This is 50x faster than your PC… HOLY $H!T - Liqid LQD4500 Honey Badger
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Linus Tech Tips dives into Liqid's Honey Badger, the Liqid Element LQD4500, a PCIe 16x slot card designed to house eight NVMe SSDs. The hosts explain that, unlike traditional RAID controllers, this solution relies on motherboard lane splitting to deliver high throughput to each drive, enabling potentially up to around 29 GB/s for Gen3 configurations and near 29 GB/s in Gen4 scenarios. They discuss the practical limits of NVMe controllers and why on-card switching can spread bandwidth across all eight drives, achieving impressive real-world speeds close to theoretical maximums. The deployment uses Windows RAID and later switches to Linux to benchmark sequential reads, writes, and random IOPS, highlighting that the Honey Badger is aimed at enterprise and scientific workloads rather than typical consumer use. They emphasize the composable infrastructure idea, where storage, CPUs, and GPUs can be reconfigured across multiple servers, hinting at big data, databases, and research applications that demand extreme I/O. The hosts also critique the user interface and setup experience, noting the need to adjust BIOS and RAID settings for optimal performance, and tease future followups with more drives. Finally, they contrast the speed advantages with practical consumer use cases, suggesting that while this is extraordinary, it is not something most gamers or desktop users need, and they envision eventual consumer-grade adaptations and broader accessibility in the future.
Topics · hardware · storage · technology · data_center · performance
Questions answered
- What makes the Liqid Honey Badger different from a traditional quad NVMe card with Gen4 SSDs?
- The Honey Badger uses a PCI Express Gen3 16x card to host eight NVMe SSDs and relies on a PCI Express switch to distribute throughput across all drives, rather than a single quad-NVMe card with a dedicated RAID controller. This arrangement allows higher aggregate bandwidth across multiple drives while avoiding a single controller bottleneck.
- Why do Linus and the team discuss composable infrastructure in relation to the Honey Badger?
- Composable infrastructure separates storage, CPUs, and GPUs and connects them over high-speed fabric so components can be allocated flexibly to different servers as needed, enabling scalable, configurable systems for big data, databases, and scientific workloads rather than fixed hardware stacks.
- What were the reported read and write speeds in the Linux benchmarks for the Liqid Honey Badger configuration?
- In Linux, sequential read speeds reached around 27 to 28 gibibytes per second with very high utilization, and sequential writes approached similar levels, with figures near 22 to 28 gibibytes per second depending on the test and configuration.