Gadgetory

I think you just have to press it again yeah just just just do it again I am actually really excited about this video because on the one hand it's some really cool server gear from our buds over at Seagate and 45 drives but on the other hand it's a project that has kind of a personal element to it for me so if you guys are in tune with sort of the rest of the tech youtuber community you might know that we actually hooked up some of our buds with storage servers over the last little while and I was a little bit I was a little bit surprised to find out that some of those folks have actually changed out their storage servers or added storage servers without checking in with me again for a variety of reasons and I'm gonna have a more detailed video following this up in the future we'll talk about those reasons we'll actually maybe get an opportunity to talk to them directly about what exactly happened but the bottom line is the observation was that an unread box full of magnetic hard drives was not really suitable for editing off of because it wasn't fast enough but that's something that I definitely know and if I'd known that people wanted a high performance solution I could have helped them out it's just that they went with another solution that I kind of looked at and went well gee that doesn't on paper make a ton of sense so today's video is about exploring what else is out there for editors who are looking for a high performance network based storage solution and whether compared to some of the more booty key options we think we can DIY something a little more exciting and today's video is brought to you by Ridge wallet with a ridge wallet you don't have to carry around any of those well so so much so you don't have to it's that it incentivizes you do not carry around stupid things like gift cards a dollar 27 left on them our old hotel room keys or whatever else cuz they just don't have space for them check them out at the link in the video description and you can get 50 per excuse me 50 15 percent off we'll have that down below alright so guys here's our target this is the luma forage jellyfish can you see my screen okay David it's not not too bad okay so this is a you can actually get it in a variety of configurations mobile tower or rack with the tower and the rack from my understanding being very similar I have actually spoken with these folks although they're not talking to me anymore now that they know that I'm trying to beat their product for the same price or less so all I can go based on is what they told me before they figured out my ulterior motive so let's go ahead and choose their tower because the tower is quieter so you can see here their pricing is $29,000 995 and that gets you 80 terabytes of raw storage with 53 terabytes available so the reason that you've got less available then you have raw storage is because they're using ZFS with like a raid Z okay don't quote me on this I believe it's a raid z22 raid Z 2 s and then I believe the two are stripes together which is kind of like a raid 60 don't quote me on that I'm gonna have to check my notes and make sure that it's alright when I do the follow up video so I kind of went wow 80 terabytes for 30 grand that's got to be some pretty that's got to be some pretty amazing like lightning fast you know storage nests and stuff except there's only one small problem that 80 terabyte configuration 80 terabytes of raw storage configuration is actually using mechanical drives mechanical drives my friends so a quick search over on newegg.com would reveal that the storage in this machine let's choose 10 terabyte drives for a nice round number 10 terabyte hard drive hmm so eight of those would be let's let's pick something let's go straight for the enterprise so eight times $300 is twenty four hundred dollars what happened to my other you know twenty seven thousand bucks here I don't know so what I could have done was I could have put together a project where I build something comparable for the same for a lower price but then I thought how completely out of whack they were on their pricing and I thought you know what I think we can do better so this is this is the project that I'm introducing today the all solid-state storage looma Forge jellyfish killer yes my friends for the price of the one hundred and twenty terabyte jellyfish we're going to attempt to build a completely SSD based server that absolutely smashes the doors off of the jellyfish so you know we have there's no guarantee that this is actually all gonna work out that way but I'm feeling so to start with we need to unbox something from 45 drives that I've actually never had occasion to use before so I haven't experienced firsthand this is called a 45 drives tornado it's an actually it's actually a relatively recent product from them and I thought there wasn't really anything that's special about it until I started doing research for what kind of a server enclosure I could use for this project and I just couldn't find anything else that quite fit the bill because the thing is part of 45 Dru this is some interesting packing that's it you guys come on better glue 45 drives so part of 45 drives a stick is that instead of relying on back planes which take your SATA or your nvme or your or your SAS connection and then divide it up to multiple drives they directly attach every single Drive in their machines to the storage controller now this has a this has a cost in terms of the wiring that they have to do inside their enclosures because they have to run an individual cable to every single Drive and it has a cost in terms of controllers because instead of using a single eight port controller to run you know let's say times four is thirty-two drives or something like that they actually