This is the FASTEST Server I've Ever Touched... HOLY $H!T - Liqid Badger Den

The video opens with Linus expressing astonishment at Liqid's Badger Den, a server build featuring five Honey Badger PCIe cards housing a large number of NVMe drives. The host emphasizes the goal of achieving extreme storage throughput, noting claimed sequential reads over 100 gigabytes per second, a performance level described as breathtaking for a server configuration. Early on, the team discusses the physical layout, cooling, and power consumption, including a 1400 watt power envelope and fan arrangements that were at times swapped for practicality. They also highlight the composable infrastructure concept behind Liqid, where resources can be dynamically allocated across different servers through software, enabling flexible, on-the-fly reconfiguration as workload demands shift. The narrative then shifts to hardware makeup, detailing two 64-core EPYC CPUs with 128 cores total and 256 threads, plus 32 sticks of 32 GB memory per CPU, yielding a massive 1 TB of RAM in this setup, all running at 3200 MHz. The discussion makes clear that while the hardware can deliver extraordinary raw throughput, Windows performance is not representative of real-world results and will not saturate the system the same way with typical workloads. They proceed to assemble and boot the system, observe the cooling and noise characteristics, and prepare to benchmark using Linux to better reflect scalable, high-end storage performance. The team runs initial benchmarks and demonstrates a 14 to 18 second time-to-fill for certain tasks, then pivots to large-scale storage testing with 41 to 42 drives, creating a 59 terabyte striped volume for CrystalDiskMark and HTOP monitoring of CPU load. The transcript explains the NUMA and IO bottlenecks that can limit true performance, discusses potential virtualization approaches, and contemplates future improvements such as additional networking upgrades, including a 100 gigabit per second network switch for higher editor throughput. Throughout, Pulseway is showcased as a remote monitoring and management tool, illustrating how IT teams can monitor resources, deploy scripts, and maintain security while on the go, tying the hardware spectacle back to practical enterprise management and reliability. The video wraps with reflections on the Liqid demonstrator as a foundation for more ambitious builds, and prompts viewers to subscribe for future coverage of composable infrastructure and potential gaming-oriented experiments on similar platforms.

Topics · technology · hardware · data-centers · servers · networking