last year we put together an absolutely wild miniature server so that we could
travel to trade shows with a team of editors and still use the same high
performance workflow on the road and then as soon store comes up with this
thing that does everything that our DIY machine did at a quarter of the price
half the size and with zero Jank
how could it possibly do what they say for less than the price of the
motherboard in our server who is building an all solid state Nas and why
did they design it for desktop rather than rack mount use why is it that I'm
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right out of the gate I can tell you one of the reasons it's so cheap is that it
has just a wimpy quad core Celeron processor and four gigs of RAM so our
machine is definitely faster but it's
also ludicrous Overkill and almost screwed us over at the airport since
when it's packaged with the network switches and the cables we need it was
too heavy for a standard carry-on it's also a little on the big and cumbersome
Side by comparison the ASUS store flash
store 12 Pro is an equally all NVMe Nas
but it's about the size of a PlayStation 2.
look at that it's so tiny and that is what she said
oh it also weighs almost nothing it
feels like a toy it's got plenty of features though two external USB 3 ports
if you wanted to back up your external drive to your Nas 10 gig Lan right on
board spittiff and HDMI out I guess if you
want to use it as a media center you should install Windows on
oh it's just a computer how wow so it's like fully hackable yeah you can install
truenath on it you can put unwrite on it okay that's super cool we gotta open
this thing up oh did I mention those USB type A ports are 10 gig oh well you're
gonna break the thing no can I help you I want to figure it out do you need an
adult no you need an adult you just told people to put unread on here but Andre
doesn't have proper SSD support it doesn't support trim I mean he doesn't
SSD or doesn't have a proper sliding the [ __ ] plastic panel support apparently
boom wow you did it look at that got him
that's not even the one you're supposed to take off first well seems like a missed opportunity for some like quick
disconnect kind of mechanism you know seems like a missed opportunity to tell
you about our fantastic screwdriver available on lttstore.com yeah you
didn't notice this at all you're not gonna I'm not gonna say anything about this cool a type a port wait what for
the what the hell that's their fan connector okay I guess we shouldn't
complain about things that are over built right yeah exactly we should
encourage it
oh sick the RAM is upgradable yeah it
only comes with four gigs by default which is pretty Pinner
so we have more RAM Try Not To Break It eh I'm not gonna break it feels like
there's something still nah it's all good hey look another screw no way it's
a big heat sink for a little chip and the only airflow comes from this fan
that basically blows right over and
through your whoa 12 m.2 SSD slots here
okay that's pretty sick and then blows a
little bit over your heat sink and then out the side here I mean it doesn't need
much you're going to be using more power here than you will be over here oh yeah
what does it use in terms of power oh 65 watt I think you mean 90 watt like what
oh they said 65 on the product page wow I've been lied to a suit store Wow way
to go ASU store they've actually got some foam up in the front here as well
to make sure that no air is going to accidentally leak out over here yeah
what if this is RGB are you sure where's the LED is it on the board oh okay there
they are I'm trying to figure out what the deal is here they've got these as
media controllers but I've never seen an as media PCIe splitter why three how
many PCIe lanes do you think this thing has I'm gonna say 16 8.
