This SSD is Faster Than Your RAM - Apex Storage X21

The Apex Storage X21 is an absolutely wild AIC that allows you to connect twenty one SSDs to a single PCIe slot... and it is very fast.

Purchases made through some store links may provide some compensation to Linus Media Group.

FOLLOW US
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MUSIC CREDIT
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Intro: Laszlo - Supernova

Outro: Approaching Nirvana - Sugar High

CHAPTERS
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0:00 - It's cram packed full of M.2 slots!
0:49 - Tello!
1:05 - What is the X21?
4:00 - Popping the heatsink
5:48 - A Single SSD
8:35 - Hot swap?
9:27 - 21 SSDs
16:52 - Linux!
19:51 - Real use cases
21:19 - Tello!
22:27 - Outro

[raistlinmajere]

Linus holding a 31.000k SSD? This is going to be a wild ride.

[noahhallman]

One of my favorite things in LTT videos is Alex being worried about jank things that other people do even though he is the jank master himself. He will be worried about other people doing things and do something 10 times worse a minute later. And I am here for it.

[smalltime]

I can see the utility of this.
When I was still at uni (back when the fastest way to transfer data was TAs with USB keys), I worked with a professor on a project where he was using datasets that were about 32GB each, and he was having to go through about 100 to map them out. The software, which he made, required it to be loaded into memory, chucked out and recalled later. So this was on the order of 1 test per night on a (at the time) top of the range dual Xeon system. And I successfully got it up to 2 tests per night, hold your applause.
Something like this would have been a Godsend. I mean, I'd have to do more work writing code, so I am glad it wasn't a thing.

[shanent]

"Hot plug" refers only to the switch chip itself, m.2 doesn't allow for it. The mechanical interface still has to be designed to ground the SSD before applying power and limit the inrush current.

[david_sanchez]

I remember seeing something similar to this way back in the 80's. They were essentially the first SSDs. It was a board that you'd install a bunch of RAM on. Back then RAM didn't come on DIMMs. It was a bunch of socketed IC chips that looked like EPROM. Then the board would be installed in an ISA slot (it was probably EISA, don't remember). There were also no drivers. The board would present itself to the BIOS as a native storage device, kinda like how ST-506 and ATA did. The BIOS would facilitate communication between the OS and the "drive". It was a lot like MFM and RLL drives that had their own expansion cards. This was all pre-Windows and GUI OSes.

[timothyreeve]

For the VFX Editor (this may be a simplistic view)
things like Baselight X where uncompressed video with native 8K raster EXRs are used outside of a Proxy workflow for finishing, the sheer size of uncompressed EXRs combined with high frame rate requests now, means your bottle neck is storage speed.

There are bespoke Linux appliances that are used for review and feedback for workflows in VFX where high-speed RAID Cards are used for caching these frames.

This would be ideal for this purpose

[philb]

I love videos with Alex and Linus. Linus loves to do things the janky way, and Alex has an engineering background, so Linus has a hope that Alec will do things the correct way, but then when Alex does thing the janky way like Linus isn't happy, but then things work out, and he's happy again.

[andywallis]

i absolutely love this 'we shouldnt be doing this' dynamic that these two have

[rawexploiterp]

my dad says: "if more data is stored in 1 point/place, then its scarier to lose that point."

[mattp]

I’m not so sure. A ram’s top speed is 20 mph. How could an SSD possibly outclass an animal of such swiftness?

[ragtop]

Pros of BIOS RAID:
- More "natural" path to installing your OS on a RAID volume.
- Presents the volume to the OS as a single drive (mostly only significant because of the previous point).

Cons of BIOS RAID:
- In almost every case, you need drivers to use the volume in your OS. This is a common pain point during OS install.
- For consumer boards, it's still just a software RAID (see impact in the next 2 points).
- There are almost no performance benefits in regards to CPU usage (tested this many times).
- Data throughput isn't any faster than using an OS software RAID (tested this many times).
- If you ever move your drive(s) to a different system (especially a different brand) that doesn't use the same BIOS RAID, you can't access the data. OS level RAIDs will always be recognized by the OS (unless you toasted your drives somehow).

Do not confuse this for a list comparing hardware vs software RAID because consumer grade BIOS RAID is not hardware RAID.

[HedgehogYK]

5:10 I don't know why but I felt a chill down my spine of someone out there jaw dropping at this zoomed out moment.

[DisloyalGaming]

Sabrent really going at it lately first with one of the best options for steam deck now searching out large silly projects to sponsor just to show how much progress they as a company has made is just insane. I swear haven't even heard of them till last year

[manuelbardina]

Would love to see this thing loaded purely with Intel optane drives, i.e. 118gb p1600x ngff 2280 drives. It would only be ~2TB, of data, but imagine the iops.

[Sptn]

I could totally see this device being used in massive weather simulations where you need to store the values of the atmospheric conditions within individual blocks of data and need the fastest access possible to that data. Being able to store the entirety of the information contained within a storm on a single device would prove invaluable to meteorologists, especially Dr. Orr in Minnesota who's been simulating tornadoes in his supercomputer.

[asdf]

Linus is doing this for more than a decade, you would think his enthusiasm will be gone by now but no, it increased by a ton. This is why LTT is so cool!

[FeTiProductions]

I'm happy this has come up as a topic of conversation. I've been wanting someone to test SSD speed to say yesteryear RAM versions like DDR3 DDR2 etc. to see if SSDs using swap files are at parity with RAM

[username]

Machine learning is definitely going to be a big use case. Even sample datasets we use, given for educational purposes and are not meant to be very challenging, are easily 500GB in size sometimes. And they relatively small datasets since they really do not have that many different variables. Now imagine having to handle literally petabytes of data.

[QualityDoggo]

the insane part is how much of a "great fit" and "bargain price" this could be considered for high-end enterprise and workstation systems working on big datasets. This density of performance and storage without "custom" drives is unrivaled

[harisjaved]

This is perfect for data centers! I would love something like this for computer vision models! But I am sure we need motherboards with a lot of pcie lanes, like on the thread ripper.