- We've tested a lotta cool, expensive stuff
on Linus Tech Tips, but every once in a while
we get something in the shop that is
truly face-meltingly epic.
Come on over here, just come look.
Wait, not that close.
This is the Liqid Element LQD4500
PCI Express NVMe card, code name: 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 (beep).
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(upbeat electronic music)
Before we get into the speeds, we need to talk
a little bit about how this madness works
'cause it's different than what you're used to.
You might've seen something like this before.
This is a PCI Express Gen3 16x card
that can house four PCI Express Gen3 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 Gen3, though,
the most that you can theoretically pull out
of a card like this is about 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!
(Jake sputters and wheezes)
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 Gen4 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.
More screws, and (laughs)
there it is, my friends.
A PCIe Gen4 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 ballin'-out PCI Express switch.
Now, you're probably thinking,
"Couldn't they have just made a simple
"quad-NVMe card with Gen4 SSDs?"
And the answer is yes, yes, they could've.
Gigabyte actually already did this.
However, here's the thing:
Even with the fastest Gen4 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 PCE Express switching means
that they can spread the throughput
of each of these eight drives
across the entire Gen4 16x link.
Which, with high-end Gen3 SSDs like these
four-terabyte Rockets from Sabrent,
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.
Ooh!
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 Liqid 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, kinda lackluster.
Liqid is also soon gonna be releasing
a Phison-based version of the Honey Badger
filled with Gen4 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.
- [Jake] I think the first time we did this was
the 100-gig card, right?
- Yeah, yeah, the network card.
- This is insane!
Wow, it's even bowing a bit.
I guess it's not used to that double-sided NAND.
- Before we start testing, we need to (clears throat)
change our motherboard, oops.
We're running an Asus board now
'cause 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?
- Make sure it's off, basically.
- Make sure it's off, okay. - Yeah.
- Instructions unclear.
(beep) stuck in second PCIe slot, yeah.
- [Jake] Oh, 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 1, RAID0, 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 Liqid 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 one server over there,
and then four or whatever to another server over there,
depending on what their customers wanna do.
Those guys are just straight cray cray, you know?
Cray cray, Jake insisted we have cray cray in this group.
- I insisted we specifically don't say cray cray.
But sure.
Wow, that's really not bad for Windows.
- Yeah!
- 20 gigs-- - 20 gigs a second, baby!
- [Jake] This is better than New Whonnock.
- On one card, that's embarrassing.
That was 24 drives, with like a--
- This is eight. - Dang it!
- I mean, those drives were cheaper, but--
- Yeah, but still.
- [Jake] What's the IOPS like, 200,000?
- Yeah, it's still crap.
- [Jake] What about the other side?
The write rate? - Still garbage.
- You'd probably do like 400 if you did FIO,
but Crystal (beep) Mark...
(Jake snickers)
- Actually, that's all it's for measuring.
- Yeah.
- Wow, it's already changed the scale
to gigabytes per second.
And we're at 8k.
Holy banana sacks.
32 kilobyte, we're already writing at--
- Open Task Manager at least. - 2 1/2 gigabytes per second.
Ah!
- It's at 100% usage now.
- Sure is, boys.
- And this is on Windows, too, like, damn.
(Linus squawks)
- Are you okay?
You gonna make it, bud?
- Wow, over a gigabyte per second at just 16k.
- Faster than regular Whonnock, faster than New Whonnock.
It's probably faster than both put together
in the current state.
- Now, for fun, let's have a look at some workstation use.
We'll 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 megabit 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 ya look at that!
- Wait, what is this?
50%, that's a lot.
- Beautiful!
Well, let's play back at double speed then, shall we?
Hey, there it is!
More speed!
2.5, 3.2.
Let's go faster! - Wow, 3.8!
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 kinda cool.
Ooh, ho ho, 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 mean, you can do 5.7.
It might have actually hiccuped a little bit
on a mortal SSD.
- Wow, look at that!
So each of these is 500 megabit.
- 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.
- 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 gonna delete our array.
See ya!
Confirm, wait, I don't even--
- I don't even think you selected,
you didn't even set the 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 gonna boot to our other drive.
- So what do we wanna start with?
Sequential read, sequential write?
- Oh yeah.
- 4K random?
- Yeah, just show me that giant number
that means absolutely nothing.
- Okay, so we'll do the sequential read.
- I just like big, throbbing numbers.
- [Jake] Well, there's your big, throbbing number.
- [Linus] Wow!
- [Jake] So that's gibbybytes.
- 26 gibbybytes per second.
Gosh darn.
- That's insane, that's a lot.
Oh, 27.8!
- 27.8. - Whoo!
That's a lot.
- That's basically as fast as she goes.
I would high five you, but--
- Yeah, so we were thinking 28.5 is 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 really fast.
What about write?
'Cause the Samsung ones could only do like eight combined.
These should do over 20, yeah, look at that.
- [Linus] How peasant-tastic.
- 22.5 gibbybytes.
- 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.
- Yeah, look at that.
So 99.5% utilization on all of them.
Okay, random read.
So this is cued up to 32, this is pretty unrealistic.
4.15 million IOPS.
- I don't even have context for that.
- That's a lot of input/output operations.
- I'm used to seeing SSDs measured on the order
of hundreds of thousands of IOPS for a really good SSD.
- I think these ones'll do 580,000-something each.
This is just madness.
- So, okay, New New Whonnock.
- Yeah.
- After all the hassle we had with that other stupid thing
we could've just plugged a Honey Badger into it.
- Like two.
- Yeah, two.
- We could just get--
- Hey, Liqid.
Something to note here is that, actually,
New Whonnock 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 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 kinda followup involving more drives in the future.
In conclusion, though, guys, this thing is flippin' gnarly.
But clearly, here at Linus Media Group
we don't actually need this kind of speed for 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, Liqid is building these first and foremost
for their composable infrastructure,
as we talked about before.
What that means is that you'd have
a rack of servers over here somewhere
with just CPUs and memory, no GPUs, no storage.
Then, over fiber optics, you would have
a whack of high-speed storage over here
and a hunk of GPUs over there.
And then you could 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@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 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.
Sick burn.
Speaking of burns, I went so fast into this sponsor,
Micro Center, that I almost got one.
Micro Center is open to supply all your work-from-home
or learn-from-home technology needs.
The Maingear Element laptop is available
at 25 Micro Center locations, as well as on Amazon
for anyone who's not near one of their stores.
It's got a Core i7-9750H processor,
Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 graphics,
32 gigs of DDR4 2666 RAM,
two terabytes of NVMe storage.
It's not quite this, but that's still pretty good.
15.6-inch IPS display, and you can check it
and other Micro Center specials out
at the link in the video description.
If you guys enjoyed this video,
maybe check out the 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.