everyone knows Mark Rober he has dashing
good looks helped design a Mars Rover single-handedly solved the ports
pirating pandemic and even has more subscribers than me but it turns out he
can make mistakes like the way that his team is handling storage we're talking
towers of external hard drives no real
backup and worst of all editing videos off of Dropbox thankfully he knew where
to come for help that's right boys and girls today we are building not one but
two identical storage servers for the one the only Mark Rober and not only
that but we're going to show you guys how with basically zero networking
configuration no port forwarding any of
that stuff these two epic machines are
going to be able to remotely and securely sync to each other from miles
away just like I'm gonna remotely sync this message from today's sponsor cable
mod worry no more about your graphics card going pyromaniac upgrade your
default power cable to Cable mods 12 volt high power basic replacement cable
learn more at the end of the video when Mark first reached out he had already
come up with actually a pretty reasonable plan to solve their issues to
migrate off of the stacks of external hard drives they had specked out an OWC
Thunder Bay Flex 8 which is a Daz or
direct attached storage chassis that as the name implies directly connects to
the computer using a 40 gigabit Thunderbolt connection pen for remote
backup they chose a smaller Daz box from
that same company these kinds of storage docks are great for the solo
photographer or freelance video editor where only that one person needs to
access the data to their credit their current workflow only actually requires
that one computer to be able to access the raw footage in order to generate low
quality proxy footage for their remote editors once the project is complete
that computer with the raw footage directly attached to it would run the
final export for YouTube however just because that works for them today
doesn't mean it's going to work for them in the future and given the flexibility
and the upgrade ability that's afforded by a DIY Nas or a network attached
storage box like being able to access the footage on any computer on your
network or I mean heck any computer in the world through a VPN but when you're
spending this kind of money and you operate on a scale larger than one
person Nas is a no-brainer not to
mention that whatever machine you end up plugging these storage boxes into is
going to be bogged down every time it has to sync to that off-site backup so
what do we build in well the capacity is
easy to figure out he needs lots he
asked for 200 terabytes at each site but
what about the form factor or the hardware platform originally we specced
out two options one based on AMD's Enterprise epic platform and one with
their consumer grade ryzen Parts but it was immediately apparent that the cost
was going to be basically the same so epic was the obvious choice this is
going to be a really fun build because while Mark obviously wants to take a
spare no expense approach to keeping his data safe we also don't want to waste
his money meaning that this is a really Solutions oriented video and we tried to
keep it really practical so back when we specked this out the Epic 7302p a 16
core processor was available on eBay for around 380 dollars a piece now the 16
course might not be the fastest on the market but they're frankly overkill for
a hard drive based storage workload like this and considering the platform
advantages like tons of PCIe lanes and
registered ECC memory it's basically the perfect option and it's gotten even more
perfect if you check eBay today you can pick these things up for just a hundred
and fifty dollars used or with a used super micro motherboard for less than
five hundred dollars now some of you are probably freaking out right now like
seriously Linus you're putting a use CPU in a system for Mark Rober that's fair
that thought did occur to us but if you
pay attention to how used CPUs drop in price when each new generation comes out
they go and there's a reason for that it's
because CPUs are damn near indestructible compared to
say a motherboard or a GPU so what happens
is you've got this glut of CPUs on the market with no boards to put them in you
say indestructible can we cut to that clip of him destroying that ten thousand
dollar Zeon yes very funny except that's also a great way to prove my point
