeah I kind of want to try it there's other
stuff to look at here six pin PCIe power connector I mean should we pop the heat
sink go for it I kind of want to look at it right I'm assuming we have to send
this back hey I don't know oh who the
heck are these guys it's so wild they come out of basically nowhere and
they're like yep we've got more ssds than anyone else that's what you get for
being asleep on the job switch Tech pfx
I don't know why but I was like expecting an fpga or something I guess
that makes sense that it wouldn't be since you're not really doing any logic
on the board if it was some kind of raid
card or something like that then maybe but if all this is doing is just PCIe
switching then it doesn't have to be that maybe there's an fpga somewhere
else no it looks like the whole thing is just this chip just this chip it's
bigger than most CPUs I mean yeah well yeah yeah yeah I
mean I'm not not undermining the coolness of the chip I'm just and where
would we normally find something like this I'm imagining like a PCIe fabric
like rack mount switch or something or
I don't even know I I don't rightly know
sir it can be used in Metro networks and
core networking cellular infrastructure
broadcast equipment I would imagine anyone building out composable PCIe over
fiber infrastructure might use something like this man those things are wild you
can have a whole bunch of PCIe devices just connected over fiber optic cables
to a switch and then you can have your systems and then on the Fly you can
assign I know put um six gpus in that
one and it just connects to
anyway okay and I do want to say the hot
plug support that I said is on the data sheet for this chip not the data sheet
for this whole solution well start with
one which one's going to be the lucky slot here why would you start with one
because I want to see if they each get two lanes oh yes well but you can just
do that with all them on there yeah I just I want to see how it behaves with
one okay okay this is awkward we need to
move our GPU 4070 by the way 4070 ah all
right let's turn it back on
yeah you were here the whole time I did nothing you did touch it though I well I
touched it so you want the GPU in now yep thing is uh oh you can't put it in
this slot because then we get by eight and by eight all right we need all 16
PCIe Gen 4 lanes for our SSD so I guess
we're putting it in this 1X slot yes one sec that's the stupidest thing ever
really does it does it touch something is it going to short out yes yeah I'm
giving it a sec oh oh I don't think it got green before hold on
hey patience all right this GPU is in at
a very uncomfortable angle sir yeah I I
don't love it and our one dis shows up
oh I see you've did you configure this in a Windows software raid zero yes
that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard and I love it all right let's uh
we can also do the BIOS raid if you want that would be smarter although I've had
some issues with AMD PCIe raid and you know reformatting Windows and getting
confused and stuff so I don't know I mean if we're doing something we'd never
recommend anyway it doesn't really matter how we do it
so my theory my theory then is that this is only going to get us a buy two
connection no wait how does that work
it's claiming to be PCI gen 4x4 right but wait the connection
through the PCI switch chip would be at
least by four but then then the drive wouldn't
report that okay let's just try yeah let's see what it does man if they wired
every slot up for four lanes they did they wired every slot for four lanes
that dramatically increases the cost but
also dramatically increases the utility of this product because under normal
circumstances you wouldn't do something dumb like configure 21 drives in a raid
zero you would have this in a system that's got a lot of CPU resources as
well and then you would be dividing up that Solid State Storage sometimes
leasing it to separate clients so some of them might be using it when others
aren't which means being able to get the full throughput to one Drive could
matter depending on your use case that's pretty cool that's awesome let's add
another Drive H please turn it off I
don't seems like a really bad idea I'm a little nervous too please do
remember each of these drives is $1,500 1,500 bucks
hey oh let's get a cheaper one I think I
have one in my backpack of course
I mean why wouldn't I right don't you keep an SSD in your backpack
hey Good Old Reliable crucial only 500
gigs okay you're doing a great service for your
country oh light turned on oh yeah that's something it's not there but also
this is still working so I kind of consider that a
win holy crap even though it was isn't
doing anything it's like flipping hot oh
wow I just installed 32 tab of SSD on
here oh looks so good 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16 18 19 20 one hey
they're all here sick and you can maybe changing that to
