we've tested a lot of cool expensive stuff online as tech tips but every once
in a while we get something in the shop that is truly face meltingly epic come
on over here let's come look at this not that not that close this
is the liquid element lqd 4500 pci express NVMe card codenamed
the honey badger it is the fastest single pci express slot SSD that current
technology can support with a top speed of nearly 29 gigabytes per second holy
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before we get into the speeds we need to talk a little bit about how this madness
works because it's different than what you're used to you might have seen
something like this before this is a pci
express gen 3 16x card that can house
four pci express gen 3 4x NVMe ssds and
in spite of its cutting-edge performance a card like this is actually pretty
inexpensive that's because there's no fancy controller or pci express
switching logic on it it's actually left up to the motherboard to split out those
16 lanes into groups of four lanes that are effectively wired straight up to
each SSD because of the speed limitations of PCIe gen 3 though the
most that you can theoretically pull out of a card like this is around 15.8
gigabytes per second assuming no additional losses now don't get me wrong
that's obscenely fast and definitely faster than anything the typical desktop
user could benefit from but it's no longer the fastest it gets so out with
the old can you catch this i bet you can
and in with the new as i'm sure you're aware with the introduction of AMD's
x570 platform we got our first taste of pci express gen 4 on a consumer platform
with double the bandwidth of the previous generation meaning that you
could theoretically create a 16x slotted
SSD capable of around 31.5 gigabytes per
second assuming no additional losses now that's fast let's tear this thing open
four screws and
there it is my friends a PCIe gen 4 16x slot dedicated to
nothing but storage i mean who needs a
graphics card anyway right what's interesting though is that instead of
just four slots here they went and put
eight m.2s on this thing and a ball and
out pci express switch now you're probably thinking couldn't they have
just made a simple quad NVMe card with
gen 4 ssds and the answer is yes yes
they could have Gigabyte actually already did this however here's the
thing even with the fastest gen 4 m.2 ssds the
most that a single drive can really achieve right now is five gigabytes per
second sequential due to limitations of current NVMe controllers that means that
if you were to combine four of those the most you could achieve is about 20
gigabytes per second lame ew
gross right so the on card pci express switching means that they can spread the
throughput of each of these eight drives
across the entire gen 416x link which
with high-end gen3 ssds like these four terabyte rockets from sabrin means that
we can expect speeds of up to 28
gigabytes per second which is right near the theoretical maximum and then because
these are actually four terabyte drives i guess the
30 plus terabytes of capacity is just a
nice added bonus oh
it's fine i got it something you guys might have noticed by the way is our
graveyard over here of enterprise samsung m.2s so these are the ssds that
liquid actually included with the honey badger they sent but thing is
they're designed for long-term endurance rather than drag racing so the write
speeds on these kind of lack luster liquid is also soon going to be
releasing a faison based version of the honey badger filled with gen 4 NVMe ssds
which can apparently reach nearly 29 gigabytes per second effectively as fast
as you can go after accounting for overhead this feels so wrong
using the top PCIe slot for a storage device instead of the
titan rtx that's also installed i think the first time we did this was the 100
gig card right yeah yeah yeah the network card
this is insane wow it's even like bowing a bit i guess
it's not used to that double-sided nand before we start testing we need to
change our motherboard oops we're running an ASUS board now because we need one that has these options so we
need to set the preferred i o bus so that our threadripper 3990x 64 core CPU
knows where to allocate all that sweet sweet bandwidth and we need to turn off
pci express ari which on these ASUS boards is off by default
turn it on or off um make sure it's off basically make
sure it's off okay instruction's unclear
PCIe slot yeah oh um i believe it finally because we're starting with
Windows we're gonna go to NVMe raid mode set that to enabled reboot and set up
the array once you've created your array we can pop into manage array properties
and there it is array one raid zero
32.7 terabytes it's worth noting that the honey badger doesn't come with any
kind of raid chip on board though meaning that all of the drives are
exposed to the system individually this allows liquid the flexibility to use it
with their composable infrastructure system so they could say for example
take two of these drives and assign them to like one server over there and then
four or whatever to another server over there depending on what their customers
want to do those guys are just straight cray-cray you know
cray-cray Jake insisted we have craig fans i i insisted we specifically don't
say cray-cray but sure
wow that's uh really not bad for Windows yeah 20 gigs 20 gigs a second baby this
is better than new wanik on one card yeah that's embarrassing
that was 24 drives with like a this is
eight hang it i mean those drives are cheaper but yeah
but still
wow what's the iops like 200 000 it's yeah it's still crap what about the
other side the range rate and garbage you probably do like 400 if you did fio
but crystal mark
actually that's all it's for measuring wow it's already
changed the scale to gigabytes per second
and we're at 8k holy banana sacks 32 kilobytes we're
already writing test managers per second
it's at 100 usage now sure is boys
