whether you're a casual part-time wedding photographer or you're working
on the next big budget hollywood movie every media production professional has
run into this problem at some point they don't have enough space for all their
photos graphics assets or video clips
what's the solution well a lot of the time people will run out and buy things
like these and whether they've got a hard drive inside them or an SSD
external drives like these ones always run into some of the same
limitations they connect your system using buses like usb or Thunderbolt that
are not easily shared with other users so today as a spiritual follow-up to our
recent budget 4k video editing workstation i'm going to be showing you
guys what i consider to be the budget 4k
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i'm going to put aside the internals for now because really where the story
starts is the case so this ticked all
the boxes quiet reasonably professional looking and it
can accommodate with the optional hard drive sleds up to 18
hard drives fractal sent along the case for this video along with
all the expansions but um i haven't looked at the reviewer's guide
so i don't really know how any of this works
there well there seems to be a slight problem my original email said the
define 7xl holds up to 18 three and a half inch hard drives the reviewer's
guide says 14 max
and it's bolded i don't know how this works
oh here we go
so now what i want to do is reconfigure my fans before i start stacking hard
drives in this thing now we're about ready to install drives but i found yet
more conflicting information in the user's guide three and a half two and a
half universal drive positions 18. which one is it fractal so for this project
we're going to be using the ideal drives
these are seagate's iron wolf pro nas drives
so these are the 16 terabyte variant but they are available in a variety of
capacities they come with a five year warranty including seagate's rescue data
recovery service that's freaking awesome
and as they're pro iron wolf drives
they're rated for up to 24 drives in an enclosure because with drives that are
not designed for nas use and for operation in close proximity to each
other the vibrations of the next drive over can actually affect the operation
of another drive so these are good for up to 24 and since we're going to be
putting 18 or 14. in this chassis these were a
perfect fit we got to put the anti-vibration rubber grommet then we
lined that puppy up on the bottom of our drive now with an SSD
you guys have probably seen me use as few as
two screws or one or none and some double-sided tape
but i would never recommend that with a hard drive when it comes to hard drives
you mount them with as many screws as you can because even if your drives are
designed to withstand the vibrations of nearby drives they are not designed to
withstand the vibrations of nearby drives that are not mounted correctly
so all four of our screws go in
that's 16. okay none of the documentation said
anything about 16. what the crap
well that happened we're up to 19 drives which sort of leads me to wonder how
much farther we can go like
yeah you know what you can call it good at 20 right
i mean 320 terabytes of raw capacity in a 200
case let's start talking about some of our other components
yes this is a strix gaming
motherboard or whatever but what it also is is a good value board with lots of
memory expansion which could be important if we want to run vms or other
server functions on our nas it's got support for third gen ryzen processors
with a BIOS update of course it's got lots of pci express expansion it's got
two m.2 slots and we'll get to why we need those later and finally it manages
to boot in headless mode without a graphics card installed and without an
apu installed where you would be able to use the onboard graphics so that saves
us some money because even though we're going to need a graphics card in order to configure our system we don't
actually necessarily want to leave one in there unless we have some purpose for
it like we want to use GPU hardware acceleration for media encoding for a
plex server or something like that so we're going with a second gen ryzen 2600
non-x because it's using the original zen architecture instead of zen 2 those
individual cores are not as fast
now we could go with something heavier if we intend to use this thing you know
again as a you know a media server that's going to have to do you know
heavy video encoding or whatever the case may be but our intent for the build today is to
just have it be a file server and this is going to be plenty plenty of
horsepower for that now i did consider going Intel for this build but even
though we're using regular unbuffered memory one of the things that pushed me
to AMD was their unofficial support for ecc or error checking memory on their
consumer processors now it does require support from the motherboard and
conveniently this one happens to support it as well as costing a little bit more
but if you were gonna run something like zfs for your software raid it is a
recommended feature to have and you should spend a little bit of extra for
some unbuffered ecc RAM cooling is another item that i waffled about a
little bit on this build so i ultimately decided to give it a shot with the AMD
box cooler and then as long as my thermals and acoustics were fine stick
with that and then if they're not then i can always upgrade down the line one
thing i spent extra on that would normally be considered a splurge item
but in this case actually makes a ton of sense is a modular power supply why don't we
just say this the recommended way to do this would be to get your hands on
some custom cables for the power supply