have to add more SATA or more SAS controllers to their machines but they claim the advantage is that you've reduced the complexity in other ways you reduce the points of failure by just using a proper controller port for every single Drive so anyway because we're going for maximum performance in this machine I didn't want to run into any kind of you know SATA splitter or SAS splitter bottleneck and I decided to go with this tornado I was going to use a machine from Super Micro that's actually quite similar to one that we have in our server room but what I realized is that it only had I believe about four you know four I believe it was eight SATA channels for 48 drives or something along those lines so it just really wasn't gonna fit the bill for us so let's oh yeah I sure can so let's go ahead and crack this open Anthony do you want to give me that overhead shot there oh look at our people enjoying the stream so far they into this pool because I am amped so it looks like 45 drives actually sent over a significantly higher end configuration than I dissipated it might have actually kind of screwed me over on this because I have like I have a costs I have a cost target to hit here and they've gone and they've equipped this thing with a dual socket motherboard and how much how much RAM do we have now okay with that said this might still be okay because I know that luma Forge does have a performance boost option where they install more ran and I believe they upgrade the CPU but they don't actually tell you how much more ram or how much more CPU they put in so it's like we could kind of say yeah we performance boosted it and we could go up against that if we want but either way the math is gonna be a little bit fuzzy on this project in terms of RAM they've gone and equipped us with 32 gigs times 8 so that's around 256 gigs of ram now you might wonder why on earth you would need 256 gigs of ram for a storage server and that's a very fair question but the reason is that because we're going to be using ZFS probably on FreeNAS although that's not entirely decided yet because we're going to be using ZFS we can actually use our ram as a cache in a way that can improve our performance significantly now normally with FreeNAS and ZFS what you could do is you could install an SSD device or two that you could use to act as sort of like a buffer for writes so all your random writes go to your SSD and then it will kind of organize it all and then spit it out in a more linear fashion that's more harddrive friendly but because we're using all solid-state drives it's very unlikely that we'd get a great benefit from that so the only ways to really successfully cache a fully solid-state server would be either using obtain or using RAM and the the consultant actually this is a really exciting part of this video the consultant that I have connected with actually at Computex this year to help us out on this project and make sure that we are setting this up in the best way possible is none other than oh well I'm having a total I'm having a total brain abandoning me moment and I have fashions we forgot misty oh this is really bad oh boy hopefully he never watches this we Patrick I know he's watching right now Patrick from served the home so if you guys aren't familiar with serve the home it's an absolutely fantastic sight it's better than it sounds because it kind of sounds like you know weird nerds you know cobbling together like servers for their closets out of old hardware or something like that and they do do that kind of stuff of course but they're actually they go so much deeper than that and they have a really great understanding of network storage and servers and all that kind of good stuff so we're gonna work with Patrick he's gonna come up here for the final build where we put this whole thing together get all the little dials tweaked and see how much performance we can pull out of this machine so you guys can see here I've actually gone ahead and pulled off the second cover here and that is is that not just absolutely beautiful I've never seen a store Nadeau so the difference between a 45 drives store and a derp and ass tornado is this this is actually a very similar chassis to their AV 15 which is the one that we hooked to Austin up with where you load a bunch of hard drives in here but instead they've got this bracket that seems to be like machined like acetone like a dollar in type material or something there's a metal outer layer and it's designed to hold yeah it's 32 SSDs up to 32 SSDs let's go ahead and have a look at the rest of our specs here so as I said before we're using dedicated controller ports for each one of these slots so you can actually see the absolute nightmare of cabling if you get a look through there David can you see that kind of through that through that slit there all these cables that are running to each individual slot and we're using a pair of I believe they're LSI controllers here although LSI has been I think acquired a couple of times in the last five years so I can't keep track of who owns them now is it Broadcom now Anthony I know it was a vago for a bit whatever I'm just going to go full old school and I'm gonna call them LSI controllers because I just can't be arsed to deal with it there are 93 90 305 - 16s I think don't don't quote me on that it's kind of hard to read from this angle and then here's another thing that we've gotten here so this is a pair of Intel X 540 T 2 Ethernet cards now you might wonder why we would care about having quad 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports on this device well one of luma forges big selling points for the jellyfish is that it's like plug-and-play so you don't need a switch like a network switch that has to sit and be