You've probably seen the metric boatload of videos that we make every year at CES,
but the thing is, in spite of being called, and I quote,
the most powerful tech event in the world, the show runs out of Las Vegas,
where the hotels don't exactly have the fastest internet.
So instead of sending our footage back home to the studio to be edited,
we have to bring our editors to the footage. And there's a lot of footage, so much so that a couple of years ago, we built this.
And you might think, wow, Linus, that looks like a crappy old business machine.
And you're right. But I promise it's got a heart of gold and a heart of Kyokuse CM6 NVMe storage,
specifically 60 terabytes of it that allows our editors to work on location
with the same speed and efficiency as they would with the crazy servers we have here in our studio,
all without even having to think about running out of space.
It's small enough to fit in a... Yes, thank you for that, Jake.
Carry on. And it has enough networking to support more editing machines than we could ever need at the show.
But it has a major flaw. It's, at least with the case, way too heavy.
I actually almost missed my flight last year because of this thing.
It just so happened that the airline check-in manager was a fan and was like, okay, he can go.
We don't want that to happen again. So it's time for a portable NAS V2, smaller, lighter,
but just as capable. And we're going to be using...
Oh, oh yeah, you have the box. Do you want the box or the actual thing?
Sorry. Meet the Mini's Forum MSO1 Mini PC.
This thing's got to be what? A quarter of the volume of what we built before?
And if the spec page is to be believed, we'll be making basically no compromises to performance.
Perhaps the best part is you could just buy one of these online,
no weird modifications required. Check this out.
I can even fit our sponsor in there.
We promised basically no compromises compared to our older NAS machine.
So why don't we start with networking? Any storage system that we use is going to have to be at least 10 gig Ethernet.
Good for around one Gigabyte per second of throughput
to the MacBooks that our editors bring to see. Yes. But this has not one, but two onboard Intel-powered 10 gig SFP plus ports.
Not unlike the system that it's replacing. But on top of that, it also has dual two and a half gig
and dual 40 gig USB four ports, which could easily run 10 or even 25 gig Thunderbolt adapters.
Now we wouldn't want to bring a 25 gig switch with us to CES, right?
Are you not? Are you? No, I'm not. What? Well, I don't know.
I'm not going to. Can never tell with you. Where am I going to put that? I'm going to bring that on the airplane.
I'm going to end up on a watch list. The point is the onboard 10 gig is already lots for what we're doing,
but it's cool that we could go faster if we wanted to. Speaking of faster, is that a freaking PCIe by 16X slot on a computer this small?
It's a half height slot. So there are some limitations.
I call them line of slots. That's a great name for them.
Unfortunately, while it is a 16X slot, only eight of the lanes are hooked up.
But that's still a ton of bandwidth to play with if you wanted to add something like a couple additional SSDs
or in our case, an NVIDIA Quadro P1000.
A half height. Oh my God. It's so cute.
Single slot workstation GPU. Now, this might be a bit of an older card,
but realistically, it's powerful enough for our purposes.
Actually, why do we need your workstation card? We're going to get into that.
And let's read the bloody script, brother. Ah, which we'll talk about in a minute.
But the system officially supports up to NVIDIA's current gen RTX 2000 E
ADA with a whopping 16 gigs of VRAM. Or if you're feeling crafty,
you can install this sick custom single slot cooler from Nerdware
onto an RTX 4000 ADA SFF like Kraft Computing showed off recently.
We're going to have all that linked in the description if you wanted to do something like this for yourself.
As for why we need a GPU in a NAS, I mean, we're not running a Plex server on it, are we?
Well, I don't think I told you, but I actually did find a place in Vegas with good internet.
HyperX Arena Esports Venue. And they offered to let us keep this machine there,
which is great. It's just that they're not open 24 seven
like everything else in Las Vegas. So we need to like export a video at two in the morning,
which I'm going to try not to, but it happens.
This way we can run a VM on this machine, remote in and render a video from wherever.
That is awesome. And it will still have good internet. But why not go with something newer?
I think I know the answer. And workstation cards are expensive. And that was on the shelf.
