One of the hard drives in my home server, it just died with my data on it.
And that's totally okay because you see I'm smart and always use protection.
Look, devices disabled, but the contents are emulated because I use not one but
two parody drives, meaning I can lose up
to two drives in this bad boy before I
risk the rest of my data. So, all I got to do is plop in a replacement disc, let
it rebuild from parody, and Bob's your uncle. Server fixed. Except I do
actually have a problem today. When I built this machine, it was still the
early days of a company when you could uh borrow stuff that nobody was using.
Stolen. Wo wo wo wo. So, my choice of hardware
was dictated less by what actually made sense and more by what nobody else could
possibly want, which is how I ended up with these 8 TB Seagate archival drives.
To be clear, I'm not saying they're lowquality. I've been running these
since 2016 when they were manufactured.
I'm just saying that shingled magnetic drives are not great for RAID or even
UNRAID for that matter due to their abominably slow write speeds. And what
really sucks is that while these drives are still available on Newegg, cost per
Gigabyte is awful at about $27.
For some context, I could get my hands on Seagate Iron Wolves in the same
capacity. So, proper actual Naz drives
for just around $20 a terabyte. That is
also a terrible deal. See, here's the thing. There's a fixed cost to
manufacture a hard drive. You've got to build a chassis. You've got to have a
motor. You've got to have platters and time on the production line. So, as
newer, higher capacity drives come out, these lower capacity drives can only
reach a certain point in terms of price, which means that there's often a sweet
spot for dollars per gig. For example, a 16 TB Exos, that's an enterprisegrade
drive, is just $15 per terabyte. That is
only a 50% increase in cost for double
the capacity. Now, if this was for work, I might be fussy and demand matching
drives, but this is for my house where I'm running Unrade. One of the key
benefits of which [music] is the ability to mix and match. So, I'm just going to
pick up whatever's the best bang for the buck and stuff it in there.
Unfortunately, with that flexibility comes some trade-offs. like a regular
RAID array. I could replace my dead 8 TBTE drive with a larger one, say a 22
TB Iron Wolf Pro, but I would only get to use a fraction of that capacity. 8 TB
to be precise. So, it matches the rest of my drives. Then, Unrade's flexibility
shows up again. And as long as my par
drives match the capacity of my replacement drive, I get the full juice.
So, I made the call today to replace two
drives, neither of which is my dead one.
Then, I'm going to take my two parody drives and throw them into the array to
replace the dead one to give me a little extra capacity today. And with these
juiced up parody drives to give me an easy, coste effective path to even more
storage. The bad news is, as clever as our devious plan is, it is a little bit
more complicated to execute. A straight drive replacement is pretty simple
because it uses the parody drives to rebuild the data. But if we want to
replace parody drives while we have a dead drive, is there a safe way to do
this? Do we need a third drive [music] to sit and take that spot for now?
I don't know if you can do that in unrated. I do happen to have a third drive. So,
we could just replace the dead one, then do the parody swap. The way to do it would be to replace the
dead drive and then replace the parody drives. I think we should do that. I have a
third drive. Okay, we're going to cheat. I mean, in theory, we could replace one
parody drive at a time. I think. But here's the thing. The most likely
time for a hard drive to die is during an array rebuild because you're putting
strain on all the drives in the array. So having two parody drives means that
even if one more drive does fail while we're doing a rebuild, we're still
golden. If we were to intentionally
take out a parody drive, then lose a drive during a rebuild, we would be
kicking Jake because that was his suggestion. I'd also be kicking myself
because I knew better. I knew better.
Let's just use uh a third drive.
Yeah. And then that way you have even more capacity. Do you happen to know the serial of the
dead one? Does it happen to be
F4SB? What are my odds here?
No. Rat. Ewde. Ewde. Got them.
That's not so bad. Are they screwed in? Uh, I mean they're supposed to be
screwed in. I don't see any screw. Oh, we got one screw, boys. Yep. This server
was built by me with this Noctua edition
LT screwdriver. How freaking awesome does that look? You can sign up for a
notification when it gets in stock. ltstore.com. Two screws is enough,
right? Enough screwing up the segue to our sponsor. Sorry, I was supposed to do
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the link in the video description. Did you add the other drives yet?
