Liqid has added the LQD4500, its first PCIe 4.0 SSD to its composable systems line-up. This is possibly the world’s fastest SSD. Internally, Liqid calls the thing ‘Honey Badger’ – which we associate with crazy-aggressive, rather than super fast. But hey ho.
Liqid’s composable system uses NVMe-over Fabrics to connect pools of compute, FPGA, GPU and storage resources, from which dynamically configured servers are created to run applications. Resources are returned to the pools when the application completes.
The Liqid SSD range consists of:
- LQD3000 – NAND – AIC format with PCIe gen 3 x 8, 16TB, 1.25m IOPS and 7GB/sec
- LQD3250 – NAND – U.2 format with PCIe gen 3 x 4, 8TB, 850K IOPS and 3.6GB/sec
- LQD3900 – Optane – AIC format with PCIe gen 3 x 8, 1.5TB, 1.6m IOPS, >7GB/sec
- LQD4500 – NAND – AIC format with PCIe gen 4 x 16, to 32TB, 4m IOPS, 24GB/sec
The LQD4500 is Liqid’s first SSD to use PCIe gen 4 only, and it concatenates 16 lanes to achieve its IOPS and GB/sec performance numbers. It uses TLC (3bits/cell) NAND.
The Optane LQD3900’s latency is 10μs for reads and writes while the LQD4500 boasts 20μs read and 80μs write. That’s not too shabby at all for for reading.
We can envisage Liqid introducing a PCIe gen 4 version of the LQD3900 Optane card. If that had 16 lanes too we might be looking at something that could deliver 8m IOPS and 30GB/sec, possibly more.
Check out an LQD4500 spec sheet. Liqid does not reveal the available capacities below the LQD4500’s 32TB maximum in this document. The Honey Badger is available from Liqid now.