And because I had a better idea. Huzzah! The new Mac Mini M4.
It's so small. And this is so small that I can bring both.
And to be honest, this Mac Mini will absolutely crush this system,
even with the best GPU we could possibly put in there. This thing is actually kind of incredible,
especially for the price. And for Adobe apps, macOS is better anyways.
So that's why we use MacBooks for our editors.
Normally here, we're a PC house, but Premiere is just so much more stable on the MacBooks.
And we don't have time to screw around with that stuff when we're at a show. Of course, anything would shred the performance
of our MSO one in his current state. While you can buy it, and I read you to go out of the box system,
we got ours as a bare bones. So it still doesn't have any memory or storage.
Oh, cool. DDR5 Sodems. Let's go.
Every once in a while, I'm like, oh yeah, Bushkin still exists.
They actually have some really cool stuff. It doesn't have labels on it,
so you wouldn't know what it is. Oh, but it's on here. Oh, no, are you kidding me?
Yeah, those are dual 48 gig DDR5 5600 mega transfer Sodem.
Wow. So we are technically downgrading our capacity,
128 to 96, but it's close,
and we're going from 3200 to 5600.
It's not going to be a problem. Now I just have to figure out
how to get it into the system. Phillips zero, perhaps.
Yes, sir, yes, sir. Ah, ooh, that's cute.
You can take the fan off without actually removing the heat sink to get the Sodem slots.
Oh, and that gives them lots of airflow too. I love it. Yeah, but you're going to remove the heat sink anyways.
Oh. I heard through the Gravevine that the thermal paste they use on these,
not the greatest. A lot of the Mini's Forums boxes use liquid metal,
but this one does not. Okay, screws are out, but no, there's two more.
They're under the foam. If you feel it right there. I got to take the foam off?
There, I'll just poke through. Oh, that's horrible, Jake.
That's the other one. Ew. It's not the worst thing ever.
I'd actually rather you do it like that than rip the foam off
because it probably won't stick back on. Remember when CPUs were square?
I do. I mean, look at this thing. It's a laptop chip.
It's a tall boy. It's a laptop chip. Or a short wide boy.
I assume this is Intel then because AMD doesn't look like that.
Yeah, they actually sell a few different versions of the MSO1,
but we went for the top dog. Core i9-13900H.
Given the form factor, like I said, it is a laptop chip, but it is no slouch.
14 cores, six of which are high-clocking performance cores
reaching peak speeds of up to 5.4 GHz
with the rest being low-power efficiency cores. But this chip is ready
for a max turbo power of 115 watts.
How is that a mobile chip? Well, it's a... I mean, I guess that's why their CEO's gone.
Yeah. I was just primed to say,
yeah, I wasn't expecting you to say that. Jesus.
That's nice. He's prepared to agree with me even when he hasn't heard what I said.
I mean, usually not, but I just... I mean, with the size of this cooler
or the size of the cooler in any laptop, it's not going to be able to do that kind of wattage sustained.
No, in fact, Minisform actually limits it to 80 watts in the bias,
but they do allow you to change it. And since I heard that the thermal paste is kind of crappy,
PTM7950 from LTPstore.com. Okay. And maybe we can turn the wattage up then?
Yeah. This stuff's actually perfect for this application. Funnily enough, the reason we started carrying it
was because of the crazy improvements people were seeing after upgrading laptop chips with it.
Because on a normal desktop CPU, which has a metal heat spreader,
the thermal paste might only see like 70, 80 degrees.
But on a laptop chip, it's a bare die. And you might actually see temperatures of 100, 110 degrees,
which normal thermal paste is not made for. This stuff, it handles it.
We'll throw some screenshots on the screen, maybe a before and after to see what the temps are like.
Oh, did you get before temps? Yeah, oh yeah. Oh, nice. I'm sure it's quite a bit better.
Here's the application process, by the way. You just cut yourself a little piece, peel the one side.
Hope that you cut the right size piece, and then peel back the top.
That's a lot. What's trippy is it goes on like a thermal pad,
especially if you put it in the fridge or freezer before you work with it. So you can see it's a solid right now.