Well, not yet. Do you want me to add the other ones right now? I might as well.
See, I could, but all the hardware for this computer is inside it. Why don't
you just take one screw from that drive that had two screws and use that?
These are really shoddy trays. I don't know if one screw is enough.
I mean, it's just got to hold the drive attached to the sled when you pull it in
and out. I think it's probably fine. Oh my god. Against my better judgment.
What are you talking about? You were just saying your sleds have no screws in them anyways. Better judgment, my ass.
I just put that bloody archive drive back in.
Where did I put it? Oh my gosh. Ew. Ewde. Yeah, it wouldn't have actually
screwed anything up, but it would have confused me really good. Oh no, another
drive died. Got my super convenient radiator on the back of my rack here,
which makes it really easy to get at everything. I'm going to get a little
bit older and I'm going to start really caring a lot more about the ergonomics
of my setups. This procedure is going to vary a bit depending on what NAS
software you're running, but fundamentally the idea is the same.
You've got a disc that is no longer present. You can see it's showing not
installed. And we want to take a combination of the data that's on our
other discs and the data that's on our parody discs and use that to rebuild the
data that used to be on it. I have never actually done this in Unre before.
Yeah, that was a really fun way to say it's a pain in the ass to do this in
Unre. I just happen to be wearing my Trunass
scale shirt today. It's very easy to do in Trunass. You don't even have to shut
down the entire array like I'm about to do. Trunaz is way better in a lot of ways.
But [music] the way that it's not way better is the ability to just
willy-nilly, oh, I don't know, I'll throw one drive in or [music] I'll throw
another drive in. Oh, by the way, they don't match at all. With that said, there are plugins for Trunz that allow
you to get kind of similar functionality. For personal use, I still
think Unra is pretty strong. Um, we just pick whichever one we want.
Yeah. So, this is going to replace our broken drive. How
spicy do you want to get today? Cuz if I do that, this is my secondary copy of this data.
Oh, so then why don't we just full send? Well, because then I will only have one
copy of my data. Besides, you can't full send. You can't do one drive and both
parodies at once anyway. Well, full send in this situation would
be one parody and one drive. I don't know if it'll let us do that, [music]
though. I don't really want to find out. Let's not find out. Okay. Disc in parody slot is not
biggest. Wait, you can't even do [music] this? That's stupid.
What? I should be allowed to at least temporarily do this. If you're adding a
new disc or replacing a disabled disc, try parity swap.
Why wouldn't it just be like, "No, you only get 8 terabytes." Like ZFS.
I could have sworn it did. Parody drive always has to be the largest drive or
the same size as the largest. Okay, so we have to do the parody drives [music]
first. Can we just wipe this? Oh, no. No, no, no. Just
copy it all. No, no, no. Then I'll only have one copy of the data. That is not 321. Jake,
this isn't 321. This is my precious memories. Oh my gosh. Put them on Google Drive or
something. No. Why don't you use cloud storage?
Well, a number of reasons. One is any of the data that is precious to me, I don't
necessarily think should be on a cloud server somewhere, like pictures of my
kids. Number two, you could encrypt it. [music] is any of
the data that isn't particularly precious, like Linux ISOs for example,
what I'm going to pay a monthly fee to have that stored in the cloud somewhere.
No, I'm not. You could just upload just the precious stuff. Yeah, but then it's also super
inconvenient to have to go and get that stuff if I get it again. I can just have
two copies of it. That's what you're supposed to do. You make that face, but
that's what you are supposed to be online. Yeah, [music] but it isn't. It's here.
Okay. Anyways, replacing a parody drive is a lot more annoying. And I'm kind of
worried because this array drive, can I just like what happens if I remove this?
Can I start it with only one parody drive? Disable the missing disc and
bring the array online. Install replacement disc as soon as possible. But what is that going to do? That
doesn't help us. Unless I can use this now as the array disc.
Yes, you probably could. Okay, so that's what we should do then a
hopefully this doesn't break anything. I mean, if it does, it is the second.
Don't you love it when we do a guide and we're figuring it out as we go?