yikes are they just trying to get out ahead of nand prices falling even
further to the point where even general home users are building NASA's with
flash rather than hard drives hard drives are fine if you need lots of
capacity but as soon as you go I want to copy a thousand small files or I want to
scrub my timeline in Premiere you start to realize pretty fast that they're just
hard drives and in the event that one of them fails it can take hours if you're
lucky or even days to rebuild a failed array with mechanical drives with an SSD
minutes maybe hours that's a lot less
time to be stressed out worrying that your data is on the line because you
didn't have an off-site backup and the truth is most people don't you're
limited by the 10 gig Port but just humor me this our crazy video editing
server that's tens of thousands of dollars what do you think the peak usage
is during the week we have like 15 video editors that are all editing 4K and
sometimes 8K footage we have like 80 other people that use it as their just
work storage thing watching footage ingesting footage 13 and a half 14. yeah
and that's with like 100 people using that I mean I would have given anything for something like this
to exist eight ten years ago when we were starting out does that Celeron have
any kind of like raid acceleration anything that I'm not aware of I think
so okay it does have an igpu so if you're going to run like Plex Media
Server on this thing because you're a baller and you have an all SSD Nas you
can totally do that I think you'll get h.264 and x265 acceleration but not
anything more than that so your mileage may vary I did find out what the optical is for if you're like an audio file a
lot of people run roon which is like a music streaming server they do have an
app for it you can use that to Output to a DAC and some fancy speakers okay
what what it's durable let's go thanks crucial the same ramp 3200 cl22 it came
with four gigs we're putting 16 in which is the max that this SOC can handle you
know actually I think that the 316 terabyte hard drives you need to get
that same amount of storage would be almost the same amount of volume
oh oh wow you have to push really hard yeah I mean they're plastic I mean
they're very cost effective quick m.2
disconnects I would take that over screws any day of the week yeah actually
yeah why aren't these on motherboards I
mean we know ASUS store is just Jesus yeah right like everybody yeah
everybody knows that right just put this on your motherboards this is kind of
awesome hopefully they don't end up like OnePlus I mean we can install trueness
who cares that's true the fact that this is so open you just get to do what you
want with your computer imagine that well I shouldn't be impressed by it I
know but I have to be these days that's
that's it right that was a lot easier like with the first Port of Nas we're
going to be using a ubiquity switch Flex XG it's a four port 10 gig switch also
has a one gig PoE in we're not going to be using that and it should be the
perfect amount of ports I think this time I feel like we have three editors
and one to the nest then on the client side we're going to be using Apple
silicon MacBooks with these cool external Thunderbolt 10 gig cards from
Cal digit now you're probably wondering as an adobe and predominantly Windows
house why are we using MacBooks there are certainly faster Windows laptops the
issue is that Adobe Premiere is actually
it's just turning on more stable on Mac
OS these days and anytime that you might
gain from a faster machine you lose in crashes and glitchy Behavior we didn't
even notice the 32 gig SSD that's built in for the operating system Ah that's
super cool because it means you don't have to use up any of your storage for
your OS one potential downside is it means if that emmc storage fails which
can definitely happen especially if it's running any kind of write intensive
applications or if Android ever gets their act together when it comes to ssds
you would boot off USB anyway hey look it found it instantly
oh that was I have read and agreed to the ADM terms
and conditions gives us three options by default is balance which is raid 5 so
that would give you one drive parity data you can lose one drive okay which
across 12 is not a lot but then again this is flash storage not hard drives
they fail a little differently you should have a backup what are the other
options but maximum capacity that's raid zero oh my God no and then Superior
especially if you don't even have the CPU to push any kind of decent
throughput off it well you might as well go j-bot well it would be good because
there'd be no parity you'd be literally yeah it would be a bit slower for random
barely the last one is superior data protection which is raid six which is
like raid 5 but you have two drives a parody and it has a more expensive
parity calculation which given that this is a quad core CPU that
oh my God but that's all it shows oh my
God it has really on wow that booted really fast yeah not bad wow you know
what now we're gonna call it penis too nah
actually that's kind of better HDD partition you literally can't put hard
drives in this what are you talking about I mean you okay m.2 to micro drive
adapter this is shockingly painless I've
never tried an ASUS store product before they have begged and pleaded for us to
cover them but I was just like yup their Nas box is all right I'm very interested
to see what their software actually looks like once you're in there because that's the thing that people are paying
for ease of setup Simplicity and like it just works with all the stuff yeah I