because that ten thousand dollar CPU
that I ruined four years ago can now be found on the used market for as little
as a thousand dollars or if you're willing to accept a qualification sample
full performance one as little as 350
bucks I mean for these kinds of prices Mark could literally have four spare
chips sitting on hand with needing only
a screwdriver to swap them out for the price of one brand new one coming back
to our motherboard unlike a lot of other data center platforms the Epic sp3
socket was used on three generations of chips Naples Rome and Milan that means
that there's still a metric boatload of boards that are available both new and
on the used Market but since motherboards aren't anywhere near as
reliable as CPUs we ordered a brand new pair of ASRock racks Rome d8-2t I love
these boards we've got several of them in the office that have been Rock Solid
and they have an absolutely comical amount of i o there's an ipmi port for
Remote Management dual onboard 10 gig networking meaning we don't even need a
separate network card although we'd have plenty of places to put them with seven
PCIe gen 4x16 slots dual m.2 dual
oculink which is another PCIe by four each eight SATA ports through these
onboard mini SAS HD connectors and eight
channel memory all mounted to a standard
ATX form factor PCB this thing is it's
better than the bee's knees it's the and for a b that's that's honey
right I think it'll fit in basically any case and it shows off the Monstrous 102
28 PCIe Lanes of our epic CPU quite
nicely next up is RAM Apparently one
moment please since we're using epic Micron sent over four 32 Gigabyte ddr4
registered ECC modules that are running at 3200 Mega transfers per second RAM
honestly speaking is also another place that you can save some money if you're
doing this at home it's just that when we were looking the price cap wasn't
huge for this specific capacity and speed between brand new and used we're
talking a difference of about twenty dollars a stick now the experienced
among you may be raising your eyebrows a little bit at our RAM configuration on
the one hand we've got 128 gigs in a mass but on the other hand
we've kind of cheaped out by using only
four sticks on an eight channel platform we are giving up half of our total
potential memory bandwidth but believe it or not there's a pretty good reason
for both of those things one is that
okay say you're using a qnap small business Nas or something like that
you're not going to use much RAM but we are using true Nas scale and since it
uses ZFS it uses system memory as a read
cache for our most frequently accessed files this is called Arc or adaptive
replacement cache and the rough guideline is to have one Gigabyte of Arc
per terabyte of magnetic storage so we
are right in that sweet spot with 128 gigs as for why we only opted for a four
Channel configuration well if we were using NVMe storage we might need the
additional speed but because we're using hard drives uh I don't think our memory
bandwidth is going to be an issue and this gives Mark plenty of room to
upgrade in the future all he has to do is double his memory and he could throw
twice as many hard drives into his system of course given Mark's budget
that is to say he didn't really provide one we just tried to be sensible we
could have easily put in twice as much memory today or four times or eight
times as much and when we're talking about a very read intensive application
like video editing there would have been a clear benefit to that but there are
other ways to skin this cat DFS has another trick up its sleeve called L2 or
level 2 Arc which is a second tier of read caching that can be set up using
commodity ssds and that's exactly what we're going to do with this one terabyte
sabrin Gen 4 NVMe SSD now it's worth mentioning that you can go ludicrous
overkill on level 2 Arc and put like 10
terabytes in a system like this but that
would actually use up some of your RAM
based art capacity to index it which could actually end up hurting your
performance also the level 2 Arc is filled up by stuff that gets evicted
from the main Arc cache so it might not
even help until your system has actually been powered on for quite a while the
last thing to go on our board is our CPU Cooler and we've gone with a Noctua u14s
TR4 sp3 we want this machine to be reliable in the long term so using an
AIO liquid cooler was out of the question we also want it to be quiet!
