they're the same picture except they're not
this is a boring old u.2 drive you can find
these puppies with up to a four lane pci express gen 4 interface
and up to about 8 gigabytes per second
speed which is okay i guess but it's not nearly as cool as this
u.3 doesn't increase speeds
at all and in fact it could even be
much slower but it could also be
the same speed which
doesn't really sound that great does it until i tell you that it also allows
cross-compatibility with sas and even SATA drives in exactly
the same slot what that's right my friends this connector
here is basically like putting a usb
drive in a firewire port and we've got both a drive from kyoccia who sponsored
this video and this server over here
from super micro and we are going to be
testing it out
u.3 is super new so while the drives are
readily available hardware to actually plug them into is still pretty hard to
find our server for example only supports u.2 fortunately kyoccia
provided us with everything we're going to need starting with
this now in the old days controller cards
like this one usually had built-in specialty processors on board to perform
the parity calculations that protected the attached raid array from data loss
over time though hardware raid cards have given way to hbas or host bus
adapters that simply convert your pci
express slot into dumb storage ports leaning on the
general purpose CPU to do the heavy lifting
this kind of software raid is more flexible more cost effective and it's
easier for administrators to troubleshoot and repair and these are
actually some of the big driving forces behind the u.3 standard so this broadcom
9516i is what's called a tri-mode storage
adapter it uses a pci express gen 4x8
interface and can address up to 1024
SATA or sas drives using expanders or up
to 32 NVMe drives now let's have a look
at the broadcom lrond yes that's right
my friends it's a custom external u.3
testing enclosure that's designed for research and development of new drives
and adapter cards to make sure that they interface with servers correctly in
other words this isn't something that you can just go out and buy
normally the way it would work is a u.3 backplane like the one that's built into
this enclosure would just be directly in the server behind the bays at the front
and you would plug right into them but as of right now we haven't found any
servers with native u.3 support at least that we can get our hands on hp
enterprise is one of the only brands that's shipping u.3 technology currently
though lenovo has also expressed their support for it so here we go we just
install our try mode card into our caddy here and
plonk that into our server oh
contact believe it or not we haven't even turned
it on yet
ah there it is here we go
you're ready now one little trick is normally you
would run these cables internally to the back plane at the front of the device
obviously right well that's not a try mode u.3 backplane
so we're just going to kind of
yeah good it's good cooling gotta have
air holes on the side okay here we go
very funny what am i putin
i'm gonna be next level impressed if this manages like hot swap functionality
now you might have noticed that even though we've only got an 8x card
we've got four 4x capable cables coming
out of here that's because that bandwidth can be shared it's in much the
same way that even if you did plug in a thousand
sas drives obviously if you were actually hitting
them all at once they would have to share some of that bandwidth
what do you think is this just gonna like magically
hot swap pickup wait probably not because we don't have
a drive in it yet one moment please this just feels so wrong
SATA port u.3 connector okay here we go
just like that put it online initialize
blah blah blah ouch
60 megabytes a second reads
not exactly impressive but of course the
performance of u.3 was never the point
there's nothing you can do with an interface to make a
two and a half inch hard drive suddenly magically fast
the point is that we can do this this is a sas SSD
and theoretically i'm gonna pop that right in there hot swap
and it's going to just like work wait for it
there it is
we can run a quick performance test here there it is you can see it's a lot
faster of course it's an SSD it's not a mechanical hard drive but the point here
again is not the performance it's to demonstrate how just because you've got
one physical connector doesn't mean that you can't use different protocols over
it and that's really this is a much more appropriate analogy
for what we're doing today than the whole usb firewire thing because those
are completely different physical connectors SATA and sas already used the
same connector just a different protocol so that's what we've looked at so far
but now ah uh this one
now it's time to put in a gen4 pci
express SSD using again the same u.3 connector this
is a cm6 from kyoxia which was the first
available u.3 drive on the market and it's rated at up to
6900 megabytes per second nice
just like our merch is nice like the CPU pillow lttstore.com now
you probably noticed i just shoved that in there
is hot swap gonna work i actually don't know because i've had some pretty bad
experiences hot swapping pci express devices oh oh ouch
but that's supposed to be one of the benefits as the technology has matured
is we're supposed to be able to take any kind of drive we want chuck it in there
hot swap cold swap let's see if it's in here there it is
online it and boom we've got our e drive
i'm expecting this to be a lot faster and it is now
wait a minute you might say that's not 6 900 megabytes per second
that's not nice but we're not actually reaching the
drive full speed because of two bottlenecks in our setup one this system
has two epic 7702 processors pretty cool
but although each of them has 64 cores and 128 threads they are single core
performance isn't particularly impressive because of their low clock
speed and with this setup on Windows server 2019 we're not taking advantage
of the drive's full potential but we can still try out u.3 hotspot oh
interesting so okay we're taking it one step further
with the hotting and the swapping apparently
i'm just gonna pull out a SATA drive
i'm gonna pull out an NVMe drive
okay
and theoretically they're just gonna come back my script says react to the
hot swap just working we've got ooh
we've got e no the SATA drive is missing what if i
rep seriously boom all three of them are there so
we've got SATA ooh and e
okay then what does all this mean for me the average consumer for the time being
probably not much i don't expect that u.3 is going to be
sweeping in to replace the popular m.2 gumstick form factor in your home gaming
pc anytime soon but in the data center it offers a
couple of clear benefits one of which is visible right on the face of it see
these cooling holes i call them speed holes because adequate cooling allows
these drives to perform their best even when they're under heavy load 24 7 like
they would be in an enterprise or data center setting the other thing that the
larger form factor does is it allows the drives to have more capacity because
they can physically solder more nand dyes to the thing than can fit on a
simple little gum stick so for the data center these are going to be huge
not just because they have a single connector that natively supports
multiple protocols that's not anything new we already showed that with SATA and
sas the big deal is that it allows a single
server with a single type of bay in the front to serve all kinds of different
roles so manufacturers instead of having to have different skus for like a slower
bulk storage box and then a faster all NVMe one are going to be able to have
just a single sku simplifying their product development and simplifying
their product stack that data center administrators can just deploy however
they want so i want this one to be all NVMe i want this one to be all sas i
want this one to be you know NVMe accelerant over here and then sas mass
storage over there it's totally up to the admin and that
is super super cool another fringe
benefit actually that we heard from one of the techs that's working on this is
that it makes uh trying out different hardware configurations and
troubleshooting way simpler because you can just use one machine for all of your
test benches instead of having to like move giant servers around as you're
testing out different drives and configs so that's uh that's another thing
thanks to you guys for watching thanks to kyoccia for sponsoring this one you
guys can get more details about their cm6 drives and the rest of their
technology at the link down below if you guys are interested in the backstory
behind my nightmare experience hot swapping pci express devices you can
check out the video that we have linked in the description as well this was a
much smoother