if you've been following me on social media you've probably spent a fair bit
of your time lately feeling bad for me about all of the ssds that I had to
mount in our new 24 Drive Solid State Storage server no all right well then
you've probably at least been hoping that I'll make a video about it at some
point and talk about the performance and that time is now this is the allnew
wanic the fastest beast machine in our
office
the Corsair HX 1200i power supply delivers 80 plus Platinum efficiency for
quiet performance and Corsair link digital Advanced monitoring and control
click now to learn more so our current storage server rusin
uses Seagate 3 tbte consumer drives in a
raid 6 array to achieve respectable readand WR performance and some fault
tolerance the array can actually lose up to two drives before suffering
catastrophic data loss assuming it's able to rebuild before more drives fail
or an unrecoverable error occurs this is all fine and good but the main problem
with it is that rusin was built for one
Editor to work on 4K video files at Max
Speed and we now have a whole room full of editors so while the rusin 10 GB
network interface and sequential data speeds aren't really bottleneck X its
mechanical drives are much more suitable for a single person workflow so I
reached out to our good buddies at Kingston with a crazy idea what if we
slipped free of the Surly Bonds of mechanical storage and danced the skies
on SSD silvered Wings to which they kind
of went um how much silver lonus I told
them I wanted 24 1 tbte class drives and
dog G it for some reason said yes I
think the most incredible thing about that story is how much the landscape has
changed in such a short amount of time two years ago I could have been the Pope
in Rome and any SSD maker would have laughed at me for wanting 20 terabytes
of redundant SSD storage in a single
server but in 2015 Kingston's just like
yeah we've got the Enterprise grade KC 310 it's got an 8 channel fisen S10
controller 960 gigabyt of capacity ECC
flash protection for data Integrity power loss protection trim support
although we'll be relying on idle garbage collection in rate anyway and
it's under 60 cents per gig I mean Holy balls I'm actually wearing the right
shirt for that so let's talk upgrade process then the first thing I needed
was way better raid cards yes cards not
a single card there are 24 Port controllers in fact the old server has
one but since each individual SS D is
capable of 500 plus megabytes per second read and write speeds if you hook 24 of
them up to a single card with a theoretical total speed in the
neighborhood of 12 gbt per second you're going to run into some pretty serious
bottlenecks all over the place so after removing the placeholder mechanical
drives from the system laboriously mounting 24 ssds on sleds and connecting
the sff 887 connectors Each of which handles four drives to their back plane
in my Norco RPC 4224 chassis man I love
these things on Kingston's recommendation I picked up three LSI
9271 8i 8 Port raid cards each in a PCI
Express 3.x slot this is where the x99
platform really shows its value because you're going to need enough PCI Express
Lanes to handle all that storage bandwidth something that consumer grade
platforms simply cannot provide now
something a lot lot of people commented on when I posted a picture of these
cards on Instagram was that these cards run really hot and I had them installed
right next to each other don't worry I'm using a 90mm fan mounted directly on top
of them for auxiliary Cooling and I'll be bolting that in before I install this
server in our fancy rack cabinet at the new office so with all the drives
installed the next step was getting firmware updates and drivers taking care
of for my controllers and configuring arrays naturally the first thing I did
was throw the whole thing in raid zero for laws to see how fast it would go
there's a bit of a special process for this in this case though you need to
create a raid zero array of eight drives
on each of the controller cards then use
software raid to put them all together so in my case that required the use of
dis Management in Windows to set each raid zero as a dynamic drive then stripe
the whole thing together so it's kind of like raid 0000 or something like that
the results were well if Shia were here
I guess she'd say that don't impress me much read speeds were great even for
512k transactions I'm looking at over 5
12 gigabytes per second I mean remember
this is for video editing so very little of what we deal with is going to be
smaller than half a Meg with 4K transfers that's more than two full
orders of magnitude faster than my old 10 hard drive solution but those
right speeds aren't enough to saturate
the planned 2x1 GB teamed network connection This Server is packing if
multiple users are writing large files to the array either way raid zero wasn't
my final configuration since I wanted some fault tolerance so I figured if I'm
going to troubleshoot this thing I might as well do it when it's set up properly
so I threw my eight Drive arrays in raid five that allows me to lose up to one
drive per array and then I also have a spare drive on hand in the unlikely
event of a failure which is lots for a server that'll be backed up nightly on
the network then I striped those raid fives together in software for what is
effectively raid 50 a quick Benchmark before the arrays
were finished initializing revealed worse numbers than raid zero although
that's pretty much a given since any parody raid puts much more load on the
controller card especially for rights than a striping raid but I really hadn't
expected them to be this bad so I waited for the arrays to finish initializing
and they got worse so it was about that time that I
realized maybe the right cash setting on solid state makes a bigger difference
than on mechanical so even though I don't have battery backups for my cards
or a ups for my server yet I enabled
right back cash and there we go there is
the drawback of an unexpected power loss causing potential data loss with right
back caching enabled but we're just going to have to get those batteries and
UPS's going because with that setting on we are able to saturate the bananas out
of any connection we can make on the network to This Server when she's
handling large streaming reads and wrs this array can do an excess of 5
gigabytes per second when she's handling extremely small transactions she can
still do just under a 100 times the performance of Ruskin and when she's
able to queue up those small transactions from many clients hitting
her at the same time she can do well over 500 megabytes per second I just
need to drop another $600 on battery units for the raid cards and wait for
the network cards for my clients to show up so that I can show you guys how the
network is going to handle all of this
man this server grade stuff is expensive and very timec consuming but it floats
my geeky boat to see numbers like this where a PCI express-based Predator SS D
is the bottleneck in a local file
transfer speaking of stuff that floats my geeky boat I fix it you probably know
I fix it from their tear Downs of electronic devices and their fantastic
repair guides on their site that can save you tens 50s even hundreds of
dollars on repair costs I've used them a number of times on an iMac on a phone
and I'm sure there's something else but I'm not thinking of it at the moment
what you probably aren't aware of is that I fix it Sals per professional
grade tools as well so they've got their uh their iFixit 54-- bit driver kit
they've got all these little prying tools they've got antistatic straps
they've got their magnetic organizer that I actually I might have Andy
yeah I was using this the other day that lets you write little labels draw little
diagrams and keep all your screws somewhere safe when you're working on a
project they've got all kinds of fantastic stuff whether you're trying to
take apart a Nintendo DS with a tri-wing bit whether you're trying to take apart
McDonald's toys with a triangle bit or you need to take apart something that
uses security Tores all that stuff they've got it and what's cool is when
you go on their guides they actually list all of the tools that you need for
a particular guide the one to probably start with though is the kind of
all-in-one protect toolkit pack I use mine all the time it's 65 bucks and if
you use ifixit.com Linus and then code Linus 05 at the
checkout you save $10 off that or any purchase of $50 or more so that's
ifixit.com Linus check it out great tools great guides great
stuff so that's pretty much it guys thanks for watching like the video if
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watching