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they're the same picture except they're not

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this is a boring old u.2 drive you can find

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these puppies with up to a four lane pci express gen 4 interface

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and up to about 8 gigabytes per second

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speed which is okay i guess but it's not nearly as cool as this

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u.3 doesn't increase speeds

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at all and in fact it could even be

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much slower but it could also be

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the same speed which

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doesn't really sound that great does it until i tell you that it also allows

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cross-compatibility with sas and even SATA drives in exactly

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the same slot what that's right my friends this connector

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here is basically like putting a usb

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drive in a firewire port and we've got both a drive from kyoccia who sponsored

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this video and this server over here

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from super micro and we are going to be

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testing it out

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u.3 is super new so while the drives are

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readily available hardware to actually plug them into is still pretty hard to

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find our server for example only supports u.2 fortunately kyoccia

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provided us with everything we're going to need starting with

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this now in the old days controller cards

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like this one usually had built-in specialty processors on board to perform

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the parity calculations that protected the attached raid array from data loss

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over time though hardware raid cards have given way to hbas or host bus

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adapters that simply convert your pci

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express slot into dumb storage ports leaning on the

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general purpose CPU to do the heavy lifting

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this kind of software raid is more flexible more cost effective and it's

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easier for administrators to troubleshoot and repair and these are

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actually some of the big driving forces behind the u.3 standard so this broadcom

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9516i is what's called a tri-mode storage

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adapter it uses a pci express gen 4x8

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interface and can address up to 1024

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SATA or sas drives using expanders or up

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to 32 NVMe drives now let's have a look

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at the broadcom lrond yes that's right

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my friends it's a custom external u.3

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testing enclosure that's designed for research and development of new drives

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and adapter cards to make sure that they interface with servers correctly in

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other words this isn't something that you can just go out and buy

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normally the way it would work is a u.3 backplane like the one that's built into

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this enclosure would just be directly in the server behind the bays at the front

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and you would plug right into them but as of right now we haven't found any

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servers with native u.3 support at least that we can get our hands on hp

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enterprise is one of the only brands that's shipping u.3 technology currently

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though lenovo has also expressed their support for it so here we go we just

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install our try mode card into our caddy here and

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plonk that into our server oh

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contact believe it or not we haven't even turned

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it on yet

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ah there it is here we go

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you're ready now one little trick is normally you

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would run these cables internally to the back plane at the front of the device

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obviously right well that's not a try mode u.3 backplane

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so we're just going to kind of

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yeah good it's good cooling gotta have

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air holes on the side okay here we go

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very funny what am i putin

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i'm gonna be next level impressed if this manages like hot swap functionality

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now you might have noticed that even though we've only got an 8x card

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we've got four 4x capable cables coming

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out of here that's because that bandwidth can be shared it's in much the

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same way that even if you did plug in a thousand

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sas drives obviously if you were actually hitting

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them all at once they would have to share some of that bandwidth

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what do you think is this just gonna like magically

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hot swap pickup wait probably not because we don't have

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a drive in it yet one moment please this just feels so wrong

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SATA port u.3 connector okay here we go

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just like that put it online initialize

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blah blah blah ouch

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60 megabytes a second reads

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not exactly impressive but of course the

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performance of u.3 was never the point

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there's nothing you can do with an interface to make a

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two and a half inch hard drive suddenly magically fast

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the point is that we can do this this is a sas SSD

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and theoretically i'm gonna pop that right in there hot swap

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and it's going to just like work wait for it

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there it is

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we can run a quick performance test here there it is you can see it's a lot

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faster of course it's an SSD it's not a mechanical hard drive but the point here

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again is not the performance it's to demonstrate how just because you've got

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one physical connector doesn't mean that you can't use different protocols over

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it and that's really this is a much more appropriate analogy

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for what we're doing today than the whole usb firewire thing because those

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are completely different physical connectors SATA and sas already used the

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same connector just a different protocol so that's what we've looked at so far

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but now ah uh this one

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now it's time to put in a gen4 pci

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express SSD using again the same u.3 connector this

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is a cm6 from kyoxia which was the first

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available u.3 drive on the market and it's rated at up to

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6900 megabytes per second nice

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just like our merch is nice like the CPU pillow lttstore.com now

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you probably noticed i just shoved that in there

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is hot swap gonna work i actually don't know because i've had some pretty bad

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experiences hot swapping pci express devices oh oh ouch

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but that's supposed to be one of the benefits as the technology has matured

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is we're supposed to be able to take any kind of drive we want chuck it in there

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hot swap cold swap let's see if it's in here there it is

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online it and boom we've got our e drive

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i'm expecting this to be a lot faster and it is now

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wait a minute you might say that's not 6 900 megabytes per second

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that's not nice but we're not actually reaching the

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drive full speed because of two bottlenecks in our setup one this system

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has two epic 7702 processors pretty cool

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but although each of them has 64 cores and 128 threads they are single core

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performance isn't particularly impressive because of their low clock

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speed and with this setup on Windows server 2019 we're not taking advantage

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of the drive's full potential but we can still try out u.3 hotspot oh

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interesting so okay we're taking it one step further

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with the hotting and the swapping apparently

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i'm just gonna pull out a SATA drive

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i'm gonna pull out an NVMe drive

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okay

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and theoretically they're just gonna come back my script says react to the

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hot swap just working we've got ooh

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we've got e no the SATA drive is missing what if i

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rep seriously boom all three of them are there so

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we've got SATA ooh and e

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okay then what does all this mean for me the average consumer for the time being

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probably not much i don't expect that u.3 is going to be

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sweeping in to replace the popular m.2 gumstick form factor in your home gaming

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pc anytime soon but in the data center it offers a

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couple of clear benefits one of which is visible right on the face of it see

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these cooling holes i call them speed holes because adequate cooling allows

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these drives to perform their best even when they're under heavy load 24 7 like

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they would be in an enterprise or data center setting the other thing that the

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larger form factor does is it allows the drives to have more capacity because

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they can physically solder more nand dyes to the thing than can fit on a

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simple little gum stick so for the data center these are going to be huge

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not just because they have a single connector that natively supports

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multiple protocols that's not anything new we already showed that with SATA and

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sas the big deal is that it allows a single

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server with a single type of bay in the front to serve all kinds of different

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roles so manufacturers instead of having to have different skus for like a slower

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bulk storage box and then a faster all NVMe one are going to be able to have

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just a single sku simplifying their product development and simplifying

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their product stack that data center administrators can just deploy however

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they want so i want this one to be all NVMe i want this one to be all sas i

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want this one to be you know NVMe accelerant over here and then sas mass

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storage over there it's totally up to the admin and that

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is super super cool another fringe

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benefit actually that we heard from one of the techs that's working on this is

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that it makes uh trying out different hardware configurations and

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troubleshooting way simpler because you can just use one machine for all of your

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test benches instead of having to like move giant servers around as you're

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testing out different drives and configs so that's uh that's another thing

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thanks to you guys for watching thanks to kyoccia for sponsoring this one you

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guys can get more details about their cm6 drives and the rest of their

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technology at the link down below if you guys are interested in the backstory

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behind my nightmare experience hot swapping pci express devices you can

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check out the video that we have linked in the description as well this was a

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much smoother