powered externally and you've got wiring from your nas and then wiring to all your editors it's meant to be just like a drop and go solution where your editors just plug right into the back of it and boom they've got access to the network share so that's something that I talked to Patrick about and he's like yeah I think we can simplify the setup of that to the point where someone could build something like this and have that experience for themselves without paying an arm and a leg for it or they could pay an arm for a leg for it and they could have an all solid-state server instead of one with spinning rust now let's have a look at a couple of customizations that 45 drives has made so we went for Oh instead of a redundant power supply because we're looking for a configuration that's more like the tower we went for a single quiet power supply I want this to be something that someone could install in their office and be ready to rock with and all of the fans are Noctua high airflow fans for this particular configuration so these are NFS 12a FLX fans all right now let's talk about oh the thing that made this project feasible so I actually was already getting pretty close to being able to be competitive with enterprise-grade SSDs from the likes of Intel or micron but the problem was that we were sort of in like that word zone where either we were gonna have to tackle this from a let's be way way cheaper and the same performance perspective which wasn't gonna be as much fun for me or we were gonna blow the budget a little bit in order to beat it by performance by beat it in performance by a lot and I really wanted our budget to be pretty much identical and that is when these hit my inbox so this is just shy of three master cartons of something pretty special from Seagate now if you had told me even three years ago that someone was going to develop a product designed for home users to put SSDs in their naz's in their network attached storage I'd have said no way it's not ready the only way that that's ever going to be economical is well just to wait to wait more and wait more we did this is Seagate's iron wolf Nazz 3.8 4 terabyte SSD so just like the rest of their iron wolf family it includes they're actually oh does it include that hey Anthony if you need Hubble check if it includes oh yeah it does look at that it's right on the label like the rest of the iron will family it includes their rescue data recovery services so that is pretty freakin sweet and it's rated for 24/7 operation and etc etc etc just like their iron will family of hard drives so this is it with four terabyte SSDs these are priced at around 750 bucks a pop it looks like we can get there so where do I put my laptop oh wow where did I put my laptop oh good there it is so let's go ahead and fire up a ZFS calculator and then we're gonna get all these drives installed so this is a really cool calculator over on win Telecom so we're gonna use probably raid Z one single parity our drive capacity is 38 40 gigs our drive cost is going to be somewhere between 700 and 800 dollars a unit I didn't say they were cheap just to be very clear guys and then number of drives for groups so we've got how many drives do you have six seven here and then I believe these are both full master cartons with ten units each so we've got 27 drives so there's a number of different ways that we can break that up now I was actually I was I had some very old information and I thought that it mattered a lot how many drives you had in each one of your Vedas so that's your that's your groupings of drives for ZFS but apparently that's very outdated information doesn't actually matter so there's a number of different ways that we can tackle this so let's go ahead and have a look together so if we wanted to use all 27 of our drives we could go nine drives per group we could say raid-z one single parity and we could go okay we're gonna have three raid groups and let's go ahead and calculate what that gives us so total raw storage is ninety four usable storage capacity is about eighty so let's go ahead and fire up the jelly-fish here so if we only need 80 terabytes of usable capacity we actually get to compete against the $35,000 jellyfish we can have up to four editors so that's how they didn't know how many Ethernet ports they're gonna put in the machine so we've got four Ethernet ports let's go ahead and click this storage expansion no we already told you how much yeah sure performance boost we're boosted and then let's have a look so our total is forty grand so let's see how we're doing against that so our total cost well it asks me how much my drives cost but it doesn't actually calculate that for me Oh total cost okay so it's costing us 20 grand and drives which gives us about twenty thousand dollars to spend on a store inator that should be okay or store Nadeau tornado sorry sorry sorry it's tornado yeah wow that's I think I think we're gonna be okay here so I guess they sent over the turbo store NATO which starts at 10 grand we did make some additions though so I believe we're gonna run FreeNAS but that doesn't affect the price because it's free we're not running the redundant power supply we're gonna run 256 gigs of RAM we've got redundant boot drives yes they are 90 305 so we've got two of those and we have two dual copper Nix and our warranties three-year that looks comparable we don't have oh okay so we don't have any after-sales support and that is something that jellyfish does and my understanding is they also ship you too cold spare drives so we should probably factor that into our price to have a couple extra dive so it's another 1,500 bucks so let's see how much our story nadir is costing us here seventeen for fifteen all right so it looks like we are in business