I've spent the last two plus years reworking my house into a Tech's Dream
Home including custom water cooled gaming machines for my entire family but
there's a big problem the Beating Heart of it all my server which handles smart
home functions storage for my private Netflix and preserving my precious
Family Photos it isn't a server it's a
servers specifically it's two near
decade old machines that I pilfered from work instead of building something
proper and because they're old they are woefully inefficient which means they
kick a ton of heat out into this room and more importantly they kick out a ton
of noise this is what I'm talking about
that's not nice 70 DB is roughly
equivalent to a vacuum cleaner or heavy traffic not really the best when this is
supposed to be my workbench for tinkering it's gotten so annoying that
last week I moved my 3D printer out of that Bloody room so I wouldn't have to
listen to it and it's even worse than in the summer when it gets swelteringly hot
in there the gaming machines are fine they are dead quiet and they dump all of
their heat into my backyard swimming pool using this titanium heat exchanger
but I wasn't too keen on water cooling my servers which ended up being a very
good decision given that one of the gaming systems has already sprung a leak
now we could rebuild both of them with newer Hardware quieter fans and power
supplies but the question is with modern servers being as powerful as they are do
I even need both of these like this 45
Drive Storer xl60 could pretty much fit the entire other server inside it why do
you even have to well okay this one uses
mechanical hard drives and unraid which I know how to use but performs like poo
poo right and this one has highp speeed NVMe ssds and uses tress which is great
for performance and reliability but requires me to DM you every time it
breaks that checks out no more with the
help of kokia who sponsored this video and sent over a few of their cd8 Gen 4
Enterprise NVMe drives we're going to consolidate both of these machines and
this is the best part we're going to retrofit this old storinator so that it
fits both hard drives and a ton of
high-speed NVMe storage all well hopefully becoming much much quieter
should be easy right easy as pie
if I was looking for the easiest solution it would be to buy a readymade
hybrid server from 45 drives but come on
this OG storinator xl60 is from the original petabyte cluster that we built
over 7 years ago can't have this just r on a shelf somewhere it's
sentimental more important than the sentimentality buying a new server would
have been a complete waste of money because the new one is pretty much the
same thing with some minor upgrades and that's not a dig against 45 drives if
anything it shows how well this design has stood the test of time in the hybrid
chassis Design This back row of hard drive Bays is replaced with vertically
mounted SSD slots which is a really space efficient approach but we have a
slight problem the back planes that we have were salvaged from a front loaded
case specifically the ones that we built the gaming PCs in and these are
horizontal so as soon as we fill this up with stupid fast kokia CD 8 ssds with
their fifth generation 112 layer 3D TLC
flash they would block functionally all
of the air flow through the chassis fortunately I don't need anywhere near
60 hard drives at my house so we can fix this compatibility issue by removing two
rows of hard drive mounts instead of just the one in the official one that
way we can put our NVMe cages in the front wait what there's not nearly
enough space to put the two cages oh oh
well not like that but like down here no no I get it like front front front
front I do have a new question um do I need to get the angle grinder no
fortunately 45 Drive still makes pretty much the same chassis so they were able
to make us a custom front plate just over there in your computer bag actually
my computer bag I'm actually stoked for this to finally be available we took all
the best features of the LTT backpack and then we stuffed them into a much
smaller bag like it still fits a ton of stuff like your laptop your tablet your
passport in the secret RFID blocking pocket an air tag and another secret
compartment it even has water bottle SL umbrella pockets on both sides of the
outside and it's cheaper than the OG bag
just $150 anyway the front
panel oh my God that is so
cool that is so cool did you read these
wait what is that why is it did dbrand
even pay for this oh my God I emailed
last night and I was like hey would you like to pay a small amount of money to have your stuff on Linus's
Nas forever and he was like yes you know I'm not going to change this
yep I have concerns about air flow that's good for you no really though
where's the air flow coming from well air flow will flow through the drives as
well and here you'll see we'll get to it but there's no fans yes ah I have a
solution for that we're going to add fans oh just a little bit behind right
there this is also 45 Drive sent this this is like the back piece usually yeah
and we're just going to put one behind oh that's brilliant yeah this is going
to be a sick server well assuming everything goes to plan yeah we're going
to be able to put 16 days in the front that's freaking awesome it's two sets of
10 oh it is yeah there's going to be two I told you there's going to be two right
this is sick yeah it's going to use literally every ounce of PCIe that this
motherboard or the motherboard that we're going to put in there has so the