raid changes it I don't actually know no it's
somewhere oh but just
just let it go past the BIOS oh oh wait
what now do you see why I had a Windows raid well you have to physically remove
the drives from the system we don't even have them configured in a raid you just
can't in the BIOS it's too many for am5 this must be
a consumer platform lock down thing
because otherwise you could totally just
run it does Intel let you do it I'm not
entirely sure oh maybe what I said earlier about just
being able to throw this in a nuck and boom SSD server isn't true then AMD
locks it down buttheads man I'm
disappointed you got to put this in a Server Motherboard what the average
consumer doesn't have $2,800 to spend on an m.2 carrier card so AMD didn't think
of that well I guess what I need to do then is go back into dis
management and fix your raid that I broke yes oh boy this will be tedious
oh can can you not just click like add to volume and it figures it out it's
raid zero the volume is dead oh oh what haha okay it worked I
have no idea what just happened there but I'm into it oh yeah oh yeah I'm
going to call you Big
D yes thank you for hitting quick format
I did not hit that once it took like 5 hours it was 5:30 I was
just like all right see you tomorrow and that's on ssds I've done
that with hard drives before wait have you like actually run Windows raid zero
in a system sort of I was running
multiple raid cards running raid five Hardware raid five and then I raid
zeroed them in Windows that's one of the early
iterations of WX server
actually this blows my mind wao you okay
yep I'm fine okay this is the maximum speed of some things okay SATA 600
megabytes a second okay PCIe 3.0 3.4
single one of these drives 7 GB a second
ddr4 25.6 GB per second all right these
drives are already getting pretty toasty here I haven't even done anything yet we
should get us we should get some Cooling on this or wait well yeah check the
camera yeah let's check the camera first okay uh Alex that heat sinks at 90° all
right let's uh that means the Chip's probably hotter uh yeah the fact that these 55°
ssds didn't look hot in the frame is a bad thing well wait how are you even
supposed to access any of the fan ports they're all down here there's a bunch of
fan ports uh uh so do you want to zip tie that on the back here really yes so
our method oh oh I see we're making like
a tunnel yes with cardboard yes of
course we are oh my God Alex what the
hell what it's highly effective uh iip
okay so what the hell is going on here
it's fine it's fine you know this is barely in the slot right yeah what fan
is that not as good as it was before
what I found worked really well cuz I took one zip tie really well you say yes
really well right up through there oh my
God now one of those and I was The Reckless idiot for trying hot swap so
that can go on there and then I found it worked really
well if the other one went through the GPU um hold on I need another zip tie
now I'm participating I'm officially party to this okay it's at
74° okay y they're all at like 30 6 35°
now down from 50 60 heck yeah nice it
works okay gigabytes
is now I want to make something clear just because that's as fast as a stick
of memory and I don't even just mean you know theoretically when you're
addressing it raw this is with file
system overhead doesn't mean that you could use
it as RAM the latency is going to be
much much higher even if the bandwidth is off the charts unbelievable let's
just have a look here oh yeah how many threads are we given it it looks like
four four is kind of where it seemed the
happiest in Windows oh okay so four for all uh sure we are right at the
theoretical limit of this slot yeah I
mean that's the thing right is we're putting so many drives behind it that
the SSD control the Nan flash none of these bottlenecks
exist anymore you're actually limited by the PCIe
slot at least in sequential workloads as
these random ones come up you're going to see oh wow 2 gbes a second is aing
lot that's wow uh it's obviously nowhere
near the capabilities of the slot we'd have to put
another what what would that work out to about 200 drives on one of these
carriers you know at a q depth of 32 in a random workload to really like
saturate the PCI E slop but still now
that I've said it I'm sure those wild people over at Apex storage are going to
try and build one now it's worth noting you've seen speeds like this before in
the past in fact with an inexpensive carrier board that relies on the
motherboard to do the bifurcation and just four ssds you can put a benchmark
numbers like this no problem that's actually what I was running in my old personal rig the issue though is can
only see these kinds of numbers under ideal conditions when those ssds are
acting in their SLC cache mode as soon as you hit them with any kind of
sustained load especially a long right
