Gadgetory

if you've been following me on social media you've probably spent a fair bit of your time lately feeling bad for me about all of the SSDs that I had to mount in our new 24 drive solid-state storage server no all right well then you've probably at least been hoping that I'll make a video about it at some point and talk about the performance and that time is now this is the all-new Wanek the fastest beast machine in our office of course rhx 1,200 eye power supply delivers 80 plus platinum efficiency for quiet performance and corsair link digital advanced monitoring and control click now to learn more so our current storage server ruskin uses Seagate 3 terabyte consumer drives in a raid 6 array to achieve respectable read and write performance and some fault tolerance the array can actually lose up to two drives before suffering catastrophic data loss assuming it's able to rebuild before more drives fail or an unrecoverable error occurs this is all fine and good but the main problem with it is that Ruskin was built for one editor to work on 4k video files at max speed and we now have a whole room full of editors so while the Ruskin 10 gigabit network interface and sequential data speeds aren't really bottlenecks its mechanical drives are much more suitable for a single person workflow so I reached out to our good buddies at Kingston with a crazy idea what if we slipped free of the surly bonds of mechanical storage and danced the skies on SSD silvered wings to which they kind of went how much silver Linus I told them I wanted 20 for one terabyte class drives and doggone it for some reason they said yes I think the most incredible thing about that story is how much the landscape has changed in such a short amount of time two years ago I could have been the Pope in Rome and any SSD maker would have laughed at me for wanting 20 terabytes of redundant SSD storage in a single server but in 2015 Kingston's just like yeah we've got the enterprise-grade KC 310 it's got an 8 channel thighs and s10 controller 960 gigabytes of capacity ECC flash protection for data integrity power loss protection trim support although we'll be relying on idle garbage collection and raid anyway and it's under 60 cents per gig I mean holy balls I'm actually wearing the right shirt for that so let's talk upgrade process then the first thing I need was way better raid cards yes cards ooh not a single card there are 24 port controllers in fact the old server has one but since each individual SSD is capable of 500 plus megabytes per second read and write speeds if you hook 24 of them up to a single card with a theoretical total speed in the neighborhood of 12 Giga bytes per second you're going to run into some pretty serious bottlenecks all over the place so after removing the placeholder mechanical drives from the system laborious Lee mounting 24 SSDs on sleds and connecting the SFF 8087 connectors each of which handles four drives to their backplane in my Norco RPC 4224 chassis and I love these things on Kingston's recommendation I picked up three LSI 92 7180 I eight portrayed cards each in a PCI Express 3.0 X slot this is where the x99 platform really shows its value because you're going to need enough PCI Express Lanes to handle all that storage bandwidth something that consumer-grade platforms simply cannot provide now something a lot of people commented on when I posted a picture of these cards on Instagram was that these cards run really hot and I had them installed right next to each other don't worry I'm using a 90 millimeter fan mounted directly on top of them for auxiliary cooling and I'll be bolting that in before I install this server in our fancy rack cabinet at the new office so with all the drives installed the next step was getting firmware updates and drivers taking care for my controllers and configuring arrays naturally the first thing I did was throw the whole thing in raid 0 for lols to see how fast it would go there's a bit of a special process for this in this case though you need to create a raid 0 array of 8 drives on each of the controller cards then use software raid to put them all together so in my case that required the use of disk management in Windows to set each raid 0 as a dynamic drive then stripe the whole thing together so it's kind of like raid 0 0 0 something like that the results were well if Shania were here I guess she'd say that don't impress me much read speeds were great even for 512 K transactions I'm looking at over five and a half gigabytes per second I mean remember this is for video editing so very little of what we deal with is going to be smaller than half a Meg with 4k transfers that's more than two full orders of magnitude faster than my old ten hard drive solution but those right speeds aren't enough to saturate the planned two by ten gigabit teemed network connection the server is packing if multiple users are writing large files to the array either way raid zero wasn't my final configuration since I wanted some fault tolerance so I figured if I'm going to troubleshoot this thing I might as well do it when it's set up properly so I through my eight driver raise in raid 5 that allows me to lose up to one drive per array and then I also have a spare drive on hand in the unlikely event of a failure which is lots for a server that'll be backed up nightly on the network then I striped those raid fives together in software for what is effectively raid 50 a quick benchmark before the arrays were finished initializing revealed worse numbers than raid zero although that's pretty much a given since any parity raid puts much more load on the controller card especially for writes than a striping raid but I really hadn't expected them to be this bad so I waited for the arrays to finish initializing and they got worse so it was about that time that I realized maybe the right cache setting on solid state makes a bigger difference than on mechanical so even though I don't have battery backups for my cards or a UPS for my server yet I enabled write back cache and there we go there is the drawback of an unexpected power loss causing potential data loss with right back caching enabled but we're just going to have to get those batteries and UPS is going because with that setting on we are able to saturate the bananas out of any connection we can make on the network to this when she's handling large streaming reads and writes this array can do in excess of 5 gigabytes per second when she's handling extremely small transaction she can still do just under a hundred times the performance of Ruskin and when she's able to queue up those small transactions from many clients hitting her at the same time she can do well over 500 megabytes per second I just need to drop another $600 on battery units for the raid cards and wait for the network cards for my clients to show up so that I can show you guys how the network is going to handle all of this then the server grade stuff is expensive and very time-consuming but it floats my geeky boat to see numbers like this where a PCI Express based Predator SSD is the bottleneck in a local file transfer speaking of stuff that floats my geeky boat I fix it you probably know I fix it from there tear downs of electronic devices and they're fantastic repair guides on their site that can save you tens 50s even hundreds of dollars on repair costs I've used them a number of times on an iMac on a phone and I'm sure there's something else but I'm not thinking that at the moment what you probably aren't aware of is that I fix it sells professional grade tools as well so they've got their there I fix it 54 bit driver kit they've got all these little prying tools they've got anti-static straps they've got their magnetic organizer that I actually might have any yeah I was using this the other day that lets you write little labels draw little diagrams and keep all your screws somewhere safe when you're working on a project they've got all kinds of fantastic stuff whether you're trying to take a part in intend ODS with a tri wing bit whether you're trying to take apart McDonald's toys with a triangle bit or you need to take apart something that uses security torques is all that stuff they've got it and what's cool is when you go on their guides they actually list all of the tools that you need for a particular guide the one to probably start with though is the kind of all-in-one Pro Tech tool kit pack I use mine all the time it's 65 bucks and if you use ifixit.com slash Linus and then code Linus zere row five at the checkout you save $10 off.that or any purchase of $50 or more so it's ifixit.com slash Linus check it out great tools great guides great stuff so that's pretty much it guys thanks for watching like the video if you liked it dislike it if you thought it sucked leave a comment preferably at the link below to our forum if you want to discuss it also linked below you can buy a cool t-shirt like this one you can give us a monthly contribution if you think what we're doing is important you can change your Amazon bookmarks one with our affiliate codes so next time you buy 24 SSDs we'll get a kickback from that and that's pretty much it don't forget to subscribe and follow and all that good stuff thanks again for watching