since one of them is going to live at Mark's house and the other is going to
be within earshot of people's desks at their office this one happens to meet
both of our requirements just like I am
required to tell you about the LTT screwdriver that is reliable and soon to
be available and that's right
um they're not oh these are like big chunky ones we're trying to put two fans
on it that way in the unlikely event that one of them fails the machine will
still operate completely normally it's not to get extra cooling this is not a
particularly hot running chip this one has one of the big chunky ones on it
what you left one of them on there no there are five big chunky ones the four
that I have and the one that's on here holy
okay let me go steal one more from another fan are you kidding me
what the are you just screwing with me at this
point I'm not like legitimately no legitimately I'm not screwing with you
so you're telling me one of these came out of the box with the wrong one on there there's no way
no they must have gotten mixed up no the one that was still missing one was the
one you brought me wait I have three fans oh my god oh this one I borrowed it
from that's the closer color match is it yeah
I don't think so I think you're wrong what yeah that's really close no no
that's wrong this is a closer one no way oh the brownies no way it's not even
close okay why the hell was this one outside or something no they just are
all over the place remember when I said that this thing is gonna live at Mark's
house obviously he doesn't have a server rack at his house
kind of crazy person would have a server Rack in their house especially a pink
one that means that building this into a rack mount chassis isn't necessarily the
best option this time around typically for a high capacity storage machine like
this you want a rack mount since regular
Tower cases just don't have enough Drive Bays anymore but if you're a long time
Watcher you might remember one that does
ah yeah the fractal Define R7 XL is back which
with its optional Drive Bays can house 18 hard drives which is plenty for the
12 we're putting in today and for them to add another six down the road of
course by default since most people are not going to put a ton of hard drives in
here it only holds four or three and a half inch drives but we've converted it
just by moving this plate right here from the back up to the front into what
fractal calls storage layout it's been a
little while since I've done this but basically you've got this slide and this
nubbin and those hooking on the other side there okay and then you got a screw
that goes in here there you go and it gets supported by this little tab so I
mean it's not amazing but what are your other options for cases that okay hold
this many hard drives these are not sticking into the nub and thing every
mounting mechanism is great to do once now I'm not going to do it because we're
going to pull all these drives out for shipping anyway but Mark or someone from
Mark's team more realistically once it arrives I would also wow that's heavy
okay like you to put the second screw into
each drive right here that's just gonna snug this up make sure that this little
nubbing stays in place and ensure that these drives don't just suddenly go and
fall or anything like that that would be bad
one thing we are putting the work into though is putting all of these silicone
grommets on the hard drive trays this gives them a nice little
anti-vibrational Cloud to sit on and while you're not going to kill a hard
drive by moving it around we had hard drives and laptops for literal decades
it's pretty well documented that any excess vibration is pretty bad for them
the other benefit is this keeps the drives which have moving Parts in them
of course from transferring their vibrational noise to the case and
causing it to Rattle which again is a concern for the system because it will
be near where people are working or living it's like a storage brick in the
front of the case good Lord oh yeah
storage brick it's a good brick right there of course
what good is a brick without a brain
let's go ahead and put our IO Shield face is a brain because the year is
1998. got him try not to slice my hand open thing a
beauty right there I don't know what it is but compared to whatever the flavor
du jour RGB Fiesta thing that's going on
in the gaming spaces workstation server class stuff
classic high performance look you know black PCB I sleep green PCB real
hey hey what do you call the cold season when I'm making this video the winter of
my disc content
we got ourselves a computer here uh sort of we got to talk about Cooling
very heavy hopefully yes oh easy time to put some fans in the
front just use the stock ones stock ones yeah yeah we'll use the nachos for the
top what where would I like to put my fan for it
to have all of its airflow blocked by this wall of hard drives I could put it
here or here
we're here there's not going to be a GPU in this
system at least not now well no he could
put a GPU in it in the future if you wanted to you know pass through a GPU to
a a Plex VM or something like that but
you said he wasn't doing no he's not going to do any of that but I am going to put the fans in such a
place that they would deliver fresh air flow to a GPU or accelerator card or any
other kind of thing you might want to put in here I'm modifying the HP I'm
putting some coolant on here this is a little big
that's a little small this is fine this is fine yeah just put that in there it's
so cute realistically a card like this which we haven't actually talked about
yet but we need because our motherboard only supports eight say the hard drives
out of the box ten oh well whatever that's still not 16 or 18 or whatever
this can support the point is we need to add some more SATA ports this is an HBA
host bus adapter and it's kind of designed to get passive airflow from the
server fans that are way over here somewhere right now it's got nothing so
we need to add something to this and I mean that's better than nothing to be
