 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. Just come look at this. Wait, not that close. This is the Liquid Element LQD4500 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... **HONKING** Speaking of speed, here's a super fast transition to our sponsor, Ridge Wallet. Ridge Wallet wants to redefine the wallet with its compact frame and RFID locking plates. Check out how you can keep wallet bulge down and use offer code Linus to save 10% and get free worldwide shipping at the link below. 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 15.8GB 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 31.5GB 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 ballin' 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. Eww. 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 4 16x link, which with high-end Gen 3 SSDs like these four terabyte rockets from Sabrent means that we can expect speeds of up to 28,000. 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 the thing is, they're designed for long-term endurance rather than drag racing. So the write speeds on these kind of lackluster. Liquid is also soon going to be releasing a Phyzon-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 IO 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. Instructions unclear. It's stuck in motherboard. It's stuck in PCIe slot, yeah. 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, RAID 0, 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 cray cray in this board. 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. This is better than new Wannock. On one card. That's embarrassing. That was 24 drives with like a... This is eight. Dang 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 RAID? Garbage. You'd probably do like 400 if you did FIO, but Crystal. That's a f***ing 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 at 2.5 gigabytes 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 Wannac, faster than new Wannac. 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, playback 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's a video file. It's 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 you 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. Two and a half, 3.2. Wow, 2.8. I wanna go fast! It went fast for a sec. 3 gigabytes a second. Dang, look at this. It got up to 3.8. 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 on a mortal SSD. Wow, look at that. So each of these is 500 megabit. That's... Each of them? Yeah. No. Yeah, it's one file, but it's loading at 16 times. Oh, so this is like... A lot. Over 5 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 gonna delete our array. See ya. Confirm... Wait, what just happened? Confirm on. You didn't even select 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. Dude. I just like big throbbing numbers. Well, there's a big throbbing number. Wow. So that's gibby bytes. 26 gibby bytes per second. Gosh darn. That's insane. Like, that's a lot. Oh, 27.8. 27.8. Woo! 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 really fast. What about write? Because the Samsung ones could only do like eight combined. These should do like over 20. Yeah, look at that. How peasant-tastic. 22.5 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 99.5% utilization on all of them. Okay, random read. So this is like 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 operations. I'm used to seeing SSDs measured on the order of like hundreds of thousands of IOPS for a really good SSD. Well, 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 Wannock. 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 new Wannock 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 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 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 a hunk of 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. 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 main gear 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, 2 terabytes of NVMe storage. It's not quite this, but it'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.