our video editors rely on high speed access to Dependable Storage to do their
work that's why we have fiber optic networking and a whole room full of
wicked fast servers but that's all here and CES in Las Vegas is in well Las
Vegas now the obvious solution would be to just send our Shooters hey guys
they could point the camera at the thing stick the SD card in the other thing and
then just transfer the footage back to HQ for editing but
I mean come on on Hotel internet please so we have no choice but to also
send the editors and since nobody wants a downgraded setup to do their work in a
fast-paced stressful situation like CES we are going to be bringing our editing
set up on the road with us actually bringing it on the plane with us LTT
style the solution for the workstations is simple laptops have gotten so
powerful these days it's the server that's going to be more complicated how
do we take that and put it into this and how do we take
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let's start with the size since that's the most challenging component of this
build in a perfect world the system would be small enough to be thrown into
a backpack lttstore.com but to make
things a little bit easier we set our Target as fitting within a carry-on
specifically this old Pelican 1510 that
pretty much ruled out full-sized ATX motherboards and cases limiting us to
ITX or matx the former mint we probably
wouldn't be able to achieve some of the nice to haves like redundant boot drives
so we settled on an matx motherboard
specifically this ASRock rack x570 d4u2 l2t might not have
the sexiest name but it means all of our
criteria it's Micro ATX has dual onboard 10
gigabit Network ports two n.2 slots for redundant boot drives support for up to
a 16 core ryzen 5000 series CPU and it
has ipmi which means that we don't even need to have a monitor attached to it to
see the output of the system we can just remote into it over the network and
control it from there even rebooting the system flashing the BIOS we can do
anything we need to do remotely over the network so this is great but as you can
see the 19.8 by 11 inch dimensions of
our Pelican case don't leave a lot of room around the
motherboard for a case and finding one that would fit an matx motherboard but
also fit inside our Pelican was
well let's just say this wasn't our first
choice meet the in-win cj712 its main
selling point is that it fits oh wow
just barely like I kid you not it is a
tenth of an inch smaller than the Pelican case is this even gonna fit
Jake validated this so I wouldn't put it past him to troll me
there's definitely some things about this build that are making me uncomfortable already so if that was
Jake's intention then mission accomplished I suppose side panel comes
off a little something like that
can you believe Jake would have rather been on vacation today than built this
computer with me I can imagine him watching this video enjoying my struggle as I try and figure
out what the crap he intended me to do with this
here's something Jake left instructions about I haven't seen one of these in a
long time given its intended use as a
case for a low-powered business machine the included power supply makes a lot of
sense 265 Watts but for what we're doing that
ain't gonna cut it especially from Power Man uh whatever the devil brand that is
so we got our hands on the best flex ATX
power supply that we have in our studio it's not a lot more it's only 350 Watts
but it's at least from a reliable brand Silverstone and is 80 plus gold
efficient so hopefully it won't need much cooling which is good because this
case does not have it we can do something about the cooling challenges
for starters we can replace the slim 80
millimeter fan with at least a full width 80 millimeter fan all that
requires is a little bit of creative
modification we're supposed to use this fan as an exhaust rather than an intake
so these little bits here are drumbled out to make room for the motherboard
hmm well it would have been pretty cool to put a 16 core CPU in here
unfortunately with the drivetray installed which well it's a server so
we're gonna need there's only 45 millimeters of room to work with above
the CPU the kinds of coolers that will fit in that space like noctos l9a
wouldn't even be able to handle one of those 16 core CPUs at its base clock
speed let alone when turboi our next best option then is an 8 core ryzen
5700x with a much lower 65 watt TDP it's
not as cool as stuffing a 16 core CPU in a box like this but it should be plenty
for our intended use case if we needed our CPU to perform parity calculations
for software raid a CPU like this could be a performance concern but given that
we're running a simple raid 1 or mirror which is just the same bits of data
being written to and read from both drives we're not expecting that to be a
problem