all right that's 16 and we've got both
one more harness as well as one more plug on our modular power supply to
handle our other four drives i just really doubt that this is gonna work
turns out this power supply does only come with one four connector molex cable
but i was able to find one just kind of lying around in the warehouse so we've
got enough even if you as an end user would end up having to order an
additional one now comes the part of the build that's pretty much just down to
however you want to do things connecting
the drives to data as you can see the motherboard can only accommodate six
drives with these connectors on the right hand edge fortunately as long as
we've got pci express slots to spare we can add pretty much as many SATA ports
as we want with boards like this now the most important thing to watch out for if
you are expanding your storage is not to get a raid card you want an hba or host
bus adapter because most software raid whether you're running it through free
nas or unraid can behave erratically or at the very least not give you proper
drive reporting if you are using a raid card another thing to watch out for when
you're shopping for these is the types of connectors some of them just have the
regular SATA connectors that you would recognize and you plug into them and
then you've got an octopus of cables coming out plug into your drives but
others use connectors that are more designed
for SATA or sas backplanes so mini sas
hd or sff 8087 are some pretty common ones the way that you connect these is
with slightly fancier cables so here's a mini sas hd one this is an eight port
card so you've got just these two connectors that go into the back of the drive and then
way at the other end you've got the octopus
oh yeah it's actually eight octopus okay so it's four per connector picking up
cards like these second hand on ebay can be a great way to add a ton of connectivity to your system
just one thing to watch out for guys is
sas cards will work with SATA drives but
not the other way around for whatever reason you have sas drives you can't buy
SATA hbas so to be clear guys i am not
necessarily recommending exactly the cards i'm using i'm just using whatever
hba cards i had lying around a couple little housekeeping items still
be taken care of i want to cable manage these kind of like this these ones for
the bottom can go over here a couple of cable ties and then i've run myself an
extra SATA cable for the future in case i want to plug in a second SSD down the
line and still got to plug in these ones at the
top overall actually this is not bad for having 20 hard drives in it i could use
the built-in fan controller that's in the case but actually that would require
another SATA connector and i don't have any right now all i need to do now is
put in my temporary graphics card this
is the fractal case yeah this thing is obnoxious what
what do you mean obnoxious well okay i mean like in a good way this is awesome
so i'm not that familiar with proxmox and i wanted to show people how you
might configure a system like this in proxmox i wonder if you ceramic coated
this if it would help with the fingerprints what is it with you in ceramic coating things i don't know
that's cool by the way make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss our ceramic coating a phone video which was also his
idea oh this is heavy man so i mean like straight into proxmox the only thing you
can really create is a a single v dev pool so we could have one that's like
raid z3 although if you're going to add more drives that would mean you would
need to add 20 whole more drives i mean
in an ideal world what i would probably want to do is like maybe
three raid z ones so that would be three raid z1 v devs
that would be three drives of capacity lost to redundancy and then i'd have two
hot spares or something like that i mean if you're running stuff at your
house like for me i have my ubiquity controller that runs on a vm on my nas i
have a plex server i have lots of different vms just for doing all these
little things home automation and like in proxmox you can do it really easy you
can actually create containers which are still running in the host os so there's
very little um overhead and it's super easy to maintain so why
don't you just use freeness well aside from my bad experiences with it in
the past it's sort of a question of
what's more cost effective right right so unraid costs money yeah which is sort
of a drag not a whole lot but but if i want to use zfs optimally in a way that
is recommended by the experts who know a lot about zfs i'm actually spending more
on memory upgrades if i don't care about the virtualization which is not how i've
configured this in the first place than it would cost me to just buy an unrated
license in the first place right and unraid does have some performance
gotchas like if you allow your drives that you're not accessing currently to
go to sleep so you disable turbo right that's bad
and also if you configure it to fill up one drive then the next one then what
that means is every project can potentially be i o bottlenecked by the
individual drive that it's being pulled off of i just wanted to highlight a few
different types of software that you can use for a config like this okay so we
if we do df we can actually see it's 214 terabytes of capacity oh no i mean we
lost what was it four drives good heavens three drives yeah oh man you can
feel it wow the vibration is real you know what
actually this would be a good way to check our drive thermals
i'm going to put the covers on and then just like run 100 gig one and let it
flash i'm going to install net data so we can
