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Personal Project 10Gbps Storage Server & Quick Emulex Unboxing Linus Tech Tips

2012-12-28
alright guys it's not often I get this excited about something that comes in a plain brown box and doesn't save Republic of gamers all over it but this is the OCE one one one zero two NX this is a direct-attached copper ten gigabit per second Ethernet adapter so it has sfp+ connectors on it two ports PCI Express 4x I believe comes with in some stuff inside ok so what's special about these these are the least expensive 10 gigabit per second capable adapters that are out there well Linus why would you care about that because you know 10 gigabit per second switches are uber expensive comes with a low-profile adapter comes with two low profile adapters I think one of these ended up I have a few of them so I mean one of them didn't have one so I think they just come with one so yeah 10 gigabit per second switches were so expensive line this why could it even matter to me the consumer that I can get a 10 gigabit ethernet card for under 300 bucks well the answer I would reply is daisy-chaining these adapters and there are other ones too I actually bought the wrong ones I didn't want the sfp+ ones it was my bad there's a different part number that can do 10 gigabit per second over cat 6 and cat 6a which is just regular rj45 connector well sort of regular I think they've made some revisions but the point is much less expensive than direct attached copper cables which will run anywhere from about 50 to a couple hundred bucks depending on the length but they can go up to 40 feet and right so there's cat 6 cat 6a ones there's these SFP+ ones why am i excited about this because daisy-chaining so they have two ports on them which means if you wanted to have sort of out here I drew a little diagram where's my little diagram ah yes this is my plan that I've been working on for a while so this is my server with the quad gigabit NIC okay so server right there and then it's sort of one gigabit out to everywhere else from there then that server could also have one of these bad boys and that I then run regular cat 6 to 2 other computers a capture computer and a video editing computer so I'm going to show you guys why this is so exciting in just a moment sorry guys baby sleeping but here's the config I'm using just for testing so there's one of the Emulex cards and I've got a direct attached copper cable running down to another Emulex card so that's a 10 gigabit NIC here and that's my quad one gigabit NIC here so this machine right here will have to have some network configuration done to allow this network to talk to this network so that these computers can all talk to this at one gig and these computers can talk to these ones at one gig but that all the daisy chains 10 gig computers will be able to do that now if you had a switch that would be better any switch with an SFP+ sorry about that any switch with an sfp+ set of connectors on it will work for direct-attached copper as far as I can tell that I could be wrong about that one but here we go so guys right now everything's pretty ghetto I just have the two cards directly attached to each other so you can see it's working here 10 gigabit per second if we go ahead and look at the status of the connection there it is 10 gigabit per second no internet access because like I said they're just direct attached but check this out okay so why do I need this a couple things number one here check this out uber file MOV this is a five minute media file that is 36 gigs for video work you want to work with uncompressed whenever you can which means I want to capture uncompressed from the camera to my black magic card then I want to work with that uncompressed footage and that is very very bandwidth intensive we've tried to do it on gigabit it's not even close so check this out I can play this file back over the network no big deal so there it's me talking about some thing let me just move this off to the side of what you guys to see this network usage you can see here that single gigabit would not have been anywhere near enough this needs at peak like if I'm scrubbing through the file it's going to go up around 40% utilization on ten gigabit per second connection alright so the other thing about 10-gig is that you have to have the horses on the other side to take advantage of it so my storage server here with the arica raid card oops yeah you guys can't see that with the arica raid card has eight Seagate three terabyte drives in those bottom eight bays so they are capable of producing up to 700 megabytes per second sustained reads and 500 megabytes per second sustained right so that's way more than gigabit Giga bits only about a hundred megabytes per second reads and writes so right so yeah so the 10 gigabit per second connection wouldn't do me any good unless the storage on the other side was good enough to keep up with it so here I'm going to do a quick demo where I'm going to take a few video files let's say totalling about and I don't know let's go for a risk go for around 5 gigs here guys what do we got here yeah there we go five point three five gigs and we're going to copy these to the desktop here check this out you guys are going to love this so you can see here it Peaks around 1.2 gigabytes per second which is freaking unreal and then we start to be limited not by the this guy on the other side here because that was all like caching and memory and all that but we're limited actually by the write speeds of the SSD in the rendering machine which is here so guys what's exciting about this is that for about so each card is about 280 bucks on NCIX for these Emulex cards whether you get the direct attached copper ones or the cat6 cat6a ones which means you can build a three computer gigabit 10 gigabit daisy chain for like 750 bucks plus cables so less than a thousand bucks you can get these kinds of speeds now for a general consumer watching your blu-ray rips yeah not that useful but if you don't want to spend several thousand dollars on a switch invest in you know $700 cards plus you know 800 $700 sfp+ fiber modules blah blah blah and spend you know five to ten grand setting up the ten game bit per second connection if you have a use for one whether it's for like prosumer video editing or whatever else this is actually very attainable thanks for checking out this episode of Linus tech tips about my ten gigabit per second connection experiment and don't forget to subscribe for more videos like this from yours truly I screwed up my outro whatever subscribe you
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