um oh boy that was fine what I did don't do it
boy is this ever a skinny computer hey are you liking how skinny it is Brandon
it's like a little slice of computer yeah by the way it's not really part of
the video because Jake already removed it but ASRock in their Infinite Wisdom
decided to glue the stock backplate onto this board so for whatever reason you
want to install a cooler that doesn't use the stock backplate you have to do some careful prying work in order to get
it off very annoying see the strong glue
a big reason that we went ryzen over an Intel based platform is that AMD almost
across the board offers at least unofficial support for unbuffered ECC
memory error checking and correcting memory is considered safer for use with
the ZFS file system which makes heavy use of RAM for caching data and we have
a bunch of these 32 Gigabyte nemix 3200
Mega transfer per second sticks kicking around from a previous project so even
though the performance of them is not great we figured ah what the hey let's
go quantity over quality and throw 128
gigs of RAM in this thing this is the part where things get very interesting
how on Earth am I supposed to fit this whole thing in here wait what
foreign
ly tight fit oh my God look at the quality of this case even though it's so
small can you see how much it's flexing the motherboard is what actually
stiffens the case enough that you can pick it up without it just twerking
around like that there it is and see like I said it's far less twisty with
the motherboard screwed into it all I've got to do now is plug in all our power
cables and oh that reminds me I never talked to you about our boot drives this
is super cool these are discontinued now but these low capacity Intel optane m.2
drives they were intended as caching drives for hard drives and low end
systems but for us they are the perfect
boot Drive they're only 64 gigs each but they are super high endurance and with
crazy low prices on the used Market because who would want a 64 gig Drive
well we do in fact we want two of them so that if one of them were to die on
the go our system can continue to function without missing a b and
that 24 pin does not have a lot of slack
on it that's not bad right yeah
it's a nice tidy little server of course it doesn't really have any bulk storage
yet ah that's where this comes in this tiny
package this cm6 Enterprise NVMe Drive
from kyocsia holds a whopping 30
terabytes of storage I mean it's not like we've never seen density like this
before Nimbus data sent us a three and a half inch drive that could hold a
hundred terabytes but that used a SATA interface limiting the drive to about
500 megabytes a second the cm6 on the
other hand can do seven gigabytes per
second in sequential read speeds that means that we would need dual 25 gig
network connections to get anywhere near the speed of just one of these drives
and just one of these drives could
easily handle multiple video editors working off of it at the same time which
is perfect for our application now it
does occur to me that with a street price of around 10 000 each carrying
four of these across the border while perfectly legal is a bit unnerving but
that's fine because a this case only seems to support two drives by default
and B 30 terabytes of usable storage after
mirroring is actually excessive for what will be about a week's worth of remote
work for reference that 30 terabytes is more capacity than our previous main
video editing server had until we upgraded it just two years ago actually
before we put this in you probably noticed that these drives use the u.2
interface and our motherboard doesn't have any u.2 ports well we had a plan
for this we tried this Max Cloud on four
port bifurcation Card unfortunately it's
a little taller than I'm comfortable with in this case and it's designed
around PCIe gen 3 so we'd actually be giving up some of our comically high
performance so instead I have these two
of these These Are PCIe by four to mini
SAS HD or u.2 cards
and all these do these are just dumb cards they just take a PCIe Gen 4
interface and Link all the lanes to these pins and they connect via PCIe Gen
4 to the back of your drive sick right so we're just going to go
ahead and plug these guys in here
then this guy goes into the back of the
drive but it needs power to come from somewhere so you just inject say to
power into it a little something like this oh
this is uh
very tight fit
all these cables then just get mashimulated down there yeah
we got this this is the way this is not
the least janky thing I've ever done hey be nice
I know but be nice
not nice about the truth
sure it's not setting me free right now Brandon I'm pretty sure everything is connected
now it's fine let's power it up and make
sure it works I have concerns about thermals in this thing even with the
better fan that is a very restrictive front panel