one that we're going to put in there we still use the same same CPU an epic
7402p which is a 24 core and we'll probably have about 256 gigs of RAM
we'll see what's on there that's plenty for a couple of VMS and all my stuff that I got running but this one has
seven 16x Gen 4 Lanes I'm going to start
taking out these guys cuz we need to get all of this extra cabling out of this
case just take the power supply out it's got to come out anyways and the back
panel has to come off too to be clear I liked having a redundant power supply it
means that if one of the modules fails the computer keeps on working but it's
so loud this is by far the biggest
contributor to the noise of this machine
hey okay I think that's it see you later
with the front bays out that gives me enough access that I can rip out the rest of the wiring see the existing
power harnesses will not work with our new
power supply because it's not a zippy power supply it's going to be a seic one
which I'll show you in a sec the last thing feels weird that this board isn't
badass anymore cuz it was at one point I
guess that's technology for you right thank you no problem hey look I've got
something worse for you five of these are nbme did I count that right five yes
there we go and then the other two are for your hbas yeah for hard drives
yeah we're finally talking about the power supply this is the noctu edition
of the cic tx600 and it is 8 to1 DB
quieter than the normal tx600 and it's 80 plus titanium efficiency of course
just like a usual tx600 so with the noct
to a fan it barely cracks 20 DB at 100%
load in a 25° room of course it's not going to fit in our original back plate
back here so 45 drives made a new one I'm holding
it there you go there we go yeah get no
I'm going to get it no you're going to bend oh what did you take the nuts off
yeah oh do you have them in your hand yeah right here these nuts
Jesus check this out we got custom cable
harnesses for the power supply who made these gentle 45 drives oh cool so what
are these so they have 12 volts oh wow these are EPS so these are like CPU
power connect no these are no they are EPS but they're not look oh they're
GPU these aren't keyed right right okay
so some of them are kind of a spade shape and some of them are square but
you can just be like too bad
Sally that's tough okay she's in there nice nice
Perfection all right test fit boom head shot uh-oh oh this one's
bent what so straighten that out but we I think we need to cut this little tab
off oh boy so this should just w rest on the
little Mount we made oh hey they're magnetic that's actually really clever good job okay there that's good enough
is that where it's supposed to go yeah isn't that mint how mint that is look
how color matched it all is but do they actually
oh we may have a clearance problem Jake
okay we trim the edge of those things let me cook so close it'll go it'll go I
just need the hammer wait what is it too tall how's it too tall what the heck
okay she's in there now that's perfect I'm actually kind of loving this
now I'm trying to test the thing you take the front off I'm trying to test
the other thing that you need for that thing so you don't have an easy way to
screw up from the bottom oh I sure don't so instead we're going to stick little
632 nuts inside of slots that are in there and then screw down boom she's in
she's good she's ready we've been at this all day and
this is basically all we've done but In fairness to us it's kind of awesome
actually this is not bad at all it's not Factory finish obviously but it's like
pretty darn good and all the slides should just go in here perfectly the
ones that I'm really concerned about are the ones on the
edges oh easy these our mini SAS 8i
which is eight PCI Lanes to dual oculink
because that's what these back Lanes use each of these will power one of our
drives and that means we get two drives off of one set of cables mhm that means
there's 10 cables oh it should fit like when I was looking
at it it's just going to be really really tight and it's going to kind of
suck to Cable Management yeah no this is actually going to be okay too bad I
think this is going to be okay oh we could fit like more in there if we can
hit five in there and we pick one more spot to fit another five we're golden
good this is no problem let's go all right we should add the power wires
before we continue 30 hard drives 20
NVMe drives literally all the PCI one
chassis sick you know there is some color
matching here these knct to Industrial PPC 2000 RPM fans match the power supply
yeah that's the one thing that matches hey that's actually like kind of nice it
really is there's like a really nice amount of space up here just to like get
in here and be able to the cables and kind of coming together this is like
honestly maybe too nice for you what our
friend Caine is back with this sick PCIe
by6 Gen 4 card each of them goes into
two of our eight Lane slim SAS connectors to power those front ssds and
what are these right here it's something to do with signal Integrity to ensure that we can cover this long distance
yeah so these are redri cards which basically take the signal that you have
at the motherboard and amplify it so that you can run over a long distance I
mean we have 1 M long cables fortunately
cables are actually pretty good for PC signaling they don't have too much resistance compared to like a PCB um but
you still need more signal than you have at the motherboard especially when you're using all the slots like this
