They're finally here. Just
wait. I got my 24 PCIe SSDs for my new storage
server. Come on, let's go build it.
If you haven't seen Nerd Sports yet, check it out. All the episodes are
available now for free over at youtube.com/ channels
superfund. But before we begin, we are going to need some supplies. First, a
barebones server from Super Micro, the
SSG 2028 AR NR48N.
I guess we'll just roll it
there. Quad 10 GB network
card, 64 gigs of RAM, dual 2699 V422
core CPUs. Time for boring inventory
reconciliation. Oh, I've had that in the wrong field. Damn it. I was scanning the
wrong barcodes. And time for fun again.
Everybody on board the insane train.
What better place to build this new machine than our shiny new B-roll set.
All I'll need is a screwdriver and maybe a table. Time for my favorite
activity. Shocking drives. Oh, this is going to take a
while.
24 NVMe PCIe
SSDs, each rated at a theoretical up to
250 with another zero, 2500 megabytes
per second reads and 1,200 megabytes per second writes. And we are going to take
all these bad boys and we're going to put them in a gigantic RAID
array. Oh no.
cut. But how on earth do you run NVMe
drives in RAID? The answer is this very
special barebones machine from Super
Micro. In fact, this box can handle not
just 24, but 48 NVMe drives, giving us
the capacity to, without changing the model of drives that we're using, have
up to about 50 terabytes of solidstate
storage in a single box. And did I even
mention that it's all in a 2U form
factor? Now that we've got everything we need for assembly, it's time to open
this sucker up, peel off the oh so satisfying protective plastic, and take
a closer look. At the back are expansion
slots, a 1,000W 80 Plus titanium power
supply with an extra in case the first one dies, and a couple regular SATA 2
and 1/2 in drive bays cuz you know you're a badass when all of your drives
don't fit in the front of your case. Back at the front, we've got 24 NVMe
slots, but this machine supports 48.
Where do the other 24 go? Ah, that right
there is the secret of Super Micros simply double enclosures, a whole
additional bank. But how do you feed 48
PCI Expressbased drives? Here's where the magic happens. One of the three
expansion slots that runs off of the second CPU is occupied by a PCIe x16
quad U.2 card. And there are four native
ports that use a different connector on the motherboard itself that run off the
first CPU. Then both of these go to back
planes behind the banks of drives.
Since we're in here, this seems like a good time to show how the quad 10 GB
network card that we showed before goes in. This can be upgraded in the future,
though I don't see myself needing anything like that for a while. And we
can throw in our 22 core CPUs and our
relatively pedestrian 64 gigs of DDR4
RAM. I think I'll have to steal some memory from the server this is
replacing. And that's pretty much it for assembly. Time to install the drives.
Oh, there go all the drives. Well, who didn't see that one
coming? Finally done. Why is every single one of these
attached with four
screws? Anyway, let's take it over to the test
bench. So, I have all the SSDs plugged
into this card right now, which means a
theoretical 16 gigabytes per second of total bandwidth
using 16x PCIe Gen
3. Let's go find out how that theoretically translates into the real
world. Oh, it's heavy.
Okay, let's get some network connections
here. Let's get some Oh, yeah. VGA. You
know it's performance when it has VGA connectivity. Got this all set up. You'd
think I plug in servers here every once in a while, right? All right, let's
press the button and listen for the sweet sound of performance.
That's not bad for a
2U. So, fast forward half an hour. We
have got everything set up. So, disc management, we have created a RAID zero.
You're going to device manager disc drives. Oh, look. Look at
them all. Obviously, we would never run
a RAID zero. I am still looking into what will be the best way to configure
them all with a good balance of performance and redundancy. But this
video is all about taking it to the extremes. So, we're going to run ADO
with a QEP of 10 on our Z drive here and
find out just how fast it can
go. Whoa. So, now we're talking. That's
like 2800 megs per second, right? It's
like play by play. Wow. Oh, it's over
9,000. We did it. We cracked 10
gigabytes per second right speeds at
512K. Wow. Of a theoretical 16 or 15 or so.
Look at that. Over 11 gigabytes per
second rights. Over 1 Gigabyte per second reads for 8 megs. I can't imagine
it getting much higher than that. So there you have it folks. Past 4 to 8
megabytes. We're looking at read and write speeds in the neighborhood of 10
GB per second with our highest peak at
around 12.7 coming close to the
theoretical maximum of our PCI Express
X16 link here. Pretty freaking bananas
if you ask me. And we should be able to easily, even once we work some par or
redundancy into the equation, saturate our four 10 GB network connections at
the back here once we get all of those bonded
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video description. So thank you guys very much
for tuning into this video. If you disliked it, well, that's what that
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up here. I will see you guys again next
time. What's he going to do next time? Nobody knows. Maybe he's going to rip
out a fan. Ah, while it's running, hot
swap fans, [ __ ]