actually look at the array it's nice that there's so much room for cable management on the back but in the event
that you do have kind of a you know thick boy cable back here i would prefer
if there was some way to screw on the side panel
that's not that great mean it's holding but
see that is what i'm talking about cable manager stuff better no wait watch
out that's power for the drive there's a whole bunch what is it why is it like
them like that don't worry about it now i did misspeak before i said that this
was 200 it's 200 without the tempered glass side panel which we obviously
wouldn't need for a build like this that's just the one they sent so we're using net data to monitor the disk usage
it's always so funny because zfs messes around with it so it's like
20 megabytes but that doesn't make any sense now that we're updated the first thing
we need to do is create our unraid array so the parity disks right here are the
capacity that we're going to give up in order to avoid losing data in the event
of a physical drive failure so one parity disk means we give up one drive
worth of capacity but it also means we can only lose one drive before we start
to lose data after that while two means that we give up a total
of 32 terabytes of space but we can lose two drives before we
start to lose any data now it should be noted unread has a cache feature that
allows you to have high speed ssds as like a faster storage tier but i use the
word tier very loosely because it doesn't work the way you might expect it
to you can use it to accelerate writes onto the unrate array but from my
experience especially when working with very large amounts of data like you
might when you're ingesting footage it can be a little bit on the finicky side
and i wouldn't really use it for that what i would use it for is if i wanted
to run virtual machines on this i would run all of my vms off of a raid1 set of
ssds that i plug into my m.2 slots
oh oh cool they built a new feature based on my feedback
when it's formatting it automatically pauses parity sync because otherwise it
takes like a day while we wait for the format we can adjust some of the
settings that we talked about before so turbo write is technically called
reconstruct write so we're going to go ahead and turn that on
this is the second tweak i talked about we're going to use most free so as we
write data to the share it'll go to whichever drive has the most free space
on it which means that if we were to write 18 separate video clips it would go this
one this one this one this one this one this one this one like that minimum free
space is a really important parameter to tune so if we think our clips could be
no bigger than uh 100 gigs then we need to make sure that
we key that in now nicholas assured me that this is going to work but nicholas
also brought me the wrong motherboard twice when we were doing that CPU repair
thing here's our problem our chassis fans are running at 700 RPM which is
nice and quiet but is just not enough to
push enough air through all those friggin drives i'm gonna move our cable
from our onboard gigabit network to our add-in 10 gig a quantcha card are we 10
gig we're 10 gig share time who's not that busy right now
there's my water bottle you bastard why would i
take that i don't know but it has my name on it and also my stickers so right
now mark is pulling in excess of gigabit speeds when he's playing back this is
ten to one 8k red footage so really not
what i had designed this system for and dennis how's it going okay so dennis 2
is in excess of one gigabit but we're also getting some chop now so
we're actually pulling three and a half gigabit per second off
of that machine now the write speeds are not fast but the assumption that i made
is that you guys are not working with 10 to 1 red footage and instead you're
ingesting from sd cards in which case 60 to 80 megabytes a second should be as
fast as you need as long as only one person's ingesting at a time the benefit
of unraid that i think outweighs its slow rights in this case is that if
you're the kind of person who's just starting out it allows you to just get
one parity drive and as few as one additional storage drive and then just
expand as you go as long as every drive that you add is smaller than the parity
drive you can add as many different kinds of drives as you want and you can
just add them one at a time that's something that you can't do with a zfs
based solution like freenas or like proxmox
i'm really surprised that this worked as well as it did
i i mean that's like between the two of you that's around 350 megabytes a second
that we're pulling off of that thing and drive temps have held steady even while
we're pushing it so all the ones on the front are around 39 41 degrees and you
can really tell which ones are the four that are in the top and at the back 47
48 46 and i don't know maybe this one 43 could be
worse though so it works great but of course the
million dollar question is how much does it cost and when i say a thousand
dollars with no drives so no ssds not
even the usb to boot on radoff of that sounds like a lot of money but when
you compare it to an off-the-shelf nas you would be paying more than a thousand
dollars for one with just eight bays and it might have specs that
are much worse than this one whereas we've got a six core processor 16 gigs
of RAM 10 gigabit networking 20 hard drives two m.2s and two more SATA drives
just comes down to what software works best for us so whether you choose unread
freenas proxmox or whatever else floats your boat
this is a great starting point if you're a starting out editor and you want to
work with 4k footage or apparently even 8k even if you have a small team
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