okay hold on oh god
after being gravely disappointed when some of my fellow youtubers showed off
their 30 to 60 000
jellyfish network storage devices i set
out with exactly the same budget to build something that could absolutely
run circles around the thing now given that we could afford ssds for
what they charge for hard drives it wasn't surprising when we
fried their jellyfishies but for some reason apparently people are still
buying enough of these jellyfish things that owc recently purchased lumaforge
the company that makes them did we not make our point people do you have any
idea how much money we could have saved if we didn't go full stupid and build
the thing purely from solid state drives
the answer is
45 000 that's right
on this table is everything we need to build a machine that is better than the
jellyfish in just about every possible way and costs one fifth as much
so let's fry the jellyfish once and for all and we're gonna do so with the help
of our friends over at pulseway big thanks to paul sway not only for
sponsoring this video but for building such fantastic remote management and
monitoring software with pulseway you can manage your whole organization's it
infrastructure on the go with their mobile apps and even create and deploy
custom scripts to simplify your job check them out at the link below
i'm sure you're thinking lioness you can't possibly make something for
one-fifth of the price without some pretty big compromises on the hardware i
mean when it comes to a gaming pc yeah you can save a few hundred bucks
building your own over getting someone to do it for you but if you try to cut
eighty percent of your budget you're going to end up with something like this
where is it going really impressive i'm stuck no professional would use that
well you're wrong excuse me wrong so very wrong lumaforge
has a few different models but we're going to be targeting their tower slash
rack models specifically because well partly they're the most ridiculous
and also partly we like the idea of rack mounting storage and we actually intend
to use this thing in the long term so we're going to replicate the 240
terabyte rack model with the optional boost package we'll talk about what that
marketing nonsense actually means later for our case we've gone with istar usa's
e4 m24 hd which includes even more drive
slots than the rack or tower jellyfish and should fit the rest of our hardware
nicely one challenge though is that lumaforge is not very forthcoming about
the specific components of their systems lest somebody google the part numbers
and figure out how hard they are being pleased
but there are some things that we know from last time around and some others
that we can glean from their product pages first off lumaforge's big selling point
is that it's all direct attached you just grab your network cable plug it
directly into the machine you want to edit on and bam it works just like usb
with no network switch required even for
multiple users but being the reasonable person i am
i just can't fathom why anybody would want a setup where you have more than
say two or three people editing off of the same box and you don't just run a
network switch microtech even has a 12
port 10 gig switch for only 500
so for the amount that i'm paying for lumaforge's special sauce here i could
buy a pallet of 10 gig switches but okay
i'm gonna put myself in the shoes or sandals as it were of the person who
thinks that that's an ideal workflow and i'm going to grab two Intel quad port 10
gigabit network cards that gives us a total in this system of 10 10 gig ports
for storage lumaforge uses zfs a file system and volume manager wrapped into
one that they've got running inside centos a Linux based operating system
like last time though we are taking a different route and we're gonna go with
truenas core formerly known as freeness which also uses zfs as its file system
but has a more user-friendly management interface based on their specs page it
appears that lumaforge is using groups or v-devs of 10 drives running raid z2
what that means is each group of 10 drives in your jellyfish can sustain
two drive failures before you actually lose any data and since they have 20 12
terabyte drives on the terabyte model that we're trying to
replicate we could suffer up to four total drive failures before we actually
lost anything that is as long as they failed two in each group if we lost them
like this all right we'd be plumb out of luck on all the
data on these drives we're not too worried about that though
because seagate sent over 22 of their exos 12 terabyte enterprise drives which
boasts two and a half million hours meantime between failure low power
consumption and excellent resistance to vibrations from nearby drives which
there's gonna be uh a few of them also the five-year warranty is a nice touch
that's a seagate part number yeah but hp enterprise model hp
enterprise now funny story we would have
actually used seagate's ironwolf pro
consumer grade nas drives but at the time of filming these exos enterprise
drives were actually cheaper so uh
weird flex seagate but okay now according to lumaforge's
website the performance boost package
doubles the stock 128 gigs of RAM so
we're gonna be running 256 gigs of 3200 megahertz crucial
registered ecc memory in eight channel mode that should give us a really nice
balance of cost and performance and we haven't had a single stick of this stuff
fail in our last handful of deployments so we absolutely love it so far
as for the ingest capacitor well that's a fancy
name for a right cache which zfs calls a
slog this limited amount of faster solid-state storage prevents the hard
drives in the array from getting bogged down when data is getting written to the
machine at the same time that somebody is trying to edit off it like for
example when you're ingesting footage off of your cameras now we don't know
how big the drive they use is but we figured a two terabyte NVMe drive from
saverin would be plenty for most ingest workflows given that camera media larger
than that is pretty unusual as for read caching you see i'm holding two drives
here zfs utilizes something called arc
which is a portion of the system memory that acts as a live cache for frequently
or recently used files problem is when it comes to media work
they're full of large files and you can
have enormous projects so even our 256
gigabytes of RAM could be easily filled up
thankfully there's a special feature called level two arc that allows us to
add a second NVMe drive that will be a well slower than memory but still faster
than hard drive caching layer before you start reading directly off of the
spinning rust lumaforge doesn't actually include this in their systems but since
the motherboard that we chose has an extra m.2 slot and we have
lots of budget left over to play with we figured hey
how many times do you live however many times you live it's not
enough times to risk downtime or data loss due to a power supply failure
that's why we actually deviated from the jellyfish's original design
this right here is the twins pro 700
watt from fsp and it is super cool
like the 1000 watt consumer grade unit that lumaforge uses it fits in any
standard atx case but unlike that one it
can sustain a complete failure of one of
the two redundant power supply modules
that goes into the back like so another nice benefit of this thing is
that it actually allows you to plug into two independent power sources if you had
say for example a ups and a
just direct into mains power one really you should just have two
ups's though and the best part about this thing is
that we were really concerned about noise but it ended up being well not
quiet but reasonable enough that you could have it in an open office space
and it wouldn't be a huge nuisance now
obviously if you're going to have your jellyfish fryer like
on your desk right next to your head you might want to choose something else but
never fear because you can afford literally the most expensive enthusiast
power supply on the market with all the money you saved and then you can go get
it gold plated at a local shop one optional upgrade would be to pull
out these hot swappable sleds and replace the sunon fans that ship with
this case something like a Noctua industrial ppc might have a longer
lifetime but for our purposes it's not like sunon
is a bad fan manufacturer and given that we're going to be putting it in a server
rack anyway we're just not that concerned about noise and the
convenience of having these plug right into these little daughter boards that
go into the drive back plane is pretty good one thing that's a little funky
about our configuration is that this power supply has fixed cables on it and
unfortunately it's only got i think like two molex connectors well we need a
total of uh 10 for all of the hard drives that we
have installed in this thing so what we'll be doing is adapting SATA to molex
because it's the only connector on here that's still got 5 volt built into it
otherwise we'd love to use the pci express connectors which you don't need
in a storage server now that doesn't sound great but as long
as you pay attention to the max amperage that these cables and these connectors
are rated for it should be okay as for the rest of the machine we chose AMD's
epic platform due to its excellent price performance and feature set which is
basically everything specifically we've gone with a 24 core
epic 7302p cooled by Noctua's adorable little nhu9
sp3 which is one of the only coolers specifically engineered to cover the
massive heat spreader on an epic CPU
for our board we've chosen asrock rack's
epic d82t this board is great for a number of
reasons i mean just look at all that expansion
it's freaking crazy have i mentioned by the way how much i
love epic because thanks to epic we've got 128
total lanes of pci express to tap in that gives us all the slots we need for
our hba which is what we plug all our drives into our 10 gigabit mix including
the two that are already on board our dual m.2s for those caching drives i
mentioned before it's even got two mini sas hd ports over here that gives us
another eight drives so we only need a 16 drive host bus adapter in our case an
lsi 9305 16i check this out too it's
even got a couple of oculink ports so that is eight more lanes of pci express
down there this thing's awesome i think the only
thing that could make it better is if it was pci express gen 4 which
naturally asrock rack has it's just not something that we would get a
performance benefit from so we are using the gen 3 one this is fun while i was
plugging power into the motherboard i noticed that this power supply has a usb
connector coming out of it turns out that fsp has a little tool it
only runs in Windows unfortunately so we can't use it but they have a little tool
that allows you to monitor temperatures fan speeds all that kind of cool stuff
just off of a usb header for boot drives we used a couple of
kingston 240 gig ssds and you can use
basically anything for this the one thing i'd recommend is having two of
them so that in the event of a boot drive failure you have a live backup of
it ready to go okay not backup but copy
there and i guess that's pretty much it isn't
it yeah we're just gonna put up do it 24 cores 256 gigs of RAM 10 10
gigabit network ports 24 drives 700
watts of redundant power and a mirrored
240 gig boot drive for one-fifth of the price now we just got to boot this puppy
up ah um
there's probably another cable oh look at another cable we've already installed
trunas so we're just going to boot right up to that if you guys want to know how
to install it patrick from serve the home did a great guide last time we
collaborated so we're going to link that in the video description now that's a
lot of network interfaces look at that 10 10
that's 10 gigabits 10
gig we could put them all together for 100 maybe yeah we could
100 gigabytes would be a big nicktoon that would be way smarter if we just put
100 gigabit nick in here and then a switch and still had lots of money left
over but whatever we're direct attached now that we're fired up we're in that
beautiful little web ui actually this has improved a lot since the last time i
looked at it there's all those interfaces there's those power supplies
by far the loudest fans in the system are the ones in the power supplies
because they're just these little tiny things but if you're not into it
just swap it out for something else because hey you built it you designed it
you can do it the way you like so we've got two groups of 10
and then like i showed you guys earlier we could lose
up to four before we actually lose any data and in the true nash dashboard of
course we can see our two raid z2s both with 10 drives and on the bottom we have
our log drive as well as our cache drive so cache would be the level two arc and
then log is the s log like we mentioned before
i like calling it a slog slog it's gotta slog through those
index entries
all right slog through them what we're going to show you guys now because
really the main point of this isn't how to set up truenose we want to show you
guys how we're going to do the direct attach special magic that jellyfish
ships so we've got a test system right here on our test cart that's got a 10
gig network card in it we're gonna go ahead and run the oh my god that's not
screwed into anything did you just pull it out uh well i didn't not pull it out
you didn't not pull it out what does that even mean
it means we're about to find out smart guy ah
it's probably fine it's hot swap right you tried PCIe hot top right ah
is that the right HDMI i think so well it was on before oh crap well you
didn't screw the thing in well it didn't have a thing and we're just trying to do it quickly right here you could just
move it i wasn't expecting you to just yoink all right i didn't he's a yoinker
man you just you got to be careful around this well
Linus tries to fix that um we're on the trunas side and basically all you need
to do to set up a direct attach setup like the fancy jellyfish software would
do is essentially just assign an ip address to both interfaces on either
side and then the computer will facilitate transfer between the two
machines in what's known as an unrouted subnet there's no router that's
controlling the packets it's just the systems telling each other where it needs to go so we're in trunas i've set
up 10.96.0.10 for this computer and we've got to make
sure our subnet is the same so dash 24 and then on that side we'll do
10.96.0.20 and you can set these to realistically
whatever you want click apply there
test changes oh man trueness has a super nice thing basically when you're doing
network changes on trinas it will like try them for 60 seconds and if you don't
confirm it in the dashboard it will just revert back to the way it was you can't
screw it up and like make it so you have to boot it into recovery mode or
something to change the settings and then on our Windows computer side we
have set up the same thing but 10.96.0.20
same subnet 2552.525 which is the same as 24. we're just gonna click okay there
close that'll start to do its thing and then we'll just apply on this side
and we should be pretty much good to go funny story that machine doesn't have
premiere on it and it's actually faster for us to just go get a longer Ethernet
cable and plug into one of our editing stations so we're just going to redo the
ip setup over there one moment please after a quick reboot to get the network
share remapped properly you can see we've got our j drive which is our
jellyfish fryer and boom we are video
editing off of our jellyfish fryer of course what we need to know now is
how's it handling it and for that naturally we turn to pulseway
unfortunately pulseway does not yet have support for freebsd based operating
systems like truenas but we use it for all kinds of server related things here
at the office and actually even ones that aren't necessarily server related
with pulseway you can monitor all of your systems through a simple dashboard
that's available right on your mobile device from here you can see i've
created a little sandbox account with the machine behind me and one of our
servers i can monitor everything from system resources like available memory
or if we're running out of storage to patch policies to even remoting into
these machines and taking control of them with pulseway you can also create
custom scripts that simplify your it management and if Windows updates are
our pain in your butt you can even manage those remotely and schedule them
as well and if you look around here in the editing den
we've had to do a lot more remote management than usual with a bunch of
our staff working from home so try out pulseplay it's available for most
operating systems including Windows Linux and mac and it's so powerful that
i'm always learning about new functionality apparently you can use it
to send a wake wake-on lan ping like a magic packet to one of the machines on
your network if for whatever reason it's stuck in sleep and you have no way of
waking it up because you're halfway around the world that's cool stuff even for home users so
it works great and how much did we pay overall before tax including everything
we've currently got deployed around 12 000 us dollars that's a lot of money but
it is nowhere near the 58 000 that
lumaforge charges for their equivalent and before you ask yes we also accounted
for the two cold spare drives that aren't even installed that lumaforge
does include with the jellyfish we could even comfortably step up to
ironwolf pros which aren't enterprise per se but do have three
years of data recovery included if you're into that kind of peace of mind
thing so yeah i can understand the appeal of a
solution that is all pre-set up for you and has some fancy software for
connecting to it or whatever but for the price difference you could quite
literally hire an it person for like
half a year to spec this thing build it for you deploy it and show you how to
use it i mean you'd probably have some money left over to send your team on a nice vacation i see how you snuck that
in there Jake that's that's good that's a good one you know we can't do workation this year as for us this
machine is destined to become the new local backup server for our NVMe editing
machine aka new new wanik so wanna go
check out that video if you haven't seen it yet and go check out pulseway
pulseway is absolutely fantastic whether you want to simplify your it management
tasks monitor your servers remote desktop in apply patches pulseway has
got you covered and you can do everything from their mobile app