Well, when you replace a parody drive normally, you reset the config, which is
like which slot each disc is assigned to. You add it and then it formats it
and does everything right. But because we're missing that disc, I
was not sure about doing that. I'm less
sure about this even, but this is the route we took. There's no going back [laughter] now.
[snorts] Parody 2, return to normal operation. I
don't think so, homie. [laughter]
It's not there. Just leave it, buddy. Just leave it. It's going to be okay.
It's dismissed now. You are dismissed. So, about truness. Hey, it's fine. Okay.
So, now we shut it off again. This was surprisingly not that difficult. And
it's not forcing us to recalculate the par. We do this.
Can I do these both at the same time? No way. This is actually kind of okay.
Very. You can't do that. It wasn't very obvious to the user, but if this works,
then that's great. Yeah. Okay. What I'm concerned about is if I do this, when I go to add the other 22,
replace this one, is it going to freak out? No, it shouldn't. Okay. So, let's
Okay. I mean, theories. [gasps]
This is a spicy salami. I'm really glad that we are
experimenting on my secondary data right now.
I will say moving to a 22 TB drive is going to kind of suck because now when
you go to rebuild your parody, it's rebuilding 22 TB of parody instead of
eight. [music] But at least it's not a shingled drive. Hey, look. Parody 2 is
being reconstructed. Just give it some time. You're so impatient. Just
Why are you even worried? It's the second copy. Yeah, well, I you know, if you lose your
second copy, then you only have one copy. I only have one copy. [music]
No problem. Oh, one day in 8 hours total. Yeah, cuz
now it has to do 22 terb. So, does that mean that that other parody drive once
this is done is just going to be doing nothing? How does that work? I have no idea. Cuz if it's thinking
that the parody now is 22 TB, this is very No, that's fine because par drives can
be whatever you want. So you have this par drive is as big or larger than all
of the array discs for now. So I wonder what I guess once
if we were to try to add a 22 after this, it would complain. Correct.
Unless you remove the eight. Unless I also upgrade the other parody
drive at the same time. Then I can do whatever I want, which you should be able to do.
Oh, yeah. Right. Yeah. So the next operation, you swap the eight to a 22. You add another 22 or or
don't even I guess. Yeah, that's funny. We are using the parody
drive to replace the other one. Oh, hey. Are you out? She's out. Wow,
these Oh, they're those quality rails that are all plastic. I just had to go
help Alex for a bit. So, in the meantime, I'm going to take his old
server and put it into the new chassis without him even knowing. Fun fact, this
is actually like the original WanX server. Um, like look at this accessory
box. See that WX server?
And even cooler, there's a Windows Windows license sticker stuck to this.
Totally normal LT screwdriver. I remember this computer. [laughter]
This thing is such a piece of crap. It doesn't have a graphics card in it, so
there's no video output. And uh because it's a Workstation X299 board, there's
no onboard graphics. So, this system has no video output. earlier when it wasn't
turning on. I don't know how to see if it's working or not because there's no
video output. You press caps lock on the keyboard, but that's all you're getting.
It's so dusty, too. Look at that. That's Linus skin. Somebody on the internet
would probably pay money for that, man. He never even peeled it. Is that It
still has the plastic on it. Hold on. Oh, brand new underneath. The nicest
part of this machine. This Storinator over here is already pretty much ready
to go. I think I even cleaned it. Yeah, look at that. It's so clean in here.
Doesn't need the boot drives that are in here right now. We're going to take those out and put the Unrade cache
drives in here. Uh Unrade uses a USB stick to boot off of, which is really
not great. Um because USB drives are not very durable and they can fail, which
causes you a lot of headaches. But, uh that's not my problem. That's Linus'
problem and it makes our life a little bit easier. So, let's start moving some
stuff over. I think I've chirped him for this in the past, but this honestly is
kind of a legitimate strat. Uh, you take all the accessories for your your NAS or
your computer and you put them in a baggie and just
tuck them in there. I don't need them, so I think I'm just gonna stop touching
things I don't need. [laughter]
Tastes like 5'1. These are the cache SSDs from Linus' Unrade pool. And we do
need these because they store the virtual machine discs
and those are important. You know, I'm grateful you only put one screw in all
these drives. I know, right? It's going to make this a lot easier.
