Gadgetory

so you can see James is editing away here in Final Cut or at least pretending to I'm gonna go ahead and rip out one of our drives have you ever walked into a coffee shop in the middle of the day and been shocked to see how many people appear to be using it as their office well that's because there are a ton of freelancers out there who do everything from pitching clients to writing scripts to editing video often all on one portable machine but sometimes especially if you're editing video or even photos you need more storage space than a MacBook Pro or any laptop for that matter can offer that's where this puppy comes in so we've configured our test device here with over 100 terabytes of rapid access storage actually 120 terabytes to be precise and only a single Thunderbolt 3 cable is required to connect it to our laptop oh and did I mention that it charges to we're gonna show you guys how to do it speaking of showing you guys we're gonna show you guys how to check out our sponsor glass wire if you don't know what's going in and out of your PC or Android device when you're connected to the Internet you can use glass wire to see if there are any badly behaving apps use offer code linus to get 25 percent off at the link below so when we first set out to build our 100 terabyte laptop the first thing we needed was a PC or Mac with Thunderbolt 3 Thunderbolt 3 gives us both the performance and the ease-of-use that we need to make this a legitimately viable solution instead of just a weird tech demo the second thing we needed was a gas nowadays is not to be confused with a mass which is short for network attached storage those things are great we use them all the time here at our office they can be accessed remotely and they can be used by multiple computers so they're for multiple users simultaneously the problem though is that they are slower especially in terms of access latency so our gas or direct attached storage device is an arica arc 80 50 T 3-12 now there are four six and eight dry variants that are also available but we chose this one because we wanted a really flashy headline like 100 terabytes the other main feature that we wanted was of course Thunderbolt 3 so it comes with the included Thunderbolt cable that you see right here which gives us 40 gigabit per second peak transfer speeds between our devices and the ability to daisy chain using the second Thunderbolt 3 port keep in mind though that we wouldn't use this capability to add more storage boxes on top of the one we have instead we'd rely on this right here this is an SF 86 44 port and it's a lot cooler than it sounds because it lets us take just kind of a dummy secondary enclosure and link our original one to it and use the controller that's in here as well as the Thunderbolt 3 chip here to allow this one to manage the whole thing as one big array so inside our arica enclosure is an LSI hardware RAID processor also called a raid on chip or rock so it's higher performance compared to software raid in many cases but could be harder to recover data from as paired to software aid in the event of an error and that was actually something that we did experience with hardware RAID in the past inside here is also two gigs of ECC RAM which causes about a two percent performance in but allows us to detect and correct data that was improperly read or written now let's talk about our drives so this unit is actually sold diskless but B&H who generously provided our unit for this video offers preloaded systems if you for whatever reason have trouble finding the nas optimize drives that are out there and installing them which you shouldn't because it's a pretty simple process so you basically take your four screws screw them into the bottom of these rails and then there's a backplane in the back of the unit that you slide it into and lock your drive in place but there are ways to make mistakes like they do have mounting holes for two and a half inch drives but I wouldn't recommend using those in a unit like this because you'll be compromising your capacity and your performance anyway we actually prefer the empty version because this is cool you don't need to fill all of the bays right off the bat on many dass's if you were to add more drives later it would mean that you would need to reformat and recreate your raid and that's pretty inconvenient because the whole point of having a device like this is this is like your storage locker for all your stuff where are you going to put it all while you reformat it ours on the other hand has what's called online volume expansion so that additional capacity can be used to enlarge the last volume set or create another volume set now as for mixing and matching drives that's something that you run into when you add some drives now and you upgrade later some people actually encourage using different makes and models of disks as long as they keep the same spindle rpm so that's to say how fast the disk actually spins within the drive and the same claimed capacity so the arguments for this are that it reduces the risk of systemic failure so that's to say like a flaw that affects all particular units of of this drive for example another thing that's nice about adding drives over time is they won't all be the same age if you look at the way that hard drives fail over time it tends to be a lot of them then very few then it ramps up significantly as they get older so if they're all the same age you can imagine that they would all start to drop off at around the same time with all of that said if you've got known good drives there is a performance advantage to using ones that are all the same if you're striping data across them which we are doing because we're looking for not just massive capacity but also high performance for our project we went with C gates 12 terabyte iron wolf pros they have a great balance of price and performance and they deliver the capacity that we need in order to hit our goal now we could have gone with something more expensive like a SAS Drive our dance actually does support that but for this kind of a deployment there's not going to be a performance benefit so we're gonna stick with these sort of prosumer grade devices instead the last thing we need is power now this is just a standard power cord but I would strongly recommend for a device like this either getting the sold separately battery backup or connecting it to a UPS so that it doesn't suddenly lose power in the event of a power outage so that's that's it now we are ready to go through the setup process to set up your machine download the Installer from the arica website and follow the steps after restarting launch the storage manager to configure your raid now there are a ton of different options in here but we're going to choose quick create and raid 5 plus spare this is going to stripe our data across 11 of our drives including one parity Drive and it will leave one spare drive available just in case one of our other 11 decides to kick the bucket this way it will rebuild automatically in the event of a drive failure now you'll have to wait some number of hours for your array to initialize it ended up taking about 10 hours in our case so now that everything is completely set up and ready to go you can see we're running off of battery here but we take our single Thunderbolt 3 cable plug it into our system our array fires up we are charging our MacBook and theoretically we're gonna see our external storage volume pop up right around here so one of the few disk speed tests for Mac is actually the black magic disk speed test which is intended to find out how fast a particular volume is in the context of what kind of footage it can handle so I'm gonna go ahead and I'm going to select our target Drive let's go ahead and see a Wow look at it go not too shabby just shy of two gigabytes per second on both reads and writes which results in a completely green lit up black magic disk speed test we can handle everything up to 4k 60fps content at 10 bit 4 to 2 but that's not actually much of a surprise to us because 2 gigabytes per second is well in excess of even the data rates of our 8k cameras so you would be able to handle any kind of footage under the Sun using a connection like this to an array like that for our next trick we're gonna take a look at Final Cut Pro X now I am far from an expert on the use of this software so we brought in one of our editors to give me your honest impressions any thoughts on the performance of this timeline it's a multicam clip so is that demanding typically usually yeah feels good feels responsive more or less yeah any complaints whatsoever can you find any problem I want to know about the problems I mean to be clear I'm not actually expecting you to find a problem oh yeah yeah we're editing off of this and it's like 2 gigabytes a second read and write so we are expecting it to perform well I was just hoping maybe you can find some some flaw in the machine no looks good very snappy yeah cool no so overall this is not a cheap solution but we're really happy with the experience it charges our laptop it gives us blazing fast performance and of course like any heart we're a raid enclosure it gives us some fault tolerance so you can see James is editing away here in final cut or at least pretending to I'm gonna go ahead and rip out one of our drives it's gonna freak the heck out but we're still editing baby pretty cool right anyway it gets even better go ahead and close down final tech and can you drag that drag to the garbage there when it's time to go out and hit the road that's all there is to it see ya there's no door here and I'm back with this segue to our sponsor Corsairs iron claw RGB wireless gaming mouse it features a comfortable palm grip a pmw 33 91 optical sensor with native 18,000 DPI it's got three methods of connection with a 1 point 8 meter braided USB cable for charging their slipstream wireless technology for sub one millisecond latency and Bluetooth which gives you compatibility with a wide range of devices it's got up to 24 hours of battery life 3s on RGB it's made for FPS and MOBA games and it's got a 2-year warranty buy yours today at the link in the video description so thanks for watching guys if you just liked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link below also in our video description is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join