somehow with everything cabled in here I think this has actually gotten a little
bit dare I say easier to work on we've
got easy access to the m.2 slots and that's going to be really important for
when we put a GPU in later as the Keen item on you might have noticed
all of the slots are used up by the hbas
which are for the hard drives and by the PCIe cards which are for the ssds so if
we want to put a GPU in here to accelerate transcoding for Plex we have
to get a little creative oh good thing I already got creative oh there you go
what is this is this a listen listen listen what are we doing this generation
there's almost no single Slot Cards there's like a 4060 that you can't buy
as far as I can see either way we it was sitting on the shelf and I was like well
you know what would be a great place to put this minus is mass I mean what I
know is that we don't need access to the rear IO because it's just an accelerator
card to be entirely clear so theoretically I could put it like here you could um it was something I thought
it's just air flow wise kind of sucked so I didn't bother with that instead I
realized there's kind of a really nice spot right here and fortunately 45
drives has these nice cutouts here which happened to kind of look just like a PC
card so move that for a second yeah so if we just pop this little 3D printed
polycarbonate piece in here and then it's just going to slide in like that
yep and then we'll secure the top somehow with another bracket I can hold
that see if it pulls it in dude that's that's kind of cool it's pretty Sleek
actually beautiful it's actually like in
there it's kind of in there the other cool thing about this GPU is it intakes
air from the top and the bottom and exhausts it out so we're feeding it nice
fresh air right here and also it'll probably draw in some just from like
here I'm going to get that drive like let's do this thing what are we
waiting for do it so how much SSD capacity do we have here these are 3.84
terabyte kokia cd8 drives so they're their newest CD series which is more
like the I guess you wouldn't call it like the super ultra Enterprise that's
the CM series these are more like your your everyday data center D value data
center yeah and these are read optimized they do just over 7 GB a second read and
almost 4 GB a second right sustained so
you are losing some capacity but you are getting way faster way more reliable so
we're going to use a couple of them as a ZFS special metadata device okay now
usually that would just hold metadata and that's something you use in like
crazy big pools like we actually use them in the mother Vault yeah but
another thing you can do is on specific data sets you can set hey all the files
smaller than this size put them on those ssds first look at the finished allnew
NVMe hard drive hybrid GPU everything machine the
Consolidated server I haven't even shown you the other thing you're getting whoa
whoa whoa whoa our friends over at server part
deals uh you said you ran out of space right oh well I got some more space for
you specifically oh my God 18 of these
18 TB Seagate exos recertified drives oh
which is 324 terab dude that's like triple the
capacity had way more capacity oh that's awesome and with these 30 Bays I think
we can actually put all of these in and your old drive so we can copy everything
over just within one machine how many do I have oh yeah I have exactly 12 really
yeah what the hell this was like 8 years
ago a very cool machine when it was like
the paby project and now it's getting a new life it's kind of it's just really
cool to this is a really cool machine rehab you got your compute you got your
highspeed storage you got your bulk storage and it's all in there and it's
going to be quiet it's going to be really quiet you're not going to hear the power so looking forward to that
okay let's throw it in the
rack there we go okay dude this thing is too nice what
are we going to plug this bloody thing into I assumed you had a plan yeah
uh-huh how do you feel about me splicing two power cables together sorry what I
said how do you feel about me spicing no I heard you oh no I'm like being 100%
serious really oh yeah to be clear we don't recommend what we're doing where
we're taking a c-13 and just splicing it to a c19 but realistically the gauge of
the wire is the same and we're going to be running at 240 volt so the amperage
is actually going to be lower than it typically would be for a deployment like
that so we're going to we'll we'll just replace the cable later professionals on
a closed course yeah just for to
home Okay odds uh fire hey it didn't
light on fire yeah one of the ssds isn't lighting up well we can figure that out
later well dang it Jake what do you mean
we haven't necessarily configured the BIOS to bifurcate all those
slots which could be it or maybe one of the cables isn't plugged in all the
way which one is it that one yeah okay now it works what did you do I've moved
it so this slot might be bad what it's on just like that no way I mean it's not
a complete win if we have slots that don't work but Mak it's for another day
I want to know what it sounds like if I sett all the fans to 100% though uh wow
oh yeah I didn't even notice it's in the BIOS dude it's so quiet it's yeah it's
running oh she's definitely pulling air across the front I'll tell you that much
oh actually they're set to 100% right now
oh hey all the mvme drives are detected
hell yeah and it's out of the rack again we had an issue with one of the SATA