fair it would it'll probably be fine um we're just doing it just in case I
think it's time for us to talk power supply we could have gone with something
redundant in fact there are some really cool ATX dual unit power supplies these
days but it's not quiet so we've opted
for the second best thing this excellent
seasonic Prime Platinum 1300 watt power
supply did we need 1300 Watts the answer
is no but the 1300 watt has native
support for 16 SATA power connectors and
while we could have adapted something else or even used splitters
particularly for SATA using Splitters is not recommended because of the tiny
little pins if you draw too much current over them they melt and that's bad this
is a machine that's intended to be operated continuously for years on end I
mean we don't know how long he's going to keep it nothing would stop him from running this for like I don't know 10
years as long as he replaces hard drives as they fail so we don't want to take
any chances I didn't have four of the same size zip tie so there's two
different size zip ties but it's mint okay
I mean it's not going anywhere no it's not you might be wondering how this HBA
is going to plug into our hard drives because that doesn't look anything like
the port on a hard drive so we have to use these mini SAS HD that's the
connector on the HBA to four SATA connectors and then we can plug directly
in no problem like Linus mentioned before the motherboard actually has two
of these mini SAS HD connectors which means eight of our 12 hard drives are
already covered so this HPA is only going to be used on one port now you can
buy ones that are cheaper with less ports this is a 16i and they make an 8i
and I think some other companies might even make a 4i which would be just one
connector it's just that we wanted to set it up for future expansion even in
the situation where he went well beyond the capacity of this case and switched
to like a rack mount chassis this HBA is still gonna work and he has enough ports
for another 12 drives on here you just slide it on in there's no graphics card
because it's a server so we can put this right in the top slot like that it's
pretty cute right aside from like an hour of cable management the last thing
this system them needs is boot drives we're going to be using a pair of
micron's 5400 Pro Series drives these are like Data Center Grade SATA ssds
they're honestly Overkill and probably more expensive than I would have spent
on boot drives but Micron sent them for the project so not a big deal and these
are going to last gosh dang pretty much forever true Nas like doesn't really
write a whole lot to the boot drives you know you're talking like the
configuration and some you know some statistics and like logs and stuff so
you could probably run it on a USB if you had to I wouldn't recommend that but
you could so these are super super Overkill Hey look it's working okay
let's see if all of our Drive these just because these are new drives
okay we got one two three four five six
seven eight nine ten eleven twelve beautiful where are our boot drives
there are some weird stipulations on this board despite it having a bajillion
i o some of them are shared I think Slot
2 which is either the second from the bottom or the second from the top is
shared with like the m.2 these ports the
oculink ports so depending on there's like a little jumper you can move around
some of the things get disabled I suspect that that's what the problem is
right now so I just got to check the motherboard manual and see we can see
from this jumper chart that said F4 underscore seven so four to seven does
get disabled in some circumstances and four to seven is the bottom one
which is what our boot drives are plugged into so I was right we're good
we just need to move this jumper the x's mean that it's disabled uh we have two
m.2 slots so we don't have to worry about our m.2 because this m.2 slot is
always on actually the only thing we need to worry about is the SATA and
probably that PCIe slot so I think I'm going to put it in this configuration
because that means we get 8X on the PCIe slot that other m.2 is going to work and
our SATA work I don't think Mark is ever going to want to use oculink for
anything and I I would suspect if anything they might want to use that
PCIe slot maybe they won't use it I don't know I'm just going to put in that config and
you know don't call me this guy is already in the correct position we just
need to move the right hand one over one pin well cool and now
our boot Drive should work the system's booted up and we've got true Nas scale
installed now we can set up our array because this is you know it's you know
Mission critical data they don't want to lose this stuff this is already going to
have an off-site backup we're going to set it up in a pretty safe configuration
but one that is still going to be very performant in our experience with ZFS
usually the best option to get good sequential and random performance
sequential being big video clips and whatnot and random kind of being small
text files or if you have lots of photos you're copying all those at once is to
use a vdev size of six which works great with our 12 drives however because
they're hard drives we do need to have some sort of protection for that array
they are at some point going to fail it's it's a for sure thing so we're
going to use two of those six drives as parity data that means in each of those
pools of six we can lose two drives before our data is at Jeopardy which
means we're going to lose a little bit of capacity I think that brings us from
240 terabytes because these are 20 terabyte drives down to 160 or something
it's a pretty essential loss but but it's not as substantial as losing
everything because you didn't have enough parity drives so it's very important to set up your array in a safe
configuration like this so let's just do that we'll pick six drives one two three
four five six I suspect true Nas is
actually going to automatically do this yeