1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:13,000 Wait. What? Okay. That was a reenactment. But a few weeks ago, my computer didn't die 2 00:00:13,000 --> 00:00:19,440 just like that right in the middle of a gaming session. Turns out, my boot SSD catastrophically 3 00:00:19,440 --> 00:00:25,400 failed, giving me an excuse to rebuild my gaming rig and my kids' machines and every 4 00:00:25,400 --> 00:00:31,560 other system in my house with no SSD, no hard drive, no storage at all. And yet, look at this. 5 00:00:31,560 --> 00:00:38,440 I'm gaming, I've got Windows, I've even got a ton of games installed. How is this possible? 6 00:00:38,440 --> 00:00:43,400 I mean, I know you can download RAM, but downloading storage? 7 00:00:43,400 --> 00:00:47,640 Well, kind of. The storage still needs to be somewhere. And luckily for you, 8 00:00:47,640 --> 00:00:53,160 Kyoksia, who sponsored this video, provided some of their CD8 enterprise SSDs. But 9 00:00:53,240 --> 00:00:57,960 what he's saying is true. None of them are in the gaming PCs. Instead, it's all in here. 10 00:00:57,960 --> 00:01:02,680 That is freaking amazing. Did you just pull one out so we got redundancy and everything? 11 00:01:02,680 --> 00:01:08,200 Yeah. I mean, it's cool. But there are some disadvantages. Like, you kind of made every 12 00:01:08,200 --> 00:01:12,360 computer in your house a bit. We'll get to that later. Roll the thing. 13 00:01:12,760 --> 00:01:27,880 I'm really excited about this because in spite of the fact that network booting has existed for 14 00:01:27,880 --> 00:01:34,200 longer than Jake here, it's not something we've ever really played around with much and certainly 15 00:01:34,200 --> 00:01:37,640 never for a home gaming setup. So how does it wake? 16 00:01:38,280 --> 00:01:42,920 Well, the current way to network boot from something like a NAS, Network Attached Storage, 17 00:01:42,920 --> 00:01:49,480 is ice-guzzy. There is also newer stuff like NVMe over fabric. But as far as I know, it doesn't 18 00:01:49,480 --> 00:01:54,360 really exist, at least in Windows Land yet. And certainly it's not within the scope of this project. 19 00:01:54,360 --> 00:02:01,160 But as silly as it sounds to boot from a NAS, is it? I mean, you can video edit on files from your 20 00:02:01,160 --> 00:02:07,400 NAS. We do that all the time. You can game using files on a NAS. We do that all the time. So why 21 00:02:07,480 --> 00:02:14,200 not Windows from your NAS? It comes with some key advantages. For one thing, it centralizes your 22 00:02:14,200 --> 00:02:19,480 storage, which means redundancy can be more economical to safeguard against the drive failure. 23 00:02:19,480 --> 00:02:24,520 Instead of having to put at least two drives in every one of your systems, you can just put, 24 00:02:24,520 --> 00:02:30,840 I don't know, six drives in here, plus one extra for redundancy. And it can make for easy 25 00:02:30,840 --> 00:02:36,600 management of backups and lightning fast system restores. Which I'm sure is great for kids PCs 26 00:02:36,600 --> 00:02:41,560 because I bet they mess stuff up all the time. Mine are actually pretty good so far, 27 00:02:41,560 --> 00:02:45,640 but I'm sure that's coming. My dad would be happy just because he could get rid of MSN 28 00:02:45,640 --> 00:02:52,200 Messenger faster. I wasn't allowed. I did it anyways. What I am allowed to use is de-duplication 29 00:02:52,200 --> 00:02:58,120 or compression with ZFS as the back end. That's super cool because it gives us even more efficiency 30 00:02:58,120 --> 00:03:02,680 out of the storage that we have. But it's not all sunshine and rainbows. Like what about the lack of 31 00:03:02,760 --> 00:03:10,440 system? Okay, we're going to talk about that later. First, let's build a NAS. Okay. Why don't you tell 32 00:03:10,440 --> 00:03:17,640 us about this weird platform you decided to use for this project? I hate this computer. This is the 33 00:03:17,640 --> 00:03:24,280 worst server I have ever played with, at least in like the last five years. In fairness to Intel, 34 00:03:24,280 --> 00:03:29,640 it's a reference platform. Software development platform. It is never meant to go to an end user, 35 00:03:29,640 --> 00:03:35,320 but it has been a little annoying to get working. The good news is it's a super cool system. It's 36 00:03:35,320 --> 00:03:42,600 dual 144 core processors, which is hilarious overkill. It's not even great for this setup, 37 00:03:42,600 --> 00:03:48,120 actually, because iSCSI not super multi-threaded. But he's been looking for an excuse to tool 38 00:03:48,120 --> 00:03:52,200 around with it, and now we have it. But aside from the CPUs, we've loaded this thing up with an 39 00:03:52,200 --> 00:04:00,200 NVIDIA Mellanoff ConnectX 6 dual port 100 gigabit per second, Nick. We don't actually need the fastest 40 00:04:00,200 --> 00:04:06,360 network cards in the client PCs. But what we have to consider is that because this one machine is 41 00:04:06,360 --> 00:04:12,680 going to serve all of them, it needs to be as fast as all of their network cards combined. That is 42 00:04:13,320 --> 00:04:16,840 assuming that they're all trying to hit it at the same time. I mean, you wouldn't want your 43 00:04:16,840 --> 00:04:23,960 computers to be slow, right? No, no, I really wouldn't. And with the speed of these CD8 Gen4 44 00:04:23,960 --> 00:04:31,000 drives that Kyoksia provided for this little thought experiment, we can use as fast a Nick as we can 45 00:04:31,000 --> 00:04:36,840 possibly get our hands on and never have to worry about our drives being the bottleneck. Now, what 46 00:04:36,840 --> 00:04:41,480 are we using for networking? Because I don't have a 100 gig switch. Yeah, and ubiquity doesn't make 47 00:04:41,560 --> 00:04:52,200 one yet. So instead, hey, our buddies for Microtik. This is the CRS 51816XS 2XQ. Not only does it have 48 00:04:52,200 --> 00:04:59,560 two 100 gig ports, that's the 2XQ, but it has 1625 gig ports, which is perfect. We plug our 49 00:04:59,560 --> 00:05:04,600 server in here, and then we can plug in all the other things downstream to the 25 gig ports. At 50 00:05:04,600 --> 00:05:09,320 least we could if we had 25 gig networking in any of our systems. Well, we're going to. The funny 51 00:05:09,320 --> 00:05:15,320 thing is as silly as it feels to use these CD8 drives for gaming, this kind of an application 52 00:05:15,320 --> 00:05:20,680 is not that far off of what drives like this are designed for. They've got die failure recovery as 53 00:05:20,680 --> 00:05:25,320 well as power loss protection and parity protection to make them extraordinarily reliable. They're 54 00:05:25,320 --> 00:05:31,880 available in capacities much higher than the 3.84 terabytes that we're deploying here. So if you've 55 00:05:31,880 --> 00:05:37,720 got simulation work or you're storing gigantic high performance databases, something like this 56 00:05:37,720 --> 00:05:44,440 would be perfect. And we're going to put games on it. And Windows. So we've allocated about 10 57 00:05:44,440 --> 00:05:49,560 terabytes of storage for a shared game drive and about one terabyte for the boot drives for each 58 00:05:49,560 --> 00:05:53,640 of our systems. We've got network, we've got stores, that's all we really need. You're going to take us 59 00:05:53,640 --> 00:05:59,240 to that. I got the whole thing. Don't drop it. All right. Oh my god. What the hell? Oh, there wasn't 60 00:05:59,240 --> 00:06:03,320 a drive in that tray. We're good. What the hell? Well, Jake gets things hooked up. Let's talk about 61 00:06:03,400 --> 00:06:09,160 the long term plan because obviously I'm not going to be keeping a 288 core Intel reference 62 00:06:09,160 --> 00:06:15,960 server in my house to boot my computers. What I actually want to do is take my two loud NASs 63 00:06:15,960 --> 00:06:22,920 and consolidate them into one quiet one. So take that 45 drives chassis, rip out the hard drive 64 00:06:22,920 --> 00:06:29,160 mounts, put in NVMe mounts, and then run them all off of that NAS software that I invested in. 65 00:06:29,880 --> 00:06:34,680 Whether or not we boot the computers from them, that kind of depends on how this proof of concept 66 00:06:34,680 --> 00:06:38,840 goes. Why are you taking the drives out? We just put them in. Well, I told you this server is so 67 00:06:38,840 --> 00:06:44,680 great, right? It doesn't boot with SSDs in it. What? So you have to like let it boot and then you 68 00:06:44,680 --> 00:06:53,320 hot plug the SSDs back. Tried so many things that Intel Rep was like, it's my last day. I'm not even 69 00:06:53,320 --> 00:07:00,120 kidding. That is legitimately what happened. Good luck at wherever you go. But I took the 70 00:07:00,120 --> 00:07:08,920 voluntary payout. I'm leaving. All right, let's go look at the software stack. Now my assumption was 71 00:07:08,920 --> 00:07:14,120 we were just going to use TrueNAS for this because we love TrueNAS. Yeah, TrueNAS is great. But we 72 00:07:14,120 --> 00:07:19,640 didn't. Yeah, I used it for Ice Cozy like a couple months ago and it was pretty slow. There's also 73 00:07:19,640 --> 00:07:24,440 this thing called Starwind vSAN, which there's a free version that they let you use forever 74 00:07:24,440 --> 00:07:29,400 on even multiple machines. You get a high availability for free and it's like purpose 75 00:07:29,400 --> 00:07:35,960 built for Ice Cozy. So it's a lot easier to just set up and use for this exact workload. So why 76 00:07:35,960 --> 00:07:39,880 not, right? There is a bare metal install, but I didn't notice until I'd already set up the like 77 00:07:39,880 --> 00:07:44,840 Proxmox image version. So that's what we're using instead. It should still be performant. I just took 78 00:07:44,920 --> 00:07:50,280 our network card and our six SSDs and just PCIe pass through them. Right. So if there's any performance 79 00:07:50,280 --> 00:07:55,960 hit for virtualization, it should be pretty negligible. This system has 512 gigs. Right. 80 00:07:55,960 --> 00:08:02,600 But you have to like load it. So I just picked 256 because that's faster. And I selected 64 cores. 81 00:08:02,600 --> 00:08:09,720 I mean, this type of server is really meant for like a web host or like virtualization web hosts. 82 00:08:09,720 --> 00:08:15,080 Yeah. Like something that just parallelizes like crazy. Yeah. Oh, we can see we have our 83 00:08:15,080 --> 00:08:22,360 Kyoxy SSDs. Look at that. All six of them. Wow. And then I went ahead and created a ZFS pool. It 84 00:08:22,360 --> 00:08:30,440 does give you the option to like just make a raid pool. It seems to be slower for some reason. 85 00:08:30,440 --> 00:08:36,200 The ZFS is cool because it has RAM caching. And that'll, it'll just put your files in memory. 86 00:08:36,200 --> 00:08:42,760 And memory is of course super fast. So with RAID Z1, that means that one of our drives is 87 00:08:42,760 --> 00:08:48,200 not contributing to our overall storage, but it also means that we can lose any one of our drives 88 00:08:48,200 --> 00:08:53,080 just like I did when I was in the middle of my game. And none of our systems should go down. 89 00:08:53,080 --> 00:08:57,160 We're going to show the real world results of that live test where Jake ripped a drive out in the 90 00:08:57,160 --> 00:09:01,800 intro a little bit later. After that, you make a volume, which is kind of just like a folder. So 91 00:09:01,800 --> 00:09:06,040 we've got one for our game drive here. This really reminds me of the TrueNAS interface a lot. 92 00:09:06,040 --> 00:09:09,960 It's like the TrueNAS interface, but like less crappy. You notice how like responsive it is? 93 00:09:09,960 --> 00:09:15,880 Yeah. And then for iSCSI, we have to make a LUN, which is kind of like a virtual disk. Now 94 00:09:16,760 --> 00:09:20,600 some of it is just needlessly complicated. Now Starwind does a good job of making it less 95 00:09:20,600 --> 00:09:25,400 complicated. Let's create one. iSCSI standalone because we're not high availability. It's just 96 00:09:25,400 --> 00:09:29,960 one system. We'll make it in our Linus smells thing. We'll call it Linus really smells. 97 00:09:30,920 --> 00:09:38,360 And 100 gigs and done. That's all you have to do, right? So now I have a 100 gig drive and it 98 00:09:38,360 --> 00:09:44,520 lives on my network. But how do you use it? That's the annoying part. This is the overly 99 00:09:44,520 --> 00:09:49,240 complicated BS I'm talking. I'm sure there's a reason for it, but this is like the address of 100 00:09:49,240 --> 00:09:54,280 the storage. I don't know why the date needs to be in there. It's not supposed to be the 101 00:09:54,280 --> 00:09:58,840 current date or the date of creation. It's like the date you registered your domain. As far as I 102 00:09:58,840 --> 00:10:02,440 can tell, entirely arbitrary. You can set it to whatever you want. One way or another, 103 00:10:02,440 --> 00:10:07,080 like any other network resource, it needs an address. But what is the difference between 104 00:10:07,080 --> 00:10:14,120 an iSCSI storage drive and an SMB shared folder? Well, one is block storage and one is file 105 00:10:14,120 --> 00:10:20,200 storage. And if you don't care what that means, it's basically imagine iSCSI like an SSD. It's 106 00:10:20,200 --> 00:10:24,040 the whole drive. It's meant to plug right into a computer or not be shared. And you can imagine 107 00:10:24,040 --> 00:10:30,200 an SMB is like, here's a folder. You know, multiple people can use one folder. And they won't conflict 108 00:10:30,200 --> 00:10:35,320 with each other if they both try to read a file or write to a folder. Yeah, because it's designed 109 00:10:35,320 --> 00:10:40,440 to handle that. Luckily, Starwind can handle both. You see, SMB share, that'll be for our games. Since 110 00:10:40,440 --> 00:10:44,200 most games, you install them to an SMB share, you can play them on multiple computers and it just 111 00:10:44,200 --> 00:10:48,600 works. And then they're going to use their local my documents or games folder for any save data or 112 00:10:48,600 --> 00:10:53,720 whatever else, hopefully. Some games not so good. Yeah. So this is going to be a little hit or 113 00:10:53,720 --> 00:10:57,320 miss, but we can at least try it. Yeah. And worst case, you can install a game locally. 114 00:10:58,040 --> 00:11:02,680 Question for you. For this test, did you swap out my network card for the fastest one that we've 115 00:11:02,680 --> 00:11:09,800 got? No. I mean, the one you have right now, an X540T2 dual 10 gig one should in theory work just 116 00:11:09,800 --> 00:11:15,160 fine for this. Yeah. I mean, if you think about it, 10 gig, that's way faster than say a three. 117 00:11:15,960 --> 00:11:24,280 Yeah. Yeah. But we can go faster. Let's go faster. I mean, how fast do you want your computer to be? 118 00:11:24,920 --> 00:11:28,680 I don't know. I just want to see what this is capable of. I think we should do the 100 gig 119 00:11:28,680 --> 00:11:36,600 Nick. There is a PCIe slot limitation. Your system only has a by four. Yeah, that's the thing about 120 00:11:36,600 --> 00:11:42,200 high end desktop platforms being effectively dead these days is if you want to get into kind of 121 00:11:42,200 --> 00:11:47,320 weird homelab stuff like this on a consumer board, you're not going to have enough PCIe lanes, but 122 00:11:47,320 --> 00:11:53,000 this one's cool. It still has a second gen four by four link to the CPU, not through the chipset. 123 00:11:53,880 --> 00:11:59,800 But this is a gen three card. So you're going to get four gigabytes a second max. Boom. 124 00:12:00,600 --> 00:12:09,560 Card installation. Let's go. Yeah. Dude, this is a buy one slot though. No, it's by four. No, it's by one. 125 00:12:09,560 --> 00:12:14,200 Oh, well, where's the, what board is this? Well, I got my Thunderbolt card in the buy four. Why? 126 00:12:14,200 --> 00:12:18,360 Because that it needs it. Don't you have an iKron thing anyways? Yeah, but I also have a Thunderbolt 127 00:12:18,360 --> 00:12:25,960 dock. That like one Gigabyte a second is all you're going to get out of that. Oh, 10 gig then. At 128 00:12:25,960 --> 00:12:30,040 that point, I might as well just leave the 10 gig card in there. Well, we could use this one. This 129 00:12:30,040 --> 00:12:36,440 is a connect six card. It's only 25 gig ports, but it's gen four. So we'll get two gigabytes a second. 130 00:12:36,440 --> 00:12:42,760 All right. How big do you want your drive to be? Toerite? Oh, okay. I was expecting more. Yeah, 131 00:12:42,760 --> 00:12:47,960 sure. Fine. No, that's fine. So the first thing we have to do, of course, is make the drive. Boom, 132 00:12:47,960 --> 00:12:53,480 done. Okay. And now we're done. You're officially ice goes eat. Okay, we should probably configure 133 00:12:53,480 --> 00:12:58,840 the BIOS then. Yep. Since our computer doesn't have a disk to boot from, we have to tell it 134 00:12:58,840 --> 00:13:04,360 where to boot from. Right. And this is potentially more complicated and annoying than one might think. 135 00:13:05,080 --> 00:13:10,680 Um, the easy way is to set up what we're going to set up on a USB stick and just plug it into the 136 00:13:10,680 --> 00:13:15,320 computer and boot off the USB stick. But then we'd be adding storage and we said we were getting 137 00:13:15,320 --> 00:13:20,600 rid of that, right? I guess. So instead, we're going to use our router. Now you might be familiar 138 00:13:20,600 --> 00:13:26,360 with a DHCP server. It gives devices on your network and IP address. Yeah. It can also give 139 00:13:26,360 --> 00:13:34,120 them other things, specifically where to look for storage. Interesting. Okay. Now the router you 140 00:13:34,120 --> 00:13:39,160 have a ubiquity dream machine doesn't have the most advanced DHCP configuration. So you can only 141 00:13:39,160 --> 00:13:45,000 really tell it one location to look, which obviously doesn't work great if we have 10 computers trying 142 00:13:45,000 --> 00:13:49,640 to boot off of it, right? Because then they'd all be getting the same drive. Right. So we made it 143 00:13:49,640 --> 00:13:55,800 a little bit more complicated and I'm running a web server that it talks to and tells it its MAC 144 00:13:55,800 --> 00:14:01,160 address. And then based on the Mac Address, it responds with the disk that it's supposed to use. 145 00:14:01,160 --> 00:14:06,760 It sounds complicated, but honestly, it's like 30 lines in a script here. You can look at this. 146 00:14:06,760 --> 00:14:11,800 Like this is the name of the device and this is the disk it's about to go to. And this is the MAC 147 00:14:11,800 --> 00:14:17,000 address. All right. I'm going to link all of the like scripty things we used in the description 148 00:14:17,000 --> 00:14:20,280 if for whatever reason you want to try to do this. What we're going to be using to install 149 00:14:20,280 --> 00:14:27,000 Windows is Windows PE or the Windows pre-installation environment. It's like many Windows that most of 150 00:14:27,000 --> 00:14:31,960 the time is used for network installing Windows, which is what we're doing. You have to take the 151 00:14:31,960 --> 00:14:38,760 image that you make and modify it slightly, namely just to add the network drivers. In our case, 152 00:14:38,760 --> 00:14:43,960 that would be Melanox drivers and I've already done that. Okay. But it also means I need to 153 00:14:43,960 --> 00:14:50,840 modify this boot script because which Mac Address do you want? Oh boy. Oh, wait, wait, yeah, right, 154 00:14:51,960 --> 00:14:58,200 it should be 98. Checking media presence, media present. Okay, we're good. All right. 155 00:14:58,200 --> 00:15:04,040 Oh, it worked. Wow. That's, that's great. We are glossing over a lot of this, but you'll see the 156 00:15:04,040 --> 00:15:09,000 scripts down below. This would be the one that you would use to boot Windows PE. We're glossing 157 00:15:09,000 --> 00:15:16,200 over so much. This is like the glossiness. It's so shiny. Editor, can you make this shot just 158 00:15:16,200 --> 00:15:22,200 like really shiny? Ew. Is that like a filter? Why does it look like wet? Set boot URL. That's like 159 00:15:22,200 --> 00:15:30,520 the file storage location. Initiator IQN is like the name of your machine. And then sandhook, 160 00:15:30,520 --> 00:15:36,520 that attaches the disk. You can see his name Linus. And this is the bits it needs to download 161 00:15:36,520 --> 00:15:41,560 for Windows PE and then boot. And then when you go to actually boot, you just change the sandhook 162 00:15:41,560 --> 00:15:47,720 to sand boot and then just comment all this out. And in theory, it should just boot. Okay. Yeah, 163 00:15:47,720 --> 00:15:51,800 wow. Look at that. We're in. So we're going to mount a network drive that has our Windows 164 00:15:51,800 --> 00:15:57,400 installer on it. I don't know if it's strictly necessary, but I like injected the proper drivers 165 00:15:57,400 --> 00:16:01,720 into the Windows installer. Okay. You can do that while you're like selecting your disk. It'll 166 00:16:01,800 --> 00:16:06,760 say install driver. Yeah. We'll just prompt you. I just did it because I didn't want to have to screw 167 00:16:06,760 --> 00:16:14,440 with that. It's every time. Every time. Oh, boy. Oh, no, it's going to do that thing. Why? Okay, 168 00:16:14,440 --> 00:16:23,080 well, no, I can just use this one. I think you need to unplug the SSDs. This is the step that 169 00:16:23,080 --> 00:16:30,680 usually fails. Please God, please, please. God can't help you where we're going. This is the step 170 00:16:30,680 --> 00:16:36,680 that installs drivers. I think it's good. When I was researching this, everyone talked about how 171 00:16:36,680 --> 00:16:41,560 this is just like an absolute nightmare to do and like disable Windows update and all this stuff. 172 00:16:41,560 --> 00:16:48,280 It seems to just work as long as you have a Nick that supports it. We ran into one very modern Nick 173 00:16:48,280 --> 00:16:54,280 that just didn't support it. Those 10 gig Aquanta ones that are in the LAN PCs. That's why when 174 00:16:54,280 --> 00:16:57,560 we were talking about this at the beginning of the video, we were saying two and a half gig 175 00:16:57,560 --> 00:17:03,400 because we were using the onboard real tech. I tried for days to get it to work, but their 176 00:17:03,400 --> 00:17:07,800 driver just refuses to launch at boot time. We're going to boot into NPE one more time because 177 00:17:07,800 --> 00:17:12,280 we have to make a registry edit. I'm not 100% sure if it's 100% necessary, but there's a ton 178 00:17:12,280 --> 00:17:15,880 of people that mentioned it causes blue screens if you don't. We're just going to disable the page 179 00:17:15,880 --> 00:17:21,160 file. To be clear, disabling your page file could cause more stability problems than it solves, 180 00:17:21,160 --> 00:17:24,760 so it's not something that we would recommend under normal circumstances. This is just 181 00:17:25,640 --> 00:17:30,840 experimental for now. Wait, is it just working? Is this it? I think it's just working. This 182 00:17:31,640 --> 00:17:38,840 shouldn't be that cool to me, but I'm not going to lie. It kind of is. I'm just using a computer 183 00:17:38,840 --> 00:17:43,400 like I would normally use a computer. I'm going to install a program like I would normally install 184 00:17:43,400 --> 00:17:49,000 a program. There are definitely some red flags. You can see the active time of my boot drive here 185 00:17:49,000 --> 00:17:55,960 is 100% and my average response time, while it's usually pretty reasonable in the sub-20 186 00:17:55,960 --> 00:18:03,160 milliseconds range, occasionally it'll pop up to half a second. That's a yikes. You don't want to 187 00:18:03,160 --> 00:18:09,240 see that. This is not a CPU issue, how long it's taking to extract this Steam package. I have a 188 00:18:09,240 --> 00:18:17,960 7950X. Oh wow, do you see that? Average response time as it's testing random writes is getting into 189 00:18:17,960 --> 00:18:26,440 the multiple seconds. That bad. Also, even these sequential results are a fraction of what I was 190 00:18:26,440 --> 00:18:33,480 expecting to be getting, even with the PCIe slot limitations. Oh wow. Even before the game starts 191 00:18:33,480 --> 00:18:40,040 downloading, okay, there it finally goes. Just the reservation process was taking up 100% of the 192 00:18:40,040 --> 00:18:46,920 active time of the drive. Still is actually. Network is doing nothing. And to be clear, 193 00:18:46,920 --> 00:18:51,480 this is not the fault of those Kyoksia drives. They're just like, yeah, we'll send over storage 194 00:18:51,480 --> 00:18:56,440 if you guys are doing a wild project. Those are really fast drives. So this comes down to the 195 00:18:56,440 --> 00:19:01,480 limitations of our network infrastructure and our implementation. How's it going? Oh, you've got 196 00:19:01,480 --> 00:19:08,840 four of them working? That's sick. How's that? Oh, it's terrible. Really? Yeah. Why? Just everything 197 00:19:08,840 --> 00:19:19,000 is terrible. Like slow? Oh yeah. Even just launching Steam took a while. Jake, I'm logging into Steam 198 00:19:19,000 --> 00:19:25,320 on this system and I just got a system leg spike that was so intense, I couldn't move the mouse 199 00:19:25,320 --> 00:19:35,080 cursor. Not good. There's something very wrong with the permissions on the SMB share and it just 200 00:19:35,160 --> 00:19:47,240 like, yeah, okay. It's not very happy. It was an interesting experiment. I want to know now if 201 00:19:47,240 --> 00:19:53,640 you can make it go fast. Me too. But I think that's an experiment for another day. I want to go unplug 202 00:19:53,640 --> 00:20:00,360 one SSD. I'm going to do it right now. Note that we've got four systems running right now, one of 203 00:20:00,360 --> 00:20:09,320 which is actively verifying the integrity of... Oh, you did it already. Okay. Well, that's one 204 00:20:09,320 --> 00:20:15,880 thing it does well. Was I supposed to wait? But I think it might finally be time to talk about 205 00:20:15,880 --> 00:20:22,280 the disadvantages. Which one? You made every computer in your house way slower. You added a 206 00:20:22,280 --> 00:20:26,920 single point of failure. So if that server has a problem, which you probably will, 207 00:20:26,920 --> 00:20:32,600 none of your computers work. And how are you going to fix that server? You don't have a computer to 208 00:20:32,600 --> 00:20:37,800 manage it with to try to fix it. It's great. And you've added a whole bunch of costs that 209 00:20:37,800 --> 00:20:43,240 realistically you could put two consumer grade drives in every one of your machines and run 210 00:20:43,240 --> 00:20:49,800 RAID 1. And complexity and management headaches. But I'm just stoked that this works. I think it's 211 00:20:49,800 --> 00:20:55,160 cool. And the fact that it would work with just about any computer, even if we wouldn't recommend 212 00:20:55,160 --> 00:21:00,200 doing this at home. Like, man, okay. The fact that the real techniques work at all. If we could 213 00:21:00,200 --> 00:21:05,560 tune it, something like a LAN cafe. Oh, I could totally see this like that. From a manageability 214 00:21:05,560 --> 00:21:09,400 standpoint, where you actually have an IT admin who's working on it instead of just a home user? 215 00:21:09,400 --> 00:21:14,360 Usually when you have a big install base of hundreds of computers, you might use folder 216 00:21:14,360 --> 00:21:19,080 redirection. You have a local disk and then you just like redirect the user folders to a network 217 00:21:19,080 --> 00:21:22,680 share or something like that. That way you're optimizing your storage use through things like 218 00:21:22,680 --> 00:21:28,600 deduplication and compression. You're also making it way easier for IT to manage how much space 219 00:21:28,600 --> 00:21:35,080 everybody's using and make sure that if something gets accidentally deleted or intentionally deleted. 220 00:21:35,080 --> 00:21:44,040 Defreeze. It can be restored. But this is dumb. I wouldn't recommend booting Windows over iSCSI. 221 00:21:44,040 --> 00:21:51,320 It does seemingly work, but. But I would recommend checking out Kyoksia's CD8s. They're PCIe Gen4 222 00:21:51,320 --> 00:21:58,040 drives with NVMe 1.4 support. They use their 112 layer 3D TLC flash. They're very fast, 223 00:21:58,040 --> 00:22:02,440 they're very great, and they have a whole lineup of other drives if they don't specifically 224 00:22:02,440 --> 00:22:06,200 meet your need. And you can check them all out at the link down below. Thank you Kyoksia 225 00:22:06,200 --> 00:22:14,520 for making it possible for us to deploy Jake on Fool's errands like this for extended periods 226 00:22:14,520 --> 00:22:20,200 of time because it's pretty cool. And look, now we can take those drives and build them into a new 227 00:22:20,200 --> 00:22:26,520 NAS. Yeah, and do something useful with those. If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe go check out 228 00:22:26,520 --> 00:22:31,800 the one where Jake and I built a NAS for your house, which is no longer here.