Gadgetory

all right so I gave you guys an update on some of the ball and new server gear that we've had arriving for the new office including a powerful Xeon based storage server the plans for which I've actually already kind of revised and our new 2,000 dollar 12 port 10 game at network switch but today we're going to kick things up a notch with a custom-built story nadir mass storage server from 45 drives comm that features over 100 terabytes of high-speed storage so strap in guys cuz this couldn't be good Intel's new 750 series SSDs utilizing the nvme standard provides speeds never before seen on consumer storage drives click my hair to learn more so the problem we're trying to overcome here seem straightforward on the surface how to store all our data but when you go out in the real world and see entire video production houses running off of USB and thunderbolt external drives or coming up with long term archival solutions like write the dates on the sides of the drives and put them on a shelf in the bathroom completely exposed to dust moisture and accidents as if this was the VHS home video dark ages it suggests that we've been asking maybe the wrong questions all this time because it's not about storage it's about accessibility the number of times that we've gone to do our review of some exciting new next-gen products and gone hey maybe I'll grab some full quality footage of its predecessor from our old video for comparison which oh it's on the archive shelve isn't it guess I'll do what we always do and download the old video from YouTube then slice it up in crappy quality that happens more than I'd like to say and obviously that's not a solution that makes sense as Linus media group continues to scale the amount and quality of footage that we're storing as well as the number of people who need to access it as our company grows so let's talk store inator s45 the middle-of-the-road model that we chose that sits in between the more quiet SMB optimized 30 drive version and the monster XL 60 drive version in the front you'll find three 120-millimeter cooling fans to push air through our drives with a custom linus media group logo painted onto the graphite powder coated chassis on top then behind that three rows of 15 slots that give us the 45 drive capacity for this sucker further toward the back we find another two 120 millimeter fans that will pull air through the drives and then the system hardware chamber that exists only to power the other two-thirds of the case overall it strikes an unusual balance between being objectively professional-grade with all the core components and Intel 2.1 gigahertz six core Xeon CPU 128 gigs of kingston ECC ddr3 ram a Super Micro motherboard a two plus one fully redundant 700 watt power supply 316 port SAS controller cards from LSI and an Intel X 540 10 gigabit network card are from brands with reliability reputations ranging from excellent to legendary and yet it has a small custom system builder or DIY feel to it but comes from things like the blue LED lit vandal switch at the back that's used to power the unit on the flat cable managed but obviously off the shelf molex splitters that provide power to up to 45 drives at a time the fairly rudimentary PC builder tool on their site and the general simplicity of the enclosure design that other than the fixed backplane something that I really prefer compared to just loose cables as a smaller operator who's going to tinker with these machines versus chucking one of the hundreds of them in my data center out if there's some kind of an issue it looks like something that could be made in a pretty normal fabrication shop what a cool machine but of course that's not what you guys are here to see the store inator isn't the star of the show today it's more of an enabler so after installing FreeNAS a freebsd based storage operating system with native ZFS support that you can learn more about here it was finally time to break out the hard drives now while Seagate sounded like I punched them in the gut when I told them that I needed 27 drives for this project they also understood that if you're actually serious about having fast reliable network access to your 4k footage for a number of operators at a time you need a lot of drives and they have to be high performance so many drives in fact that they won't even fit in one master carton shipping box so once we'd figured out how many 27 the next step was to determine which model of drive we would be using honestly for most people and small businesses for that matter nothing more hardcore than ainaz hard drive would be required they're rated for 24/7 operation they offer reasonable if not earth shattering performance certainly more than a gigabit network connection would require they go up to four terabytes that gives you 24 terabytes of storage with a couple of disks redundancy and they can be obtained for under $40 u.s. per terabyte they're kind of like the city boss of hard drives but this is lie this tech tip suckas so i'ma ride around in a 747 instead sorry anyway because we have more than just hand cam vlog footage to deal with these days sometimes even sponsored projects for customers where data loss is not an option we opted for Seagate's enterprise capacity drives unlike their Nass or even enterprise nas drives which are rated for the adverse conditions and the vibration associated with up to eight or sixteen bay drive enclosures respectively the enterprise capacity drives feature exotic interfaces up to twelve gigabit per second SAS big capacities up to six terabytes per drive top of the line performance 10 times the workload rating of their desktop drive counterparts at five hundred and fifty terabytes per year and they do all of this while managing external vibrations so you can pack them in as tight as you can pack them pretty much which I guess means it's time to start talking about how that went so to start things off I went with nine drives in a ZFS two configuration this gives me just shy of 80% storage efficiency with two of my drives dedicated to redundancy I used one of my two SSD raid array clients here that are both on the same 10 gigabit network and achieved read and write speeds in the 300 plus megabyte per second range not too shabby but I mean I wasn't really sure what to expect at this point expanding as the FS storage server is both simple and kind of complicated as long as you have the same number of the same capacity of drives it's extremely fast and basically a few button presses to get her up and running but don't get your hopes up about simply adding a tenth drive to an existing nine drive array like you can do with a hardware RAID card it just doesn't work that way unfortunately the good news is that adding another set of drives should yield a significant improvement in performance since it's effectively striping data across the two sets unfortunately that wasn't my experience I saw the same numbers as before so after soldiering on and adding my third set of nine drives for a total of twenty seven and over 100 terabytes of storage and then realizing that the performance needle still hadn't budged I figured it was time to throw another client at the problem so with two clients to SSD based gigabit clients excuse me ten gigabit clients copying 20 gigabytes of data concurrently speeds were effectively doubled I got perfect scaling indicating that both drive speed and the speed of the network card in our store inator are not bottlenecks but unfortunately I don't have anymore 10 gigabit clients at the moment so this victory and discovery also means that we're done for the time being until we move into the new office where I can give it to aggregated network connections for 20 gigabit per second total for your reticle speeds and then hammer this thing with half a dozen clients at the same time to find out exactly where her limits are so stay tuned for that speaking of staying tuned audible.com keeps you tuned in to the books that you want to sit down to read but simply don't have the time for by letting you take your library with you on the go you can listen in the car at work on the bus in bed or anywhere that you can wear a pair of headphones really with over 150,000 audiobooks to choose from so there's definitely going to be something for you especially if you're into having your favorite celebrities read to you Dustin Hoffman's performance of being there by Jerzy Kosinski is getting rave reviews for his performance so you might want to check it out and join the book club now to get an audiobook every month at audible.com slash Linus and if you're on the fence about audible.com anyway the first one is actually free all right guys that's pretty much it like this video if you liked it dislike it if you thought it sucks check out the link to the forum to discuss it if you want to discuss the video we also have links for our merchandise cool t-shirts like this one giving us a contribution and changing your Amazon bookmarks one with our affiliate code so we get a small kickback whenever you buy hard drives or whatever else the case may be thanks again for watching it as always don't forget to subscribe and follow and all of that good stuff