and this is on Windows too like damn
are you okay you gonna make it bud
wow over a Gigabyte per second at just 16k faster than regular wanik faster
than new on it it's probably faster than both put together in the current state
now for fun let's have a look at you know like some workstation use you know play back some 4k video look at that
look at that smooth scrubbing right there isn't that incredible that smooth
playback instant stop and start it's actually far
more impressive than you think because this is not just one video file that
we're playing it is 16 with a total bit rate of 500 megabits per second that is
about 20 times a 4k stream off of
netflix just to put it in context hey there it is wow would you look at that
wait what is this 50 that's a lot beautiful well let's play back at uh
double speed then shall we hey there it is more speed two and a half three point
two one faster i wanna go fast
it went fast for a sec three gigabytes a second dang look at
this it got up to 3.8 that's actually that's actually kind of cool
4.9 gigabytes a second so it's just like if you do quick speed up or stop or
start it's sort of beneficial but so would just a regular 4.0 SSD
well yeah minor details i think you can't do 5.7 it might have
actually hiccuped a little bit yeah on a mortal SSD wow look at that so each of
these is 500 megabit like that's each of them yeah no yeah it's one file but it's
loading it 16 times oh so this is like a lot
over five gigabit yeah so like 500 megabytes a second so that's like a lot
like 250 times your netflix 4k yeah if they're all playing at the same time
now to see what this thing's really capable of we need to fire up Linux so
we're going to delete our array see ya confirm uh wait i don't even
think you slept on sexy array you gotta select it first oh what
this is the worst ui that i have ever seen it's a BIOS man relax
no arrays found in the system okay then we need to go back into
no i expect better than this we need to go back into SATA configuration
to turn off NVMe raid and then we're going to boot to our other drive so we
want to start with sequential read sequential right oh yeah 4k random yeah
just show me show me that giant number that means absolutely nothing okay so
we'll do the sequential read i just like big throbbing
numbers well there's a big throbbing number wow so that's gibby bites 26
gibby bites per second
gosh darn that's insane like that's a
lot oh 27.8 27.
that's a lot that's basically as fast as she goes i would high-five you but like
yeah so we were thinking 28.5 is like the theoretical max of these ssds so i
guess there's a little bit of overhead and then maybe they're over reporting their speeds just a little bit but
that's that's really fast
what about right because the samsung ones could only do like eight combined
these should do like over 20. yeah look at that
how peasant-tastic 22 and a half gibby bytes i can see why they're into the
whole composable infrastructure thing because this is so fast that no
earthly system could benefit from having all of this performance
in it well yeah look at that so 99 and a half percent utilization on all of them
okay random read so this is a q depth of 32 this is
pretty unrealistic but 4.15
million iops i don't even have context for that
that's a lot of input output like i'm i'm used to seeing ssds measured on the
order of like hundreds of thousands of apps for a really good SSD i think these
ones will do like 480 or 580 000 something each it's like this is just
madness so like okay new new wanik yeah after all the
hassle we had with that other stupid thing we could have just plugged a honey
badger into it like two yeah two we could just get
hey liquid something to note here is that actually
nuwanik performed just fine when we were running it like this as well when we
were just addressing all of the disks individually so we haven't actually got
like any file system overhead or array overhead on here so we would have
to do a little bit more experimentation stay tuned though guys because there
will be some kind of follow-up involving
more drives in the future in conclusion though guys this thing
is flipping gnarly but clearly here at Linus media
group we don't actually need this kind of speed for well anything
cards like this are designed for big data applications or for databases where
you need a ton of information stored in a super accessible manner so that even
multiple users will have high performance access to it another benefit
of something this fast is that any data that you were to store on an array of
devices like this could be swapped in and out of system memory extremely
quickly where the CPU can work on it now liquid is building these first and
foremost for their composable infrastructure as we talked about before
what that means is that you'd have like
a rack of servers over here somewhere with like just cpus and memory no gpus
no storage then over fiber optics you
would have like a whack of high speed storage over here and uh hunka gpus over
there and then you could like configure them however you want rather
than over more traditional networking like a typical supercomputer
and i guess researchers like the guys over at folding at home could probably
use something like this as well while they're trying to visualize or perform
calculations across their gigantic data sets anyway the point is this is really
more of a tool for the enterprise and scientific types out there but
hey i still can't wait until it trickles down to desktop computers and then
maybe finally eventually to game consoles another decade later
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guys enjoyed this video maybe check out the uh one we did recently explaining
why this is completely unnecessary for gamers because under normal
circumstances you wouldn't even be able to tell the difference between a SATA
SSD and an NVMe one let alone an NVMe
one in something like this