But once it heats up, it changes to a liquid so that it fills in all the grooves,
just like a more traditional paste would. Oh, I forgot to clean that.
Yep. I believed in you though. I thought too much of you. You put so much, oh my god.
That's fine. You can't put too much paste on something. We proved it recently that you cannot.
You definitely can. You can put it even in between the pins and the CPU.
Really? And it still worked? Oh yeah. Oh my god, you're not. What?
That's the GPU mounting solution? Look, okay. Justin has not had time to make a bracket for this GPU
because it's missing the half height bracket. And he's going to today before we go to CES tomorrow.
I'm sure it'll definitely happen. Now, since we're talking about using this as a NAS,
we should definitely talk about storage, which is another one of this system's strong suits.
It has not one, not two, but three M.2 storage slots,
which is kind of crazy. Now in the old system, we used two of Kyoksia's 30 terabyte CM6 SSDs
because we had them on the shelf and it's nice to not have
to worry about capacity. And while we could still use a 2.5 inch SSD
with this handy M.2 to 2.5 inch adapter,
they actually include with the MSO1. Now that we have experience running a NAS at a show,
we know that even three or four terabytes is lots.
So instead of me having to worry about lugging around a $20,000 in Kyoksia SSDs on a plane,
we're going to install a pair of the Sabrant Rocket 4 Plus
8 terabyte drives. They're still stupid fast with a ton of capacity,
but at about a tenth of the price of the Kyoksia drives. Then for boot storage, a normie 512 gig Gen 3 Sabrant Rocket.
And I think with that, we're all ready to power this thing on. This looks great.
The entire package with networking plus the Mac,
plus its external network card, is smaller than our previous machine.
Where is that thing? Look at this. That's freaking awesome.
Yeah, I could honestly probably just like stuff that in an LTT Store backpack.
I think it's lighter than the previous setup too. The whole thing.
8.26 pounds, 10.68. Not to mention we didn't have a Mac mini before,
and that switch would have been with this computer too. Yeah, this is awesome.
Yeah. Does it work? Oh yeah. As with most of our storage builds,
this system's running true NAS scale. It's a staple in the network attached storage community,
and it makes use of ZFSA. Combo file system slash volume manager,
we have been using for years. I already went ahead and put our two 8TB drives,
whenever it loads, into a mirror. Is that enough storage space for the entire trade show?
We already addressed that. I was working. I had a meeting.
The point is that a mirror will create a redundant copy of any footage or projects that we copy to it.
So in the event of a drive failure, which probably won't happen,
we will still have a fully functioning NAS. Are you going to talk about your Windows 11
version machine with Premiere? Why do we even need that if we're going to be using the Mac to export?
Because this is our plan C. If for whatever reason the Mac, not responsive,
we can't get into the building, right? Sure. We're just out of luck. Well, we put the GPU in there.
We might as well have the VM ready to go. So we started up. That's also part of why it wasn't worth going
to buy a fancy new one, right? Right, because we probably won't use it.
This is our plan C. And so you've just got it passed through to the VM?
Yep. Cool. And I don't even need to leave the VM running.
Like we can just, if we need to, turn it on. Are we using like a Pi KVM or something like that
for the machine itself? It's funny you should ask.
Another super tiny thing, the Nano KVM. They finally open sourced the firmware on this thing.
And this is the more expensive one with the screen and stuff. But the base model version of this is like 30 US dollars.
Basically what this does is it takes any computer,
desktop, laptop, you know, little mini PC like this.
Mac mini. And it turns it into almost like a server
with a remote management interface. So you plug this into your network
you plug this into your USB port and your HDMI port
and remote access over the network to any machine.
Like a digital keyboard and mouse. So cool.
And actually this one is pretty cool too because it has those pins.
If you have this in like a desktop computer and I guess in theory you could do it with this
you can run little wires to like your power on switch.
So if the system is the bed you can hard restart it.
That is so awesome. Are we going to wire it up? No, I don't think that's going to be a problem.
The system also does technically have Intel's, I think it's called the Vepro management thing.
So you can wake on land but like extra super special wake on land. I think it'll be okay.
