all right so I gave you guys an update on some of the Ballin new server gear
that we've had arriving for the new office including a powerful Zeon based
storage server the plans for which I've actually already kind of revised and our
new $2,000 12 Port 10 G network switch
but today we're going to kick things up a notch with a custombuilt
storinator mass storage server from 45
drives.com that features over 100
terabytes of highspeed storage so strap
in guys cuz this gonna be
good Intel's new 750 series ssds
utilizing the NVMe standard provide speeds never before seen on consumer
storage drives click my hair to learn
more so the problem we're trying to overcome here seems straightforward on
the surface how to store all our data
but when you go out in the real world and see entire video production houses
running off of USB and Thunderbolt
external drives or coming up with long-term archival Solutions like write
the dates on the sides of the drives and put them on a shelf in the bathroom
completely exposed to dust moisture and accidents as if this was the VHS home
video Dark Ages it suggests that we've been asking maybe the wrong questions
all this time because it's not about storage it's about accessibility the
number of times that we've gone to do our review of some exciting new nextg
product and gone hey maybe I'll grab some full quality footage of its
predecessor from our old video for comparison which a it's on the archive
shelf isn't it guess I'll do what we always do and download the old video
from YouTube then slice it up in crappy quality that happens more than I'd like
to say and obviously that's not a solution that makes sense as Linus Media
Group continues to scale the amount and quality of footage that we're storing as
well as the number of people who need to access it as our company grows so let's
talk storinator s45 the middleof the
road model that we chose that sits in between the more quiet SMB optimized 30
Drive version and the monster xl60 Drive
version in the front you'll find three 120 mm cooling fans to push air through
our drives with a custom Linus Media Group logo painted onto the graphite
powdercoated chassis on top then behind that three rows of 15 slots that give us
the 45 drive capacity for this sucker
further toward the back we find another two 120 mm fence that will pull air
through the drives and then the system Hardware chamber that exists only to
power the other 2/3 of the case overall it strikes an unusual balance
between being objectively professional grade with all the core components an
Intel 2.1 GHz 6 core xon CPU 128 gigs of
Kingston ECC DDR3 RAM a super micro motherboard a 2 plus one fully redundant
700 W power supply three 16 Port SAS
controller cards from LSI and an Intel X540 10 GB network card are from brands
with reliability reputation ranging from excellent to Legendary and yet it has a
small custom system builder or DIY feel
to it that comes from things like the blue LED lit Vandal switch at the back
that's used to power the unit on the flat cable managed but obviously off the
shelf Molex Splitters that provide Power to up to 45 drives at a time the Fairly
rudimentary PC Builder tool on their site and the general Simplicity of the
enclosure design that other than the fixed back plane something that I really
prefer compared to just loose cables as
a smaller operator who's going to Tinker with these machines versus chucking one
of the hundreds of them in my data center out if there's some kind of an
issue it looks like something that could be made in a pretty normal fabrication
shop what a cool machine but of course that's not what you guys are here to see
the storinator isn't the star of the show today it's more of an enabler so
after installing freas a FreeBSD based
storage operating system with Native ZF FS support that you can learn more about
here it was finally time to break out
the hard drives now while Seagate
sounded like I punched them in the gut when I told them that I needed 27 drives
for this project they also understood that if you're actually serious about
having fast reliable network access to
your 4K footage for a number of operators at a time you need a lot of
drives and they have to be high performance so many drives in fact that
they won't even fit in one master carton shipping box so once we'd figured out
how many 27 The Next Step was to determine which model of drive we would
be using honestly for most people and
small businesses for that matter nothing more hardcore than a Nas hard drive
would be required they're rated for 24/7 operation they offer reasonable if not
earth shattering performance certainly more than a gigabit network connection
would require they go up to 4 terab that gives you 24 tab of storage with a
couple of discs for redundancy and they can be obtained for under $40 us per
terabyte they're kind of like the city bus of hard drives but this is Line This
Tech tip suckers so I'm going ride around in a 747 instead sorry anyway uh
because we have more than just hand camed Vlog footage to deal with these
days sometimes even sponsored projects for customers where data loss is not an
option we opted for seag Gates Enterprise capacity drives unlike their
Nas or even Enterprise NAS Drives which are rated for the adverse conditions and
vibration associated with up to eight or 16 Bay drive enclosures respectively the
Enterprise capacity drives feature exotic interfaces up to 12 GB per second
SAS big capacities up to 6 terabytes per
Drive top-of-the-line performance 10 times the workload rating of their
desktop Drive counterparts at 550 terabytes per year and they do all
of this while managing external vibrations so you can pack them in as
tight as you can pack them pretty much which I guess means it's time to start
talking about how that went so to start things off I went with nine drives in a
ZFS 2 configuration this gives me just
shy of 80% storage efficiency with two
of my drives dedicated to redundancy I used one of my two SSD rad array clients
here that are both on the same 10 GB Network and achieved readand right
speeds in the 300 plus megab per second range not too shabby but I mean I wasn't
really sure what to expect at this point expanding a ZFS storage server is both
simple and kind of complicated as long
as you have the same number of the same capacity of drives it's extremely fast
and basically a few button presses to
get her up and running but don't get your hopes up about simply adding a
tenth drive to an existing nine Drive array like you can do with a hardware
raid card it just doesn't work that way
unfortunately the good news is that adding another set of drives should
yield a significant Improvement in performance since it's effectively
striping data across the two sets
unfortunately that wasn't my experience I saw the same numbers as before so
after soldiering on and adding my third set of nine drives for a total of 27 and
over 100 terab of storage and then
realized ing that the performance needle still hadn't budged I figured it was
time to throw another client at the problem so with two clients two SSD
based gigabit clients excuse me 10 GB clients copying 20 GB of data
concurrently speeds were effectively doubled I got perfect scaling indicating
that both drive speed and the speed of the network card in our storinator are
not bottlenecks but unfortunately I
don't have any more 10 GB clients at the moment so this Victory and Discovery
also means that we're done for the time being until we move into the new office
where I can give it two aggregated network connections for 20 gbit pers
second total fre rical speeds and then
Hammer this thing with half a dozen clients at the same time to find out
exactly where her limits are so stay tuned for that speaking of staying tuned
audible.com keeps you tuned into to the books that you want to sit down to read
but simply don't have the time for by letting you take your library with you
on the go you can listen in the car at work on the bus in bed or anywhere that
you can wear a pair of headphones really with over
150,000 audiobooks to choose from so there's definitely going to be something
for you especially if you're into having your favorite celebrities read to you
Dustin Hoffman's performance of being there by Jersey kazanski is getting R
reviews for his performance so you might want to check it out and join the book
club now to get an Audi book every month at
audible.com Linus and if you're on the fence about audible.com try it out
anyway the first one is actually
free all right guys that's pretty much it like this video if you liked it
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