cables that's why you never close a computer and put it in the rack before
you actually test it and you put all the screws in even I think that's a bad Omen
so really it's your fault I see so before we put it in again Jake's going
to get the software loaded up and we're going to make sure all the hardware actually works for Linus's new hybrid
Nas we're going to be installing hexos a Nas operating system lonus actually
invested in that's based on and built in partnership with the well-respected
other Nas OS true Nas hexos is designed
to make the setup and everyday usage of a Nas like this much much more
userfriendly however it's still in Early Access so while it does support both SSD
and hard drive pools in the setup wizard I want to do a little bit of a
non-standard configuration and they haven't implemented that yet fortunately
since it's built on top of trass I can drop into the trass interface and
recreate the pools however I want specifically I grouped the 18
recertified 18 tbte exos drives that server part deals kindly provided into
three raid Z1 vdevs or groups that's six
drives in each that means each of those groups can handle one drive D failure
without losing any data I also added a pair of our kokia cd8 NVMe drives to the
hard drive pool as a special metadata device where they'll act as fast storage
for metadata like where the files are stored on the rest of the pool that
means we get both the cost Savings of using hard drives and the Lightning Fast
responsiveness of a kokia SSD all in the same pool then with the rest of our
kokia ssds I created a second all SSD
raid Z1 pool that will use for anything performance sensitive like his home
assistant virtual machine and his Plex app with that all set up we can head
back into the hexos control panel and see all of our pools create any shares
or users we want and install any apps as we normally would sick I haven't like
copied your config yet because we don't have the data yet but I figure we can
run some speed test now I mean it seems to be working all the drives are there
everything's happy see there's your VMS so there's like partial support for it
yeah give give them time let them cook I mean I made the investment 2 years ago
and uh they're making good progress but they're not done yet it's still beta so
this is the SSD pools I went ahead and set the data set that we're testing on
to synchronous so anything that we write to it has to be flushed to the discs
can't sit in memory and then I disabled the read caching so we should be getting
the raw speed of the discs now I suspect we are going to be vastly underpowered
in the CPU department for these drives especially given that we're like
calculating par and stuff so let's uh
let's see how that goes I guess should I start with a read test yeah that one
will probably do better a that is way faster than you will ever be
able to use from this machine nothing like a good 14 GB a second and a CPU
that's at 86% yeah that's not even that impressive for these drives technically
I could put up to a 64 core in there but I'm not going to let me see if I can get
it to go like a touch faster let's just do twice as many threads
16 yeah 15 and 1 12 gigs a second gig
Gib btes and it cost us another 15% CPU
usage good job Jake yeah we went from 86
to 95% C okay 10% so capping this thing
out around 16 GB a second definitely still
I'm on a 10 gig link so yeah we could bond the two links but even then you're
still 2 GB a second Max and these kokia
drives man when they list performance specs on there it's sustained like these
drives could do this all day I mean this isn't anywhere near what they can do but
they could do it all day and these are reads not wres anyway yeah 9 GB bytes a
second for rights rights so probably like more like 10 that's great yeah but
how's the mechanical storage hey look at that like 2 GB a second that's not bad
yeah they're hard drives and that is fine as long as you can cook a gigabyte
a second and to be fair we don't have any of the SSD or RAM caching enabled
when you're actually using this well over SMB it's synchronous but when
you're reading you should be able to get many gigabytes a second I still can't
believe server part deals sent over these hard drives yeah they're slow like
any hard drive cuz they're hard drives but like dude I'm kind of loving these
recertified drives this is now the third project we've used them on yeah
they're I mean you never know right but like we haven't had any problems with
them have we had any fail yet no I mean they're from different batches too so
there's kind of a benefit there like usually when you have like really bad hard drive failures or like a bunch fail
and you lose data it's because they were all from a bad batch these are from very
different batches so kind of sick bottom line we took a lemon of an ancient piece
of hardware and turned it into absolute lemonade I freaking love this machine
massive shout out kokia their cd8 R ssds are designed for well much less janky
implementations with power loss protection die failure recovery
consistent performance and reliability even in demanding 24/7 workloads and you
can check them out down below of course there is one question we have not answered yet Jake is it quieter in here
we dropped almost 20 DB like you can hear it don't get me wrong it's not a
silent machine it's so much better in here oh I'm so happy happy to throw you
to one of our other videos how about the time that the computer leaked oh my gosh
we alluded to that earlier so oh yeah