right out of the gate there are a couple of things we want to adjust we're going to set our memory to
3200 and this is interesting I went into
our NVMe configuration and I see our two optane drive so that's for our Boot and
then what's this only one of our 30
terabyte kyocsias Ah that's for a good
reason if we look closely at our cards only one of them has an indicator LED on
it and that is because the second one is installed in a PCIe by 16 slot now under
normal circumstances there's no problem putting a PCIe by four card in a by 16
slot but in this case because it's not
really a card right it's just a pass
through we might have to set that slot to be bifurcated so to operate in a
different mode so what we do is we go into PBS I think it is yes pcie16 link width
and we go buy four theoretically we can
save this fire it back up and it should
be detected if not I'm going to leave it for Jake to figure out after the weekend because I gotta go do ancho oh uh I
don't think that was actually the problem this one game unplugged
that's more a more likely explanation let's try that
hey both the lights are on now okay well we found the problem hey
hey there we go all drives detected now the last thing we need to do is go ahead
and set all of our fans to a hundred percent
because we're gonna need all the cooling we can get now we get into the really
good stuff let's talk about software we installed trunas scale which is the
Linux version of true now it's already on the boot drives our pool is already
set up as a mirror and we've already got a network share set up we might need to
change the password in order to do our demo here but we'll we'll see what's
going on as for other settings that we needed to change we enabled Auto Trim
because ssds trim is a really important
feature to increase both the performance and longevity of your ssds no
I understand for security we want to have it set to something good when we're
actually lit but you got it for a video you got to set it
to something that like all right I hacked the Mainframe and we're in 128
gigs of RAM 8 cores 16 threads hottest
core 47 degrees well we're not even doing anything how do I get to this
thing no do not cut nope not that one
nope not that one cool well anyway we
tested it before so you guys can see the screen cap of this and wow it's really
fast but the SSD temperatures are a
little hotter than I'd like to see we got in touch with keoksia and they said
they actually rate these drives at a maximum operating temperature of 70
degrees so 62 is actually fine but we
might end up modifying the bracket that they sit on for a bit better airflow for
now though apparently it's fine but I gotta say this fan at the front kicks
out a lot of heat now for everything you saw on the screen capture just now we're
just connected to our office's 10 gig infrastructure but we're not going to
have that with us on the go and our hotel internet might not even be
suitable for four editors to edit at the same time even if they're just pulling
down like you know stock photos and other assets thankfully we have a
solution to both of those problems first of all we're actually going to be using
a cellular Puck which we have done in the past and works shockingly well this
will make sure that we have internet access as for networking all the
machines together and to our Nas we're going to have a total of four editors
down there we wanted a 10 gig switch that was portable and it turns out
ubiquity has just the solution meet the
flex XG it's a four port 10 gig switch
that is shockingly heavy but also
extremely Compact and can actually be powered with USBC then because obviously
Apple doesn't actually have 10 gig networking on their MacBooks almost
nobody puts 10 gig networking on a laptop we'll be using four of these Cal
digit Thunderbolt to 10 gig networking dongles to get everybody up to full
speed now you're probably wondering why
MacBooks we are otherwise a completely Windows house when it comes to video
editing it's because for the Adobe suite
while Apple's M2 silicon might be slower
than the top dog Intel laptops for rendering and timeline performance we
we've actually found them to be a lot more stable which ends up saving us more
time than the extra performance would when we're on the go they also have
great color accurate screens great battery life they charge quickly and
ingesting footage seems to work a lot better for some reason as well we may
also bring like a top dog Windows laptop just for rendering out projects I mean
with everything on network storage it's super easy to move projects between
systems but that remains to be seen just like it remains to be seen who is our
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if you enjoyed this video you know what oh let's go full blast from the past why
don't you check out the one where I built a like duffel bag carryable
editing rig for our very first CES