mean of all of the things in this list in regards to bettering your data
security this is the least important one it takes all of half of a second to Port
scans you know how stuff like this happens though right some executive at
ASUS read some article somewhere targeted ports Hall yeah now Jake's
gonna figure all this out while I go buy a GPU on Facebook Marketplace and I'll
see you in a bit because this is just using normal raid and not ZFS or
anything like that it has to sync the array before it's kind of at its full
performance and it's already seven percent done and it's only been like
half an hour but it says the ETA is 10 hours whatever performance we get right
now is not really going to be indicative of what it can do but I do want to try
it so let's see if I copy a file here it seems to be averaging around 300 or 350
megabytes a second or around three gigabit it's not anywhere near the 10
gigabit that this port can do and the switch can do but the array is still
syncing so any performance tests we do right now is not super meaningful
although it is good it can still do 3gbit while doing that I heard there's a
lot of apps on these things I haven't dove into it at all yet I agree sign my
life away of course right at the top Plex Media Server no surprises there
let's install that wow they even have an app for portaner which is like a Docker
control panel I guess if you want to run Docker containers on this thing which a
lot of people do if they have this as their home lab that's going to be perfect for it let's let's install that
select install Docker first I don't know why I didn't just say we're going to
install it for you oh Prime video wait is that for the HDMI port if I install
Prime video is it just gonna like show up on here whoa you need a lot of things
installation of Firefox is recommended remote Center oh if it needs something
to run whatever you're doing it will install it oh look at that what are the
odds that that happened right oh there's a pie hole one look at that
okay so some of the apps are Docker based some of them are just applications
that's cool I have a cursor but that's it
hmm cool it gives you a tutorial on how
to use this there's Plex this is running a bit slow it might have
something to do with all of the apps I installed and the fact that it's still
syncing it works we got a Plex Media Server it's playing at full quality so
if I go convert to let's say 1080p it's
h.264 to h264 this should not be very difficult
oh my God I hope it didn't take that long to do one frame
oh god well that's a little disappointing
all right the version that's on ASUS store's app store is very out of date
weird that it's an Android APK like this is an Android app I guess maybe it's
simpler to package it that way there we go
well that's cool so you could throw in theory anything on here like we could
put unify protect on here and you could look at security cameras you could do whatever you want oh hello
what is going on this is what I had before that's not really a cursor though
here I'll show you a cursor I want to try Plex again now that it's
not syncing the array to see if it'll actually transcode I did copy over a
different file because the one that I used originally is like our very
compressed Fancy YouTube one that is
very high CPU usage for just a playback of a video let's try the other one again
that one drives at 58. I don't think it can do the parity data fast enough to
heat them up is what's going on here we just copied 75 gigs to it though I think
it's leveled off there considering the noise level I do wish you had the option
to do better with a little bit louder fan hey not bad that's about 300
megabytes a second we can try going the other way have you seen my true NAS
performance at home it's awful it's probably user error I mean you set it up
so one Gigabyte a second that makes sense that writing is not as fast
writing is far more processor intensive
and that's where that Celeron is going to be hurting us this looks like your
Mac being turned what does preparing to copy mean why can't I stop this quit
it's like the cancel button on a printer the printhead's not moving
the page anyway or it'll print halfway and then stop and then just shoot out a
half printed piece of paper thanks this is really useful yeah we could go to an
ingest station and do it that way these are connected at 25 gig okay
that is very 10 gig it looks like about all we can expect from raid 5 is 400 500
megabytes a second one thing to consider is this would likely perform better if
we had say only six drives when you have 12 that's a lot of striping you need to
do they ship 12 Drive versions so it's on them to make sure that it performs as
it should I mean there you go that's definitely CPU bottlenecked we're at
like 80 90 on the CPU I bet you if I put
trueness on it we could do gig both ways it's not gonna it's two gigahertz
Celeron I looked on PassMark to compare the Celeron to the port and as we built
originally which is a 5700x it was less than one-fifth to be fair it also uses
about one-fifth of the power I think the main value add for this product is in
what the alternatives are compared to building a system yourself yeah you
could do it but you're going to be spending as much on a motherboard as you
are on this thing yeah so if it happens to be what you need it's kind of killer
there's nothing else like it there is actually qnap makes one but it only has
four drives well then that's not really that much like it is it and this is an
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