Okay. I like this one a lot too because unlike the Pi KVM
it doesn't require additional power.
Oh nice it can just be powered off the system. Unless the machine doesn't output enough
but as far as I know it does. Is it off? I wouldn't know because you know.
Is it? You gotta press the power button on the bottom. Smart design.
Let's look at plan B. Eh? Yep. That's a fast processor.
God damn Format Mini is sick. Yeah I mean like if you tried to build a computer
with the same amount of money I'm sure you could build one that was like technically faster for editing.
Oh right and it costs twice as much once you increase the RAM and storage one step.
Yeah but all we would realistically use it for is
taking a final video making a couple little edits and exporting.
And sure that might take 45 minutes instead of 30 minutes
but at least we can do it at all. I see how we're going to edit remotely if we need to
but how are you planning to ingest footage to the NAS? It's actually pretty similar to how it's set up right now
just instead of a Mac mini MacBook Pro. They already have an SD card slot right there.
All we have to do is take sorry if that's still open in Premiere.
Wow. Take our 10 gig dongle. I mean we're all going to bring one so it's fine.
We don't have to share. Plug it in. Copy over your footage.
The place that I told you that has the internet they're just going to let us have some editors hang out there.
No way. Yeah it's like an eSports venue. Oh yeah.
The thing that drives me crazy is none of that used to be necessary. The Aria and the Vidara used to have great internet
and then as far as I can tell because of just like
the ownership group for pretty much all the hotels on the Strip
being either like one or two and then all basically colluding
to make sure that none of them are too much better than the others
meant that the fast internet went away. Yeah they all as far as I can tell have the same internet service provider
and it's all like 10 megabit. And they used to have hardwired jacks in the rooms
and they just pulled them out. It would have cost them literally nothing to just leave them there
but they couldn't do that. Everything's Wi-Fi so everything is dog s***.
Yeah I'm not recommending this but sometimes they have
you know the AP is just plugged in you can just unplug it. Plug it into your laptop.
I didn't tell you to do that. I did the same thing in Japan. Sometimes it works.
Of course not all of our editing is going to be done down in Vegas. What about what we have to send back to the office here?
Right we have faster internet than we usually do but not like 10 gig like we have at the office.
So we're not going to be sending the raw footage. Instead we're going to start using proxies.
So the editors back home with our fast but not crazy fast internet
can get proxy footage and then they send the project file back
and then since we have the raw footage here you take your Mac mini or your laptop and you conform the raw footage
which is basically like replacing the proxy with it and render the video.
Cool and I think all that's left is to show how all of it fits into our commuter
backpack lttstore.com. Here we go.
I'm going to put that power cable there. I'm going to put that computer right there.
I'm going to put this other power brick which I don't even know what it's for right here.
Oh no wait that's for the computer. It should fit right? Well you still left your tech sack in there.
Yeah I know. Well I need my tech sack. How am I going to take stuff apart at the show if I don't bring my tech sack?
You're bringing this over there.
I don't know man this is looking spicy. No no no let's go and get this.
Well this can just sit right there. Yeah easy. And then this. No they're good they're good dude.
I'll put the cable up there. Okay easy peasy squeezed lemons.
Oh my god. And Macmanie's going to have a giant scratch on the top of it.
No no it's going to be fine. It's on the bottom where no one will ever see it except when they turn it on and off.
Which nobody does apparently. Oh god.
It should be what did you say 9.6 pounds heavier?
It's pretty heavy now I got a lot of screwdrivers in there too. You can't bring those on the point.
There it is. Commuter backpack no Pelican case required.
Oh this says weigh it. Here we go.
With a water bottle? Not bad. How full is it? Full.
24 pounds. That's pretty awful. And here's a 24 pound segway to our sponsor.
Do you guys like this video? Why not check out the last time we built a portable NAS.
Yes. It was sick and a lot more custom but this is so much more useful.
I mean we kept it put together this whole time. Like we actually did use it multiple times.
Yeah we used it for Computex as well. I think right? No we used it at we used it at the something.
Some other show. The land party I think I used it as a cash.
Oh my god.