 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 four interface and up to about eight 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 Kioxia 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, Kioxia provided us with everything we're going to need starting with, aha, this. Now in the old days, controller cards like this one usually had built in special features like a USB drive, a USB drive, a USB drive, and a USB drive, and a USB drive. And then the hardware cards like this one usually had built in specialty processors on board to perform the parity calculations that protected the attached rate 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 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 9,516i is what's called a tri-mode storage adapter. It uses a PCI express Gen 4 by 8 interface and can address up to 1,024 SATA or SAS drives using expanders or up to 32 NVMe drives. Now let's have a look at the Broadcom Elrond. 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 Gen 4 tri-mode card into our caddy here and plunk that into our server. Oh, contact. Believe it or not, we haven't even turned it on yet. There it is. Here we go. You're ready. Now one little trick is normally you would run these cables internally to the backplane at the front of the device obviously, right? Well, that's not a tri-mode U.3 backplane. So we're just gonna kinda... 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've 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. Cause we don't have a drive in it yet. One moment please. This just feels so wrong. SATA port U.3 connector. All right, here we go. Just like that. Put it online, initialize, T, blah, blah, blah. Whoa, 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 gonna just like work. Wait for it. There it is. Ooh. Ooh. 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, this one. Now it's time to put in a Gen 4 PCI Express SSD using again the same U.3 connector. This is a CM6 from Kioxia, which was the first available U.3 drive on the market. And it's rated at up to 6,900 megabytes per second. Nice. Just like our merch is nice. Like this CPU pillow, lttstore.com. Now you probably noticed I just shoved that in there. Is hot swap gonna work? I actually don't know. Cause 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 drives 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, their 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 drives full potential. But we can still try out U.3 hot swap. Oh, interesting. So, okay, we're taking it one step further with the hot thing and the swapping apparently. I'm just gonna pull out a SATA drive. Mm-hmm. I'm gonna pull out an NVMe drive. Okay. Mm-hmm. And theoretically, they're just gonna come back. My script says, react to the hot swap just working. We've got U, we've got E. No, the SATA drive is missing. What if I regret? Seriously, boom, all three of them are there. So we've got SATA, U, and E. U, E. Okay then, what does all of this mean for me, the average consumer? For the time being, probably not much. I don't expect that U.3 is gonna 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 seven, 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 dies to the thing than can fit on a simple little gumstick. So for the data center, these are gonna 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 gonna 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 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 another thing. Thanks to you guys for watching. Thanks to Kyoksia 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 much smoother.