they are going to absolutely plumet with the x21 though having so many drives
running in parallel we weren't able to change these numbers no matter how hard
we hit the array oh wow it is actually
using 100% of these discs at least if task manager is to be believed that is a
lot of of data to be moving around in like 5 6 seconds yep I don't even know
what to do to like show how fast it is cuz like what do we do check like an SSD
in here or like an SD card is fast
enough to keep up with it it's not fast enough that is way too slow there's no
way we're going to be able to wait that long okay so we'll just fire up Linux
sure all right the reason we're firing up Linux and doing this is not because
we're expecting to see faster sequential speed I mean we were already at the
theoretical limits of what that slot can do in Windows but in Linux we have a lot
more control over our hardware and we are expecting to overcome some of
Windows' limitations in terms of iops and iops are far more important for the
kinds of applications that folks buying a carrier card like this might care
about so things like databases or many
many users accessing this storage all at the same time it's a measure of how many
operation per second our storage array can perform assuming that every one of
those transactions is very very small which is much more realistic for some
context normal SSD is what like somewhere around a million like a really
really good SSD honey badger was somewhere around 4
to 6 million that's that was obscene really really fast especially at the
time okay and
go what the heck
hell so this is very small files to get around the PCI limitations but it shows
you kind of the upper limits of what we can expect like I alluded to when we
were running tests in Windows this is without the burden of a file system it's
going down yeah it's still stupid just wanted
to check something can you think of any
reason why our iops would gradually fall
on this array as we run the test in Linux if it's doing any rights then it
could be because of that oh is it doing
rights is it doing rights I don't know um I'm not entirely sure how it's doing
that right now but it could also be that it's heating
up okay I suspect it's the rights thing
I just wasn't sure if this test was actually writing to the
drives yeah I'm not sure if it is either it seems to be kind of settling in now
anyway and it's still at 40 million I Ops yeah I mean it could be that uh
originally it was like really high uh bur because of like the the dam cach and
all that kind of stuff but uh now it's settled into the natural iops all right
see you later so I lied earlier then we
did manage to overcome the SLC cache just it's still really fast I do kind of
want to know where it ends up it seems like it's ending up here cuz it went
slower and now it's gone faster oh yeah
wow I thought it would just kind fall a lot I mean the speed of an individual
Drive will fall by as much as like a tenth sometimes when it goes from cash
mode to just like steady state where it has to do garbage collection in the
background that's really fast there's just so much nand that it can do things
in the background and still pump out these crazy numbers yep now as much fun
as that was this is a serious tool for serious work and you're probably
wondering well just what kind of serious applications are people using cards like
this for we asked Apex storage and while they couldn't give us exact names they
said that their pre-orders are from people who intend to use them for
Enterprise data center like applications and this is to take advantage of the
falling prices of flash right now uh think of something like a high
performance version of back Blaze where they could use consumer hardware and
then pass those cost savings along to the customers they also have pre-orders
from folks in the digital forensic space who are excited by the size and speed
with the ability to add cards into existing workstations and they've had
interest from high-end performance users and video editors who are excited to use
it with 4K and 8K footage other than the capacity I don't really see any reason
why you would need this for video editing but sure there's apparently also
people in the AI space since well you work with these giant data sets and if
you've got spicy gpus we should Chia mine on
it chew through a lot of data in general
Apex summarized their customers as being really anyone one who spends a lot of
time writing to and reading from discs the more iops and bandwidth that you
need at this kind of capacity the more it's going to improve your Computing
case uh some of which they probably haven't even thought of yet and I share
your sentiment I'm also excited to see where people use these and I'm excited
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you might enjoy the the last time we took a look at a wild SSD carrier card
the liquid honey badger