Look at these. I dropped a screw. I don't think they're magnetic.
They're not really magnetic, but the LT screwdriver is so magnetic that even the
not really magnetic screws still stick to it. I'm going to make a slight modification to this here server. By
default, there's two separate brackets that hold the SSDs at the back. And this
is really annoying because you can't take the SSDs out without unscrewing
four screws at the back that hold these two brackets and then all eight screws
on the SSDs. What you can do is forget
about that piece and just screw the SSDs into the top because that's already
plenty. And then if you need to swap them out, you just take those two screws
out and it comes out. Hey, look at that. Beautiful. We got SSD and other more
different SSD. Now, if you ever wants to move these SSDs or replace them, you
just take out those two screws and the SSD comes right out. Last but not least,
the hard drives. He doesn't have anywhere near the 60 drives that this
chassis can hold. So, I'm going to space them out uh just to make the air flow a
little bit better. It actually does make a pretty substantial difference to the drive temps.
There's dust on the drives, too.
I'm going to plug in that IPMI, which is something this server has that the other
one did not. That allows you to fully access this machine like you have a
monitor, keyboard, and mouse plugged in anywhere on the network, which is
awesome. Um, but then we need Wait, why is there water all over the floor? Is
that supposed to be like that? Ah, it sounds like not our problem.
[laughter] One of the kind of annoying things about
booting from a USB is sometimes certain systems will just be like, "That's not a
boot drive, that's a USB." And then you have to manually configure it to boot to
that as the first option. So, I don't know. It might be turning on. Oh my god,
Lionus. How many things could you possibly tangle around this? What are
the odds of just boot? Oh my god, look at that. It's booting
slow clap. Do you love Linux or what?
Just no around. Windows update
blah blah blah driver blah blah blah. Just load all the drivers. It'll be
fine. Exactly, though. The funny thing is we were just memeing that old server has a Windows 8.1 Pro uh
like OEM license stuck to the side of
it. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's basically Windows Server, right? Yeah.
Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, but Wow. That's what I ran on it.
Yeah, exactly. As our file server. Yeah, exactly. It's great how old that chassis is.
I actually had forgotten that we ever used Windows.
Windows-based SMB server. [music] Not actually that stupid. Not genius.
Look, you said it, not me. Are you ever going to use this second network port?
Nope. I'll just add it to the bond anyways.
What's the point of me even answering questions when you ask them?
Well, you know, I just try to ignore you. You know what they say. Happy
Lionus, happy life. Happy wife's boyfriend, happy life.
Oh my god. Happy boyfriend's wife.
Boyfriend's wife. This server is finally
being put to sleep. You know what? It's earned its sleep.
Did it go from Wikoff
stuff right to your house? Yeah, cuz I think this was the security
server, wasn't it, for a little bit? Yeah, I think it was decommissioned for maybe a few months and then I went, "Oh,
hey, nobody's using this and Jake hates these things." So, we're never going to
use it again. I took it home and it's been working perfectly since then.
Speaking of operating flawlessly, I plugged into the 10 gig nick that was
already in there. Did this one have 10 gig? It must have. It did. So, in theory, my downgrade is complete.
Upgraded my storage, but my processor is actually slower. It's substantially slower. This is like
a Zeon V48 core. I had a really weird
chip in here, the 9990 [music] XE. Intel
only ever made a handful of them. It was 14 cores at 5 GHz on a weird workstation
board. But there's real benefits from moving to server hardware, like the fact
that I can remote in with IPMI, even when the system's powered off, so I can
power cycle it. Or if I'm away and I get a notification that the power's gone off
at my house from my UPS, I can remote in, turn off my server, that kind of
thing. Yeah, this one didn't even have a video output. Like I was saying earlier, we
there was no way to see what it was doing. I took out my one GPU because I put it
in the Trunaz machine so that I could try and use GPU acceleration and Plex,
right? And then it turned out that GPU was defective. Anyway, hey, look at that. The parody sync is
running. So, it's rebuilding this disc [music] and then building the parody on
this disc. So, when this is done, I guess you shut down the array, remove
this disc, start it again so it thinks it's not there anymore, stop it, add the
20. You get the deal. and it will still be slow slow like this segue to our sponsor
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