we are like a grand grand and a half shy of what the what a jellyfish would have cost us for all solid state instead of mechanical drives so let's go ahead and do some drive installation porn here Shelby Oh am I gonna get demonetised is that a bad word because you know they transcribe everything you say right so ten percent off the ridge wallet oh shoot sorry guys here you want to throw that to me oh no no we're at ow all right Ridge wallet there you go that's a ridge wallet so basically it doesn't hold too much stuff and it's supposed to de incentivize you from carrying around unnecessary junk they feel great they're made of like anodized aluminum they clip on and you can save 10% at the link in the video description sorry about that sorry alright okay alright let's go ahead and install some drives here probably the overhead let's see if I can figure out how these go in wow they have I gotta say these guys have really really improved their drive mounting mechanisms over the years I'd like to see like a like a plasticy mount for the hard drives as well although there are there new friction now are not new it's not that new anymore but their friction mount with the kind of I don't know what to call them kind of like the spring metal on the sides that's not that bad either man I wish we had like an onscreen counter for like how many terabytes we're adding to this machine 3.8 four terabytes per drive just like that I should probably also read some super chats or something since I'm not doing anything more useful right now where's my mouse cursor there we go all right ten more of these man I'm so amped for this project it's always really cool when I reach out to someone that I really respect even though I don't know his name like Patrick from served the home and he's like pack young man look to work together that would be great he's also got some really cool ideas for how we could take this this initial project which is find a magic server and demonstrate that no it is not in fact magic it's just some open source or free to use software and some commodity hardware that someone assembled in fairness to them my understanding is that their connector software like they have a client connector software that makes it so you don't have to go into a web UI in order to configure your server my understanding is that's pretty cool but they only just got back to me with a video demoing what that UI looks like so I haven't had a look at that yet but I will before the final video I'm determined to make this as fair as I can even though obviously like I said I am coming in with the agenda of demonstrating that no you should not to be paying you know given that our drives are what 20 grand of our costs and if we were using hard drives with just a small SSD cache it would be more like 4 or 5 grand I'm just yes my agenda is to demonstrate but you shouldn't be paying an extra $15,000 for a service plan and the privilege of not having to log into a web UI once in a while so we'll see we'll see it's still possible that I'll be wrong this could be a total dog come on it cut David David okay okay what's that canines iron wolf Oh would you folks believe that he's a professional writer thanks Anthony ah all right Paul says take my money Anthony is king I'm not sure if that's for smoking me in the head with a ridge wallet or something else but there you go Anthony good work brian says take my free super chat what do people get free super chats for is that a thing I don't know okay WTF name says lag oh sorry Kenneth says take my free super check what are these three super chats people are talking about is this kind of like on Amazon where you get a free switch to find something or other once in a while or I don't I don't know that google has a service like that Jason says here's two dollars towards your new bill yeah two dollars so we only need another what's that work out to twenty thousand of those then we're good to go that's okay though this stuff was provided by 45 drives in Seagate so you guys don't have to help me pay for this it's all good what else we got Jake says need your review of the thousand dollar money understand that would actually be another really fun project to see if we can beat for half the price or you know match for half the price or you know beat for way less or something or beat for the same price or something like that what would a thousand dollar like an action well thousand dollar monitor Stan look like I have I have no idea like it would have to man if it had like like a super-strong electromagnet or something so you could like electromagnet it to a thing and then it would be like super solid and then you could like turn off the electromagnet and then you could like mount it somewhere else like like how over-engineered would a legitimate $1000 monitor stand have to be Oh YouTube premium gives super test for free okay sold and sent one two that's absolutely fascinating all right Nick says when is petabyte project getting the full SSD upgrade uh never or all I shouldn't say never never is a big word but petabyte project is getting an upgrade but it's going to be mechanical storage not solid-state because even this 80 usable terabytes of solid-state storage like I said before is is 40 grand all right let me to see if there's anything else apparently I need to get myself a mega pro screwdriver says James no more random bits falling out of the handle maybe I maybe I should look into that alright David Lee says free super chat is included with YouTube's premium okay thank you thank you very much all right so this is it guys that was pretty much the video today is the physical build having a look at the machine that we're going to be using to try to beat the luma forge jellyfish isn't that beautiful I really wished that I had talked to Seagate into sending over five more because then it would be full but it's actually okay we were trying to hit a price target which is why I settled on 27 it wasn't it wasn't a totally arbitrary decision I'm like super excited about this so I believe Patrick is flying up here in two weeks so in two weeks we're going to be filming and then after that we're going to we bring in this video to you guys actually one thing I should do is fire it up real quick and make sure the thing works because it would put a significant damper on our plans if this server was damaged and shipping or something like that so let's go ahead and I won't leave you guys in suspense we're gonna we're gonna fire it up here VGA yeah because that onboard server video you gotta love it right mouse and keyboard would we do those cables no they are awesome I'm hoping it's pretty quiet it should be it's almost all knocked to a fan's except for the one in the except for the one in the power supply let's go ahead and fire it up all right rock on that's a pretty reasonable noise level loudest thing in the system is definitely the power supply it's interesting I thought they were going to send over just like a consumer power supply unit for this but they ended up going with a zippe power supply to be cleared I'm not complaining that's a nice high quality super grade power supply it's just not what I had expected I thought I was gonna get like of course there are m-series kind of like their AV 512 oh I guess now would be a good time to find out what kind of CPUs they put in here as well that's another thing that I still don't know from luma Forge they wouldn't tell me what CPUs they're using because that's I guess proprietary information or something so I'm just gonna ask one of the folks that I know who owns one like I don't get what you're trying to accomplish by not just answering my questions cuz clearly I'm gonna find the answer it's just you're wasting my time so then obviously that's not putting me in a better mood about all this not that I'm gonna let my mood affect things we're gonna try to objectively beat it all right let's just go ahead and get this loaded up here there's BOTS spamming porn that's weird that's really weird huh how about that YouTube really is a very special place isn't it man these super micro boards take a long time to post a the worst is when you're troubleshooting one of them because it's like three minutes you know between loading up the OS and rebooting and detecting ipmi and all that kind of stuff it's like three minutes for every reboot every time you try to like change something okay so the cards report themselves as a vago but I thought that they had actually been acquired since then cuz I thought a vago got acquired Broadcom okay there you go so LSI acquired by a vago Avago acquired by Broadcom you can take a moment to appreciate the store NATO front plate they asked if I wanted a custom one with like our logo on it or whatever cuz they have this like this direct metal printer that they can use to do stuff like this but I was like no I actually kind of like the stocks tornado one I think it's cool purple is an underutilized like performance color I think I love it yeah royal surgery come on baby one of these days Super Micro you guys might actually give a care about how long your boards take to boot I'm not like I'm not holding my breath for it but someday maybe come on okay here we go so it's working that stick of memory I pulled out may not have been receded correctly 200 wait no yeah that's right yeah 256 gigs around what do we got for CPU configuration what are these xeon e5 26 20 v fours these are actually not that state-of-the-art I'm I'd be interested to know why they haven't upgraded to some of the newer stuff I guess maybe they found it doesn't matter well I guess we're gonna see so that's pretty much it for the video guys thank you for tuning in to this live stream which on youtube probably won't end up being live the reason for that is that youtube actually took a full week and I still don't know if it's actually done correctly to transcode last week's wine show that's why it never showed up on YouTube there was no problem with the show or anything like that but instead of being an hour-long video YouTube was detecting that it was 2 hours long and it was full of like weird skipping and and repetition it was some kind of a problem on their side that they claimed it was something to do with the outages that they experienced last weekend but I don't actually buy it because the land show from the previous week had the same bloody issue so what we're gonna do with this video is we are going to upload it separately to YouTube so it'll just be a regular Vlad so sorry guys if we notify you twice but what are we supposed to do if they can't manage to take these live videos and publish them in a reasonable time frame like we can't have people waiting a week to watch something it's old news by that point so alright that's it if you guys dislike this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy this stuff we featured at the link in the video description also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like o has cool hoodies like this one it's finally in stock ltte store calm so Wow I actually love this thing and one of the top features is the phone pocket so it's big enough to hold an iPhone 10 s max or a note 9 and secure enough that your phone doesn't come out with which i think is pretty sweet but you can get it out easily see that so that's just there's your technique for putting it in there's your technique for getting it out but if you're like you know bending over to pick some thing up you can never have your phone drop out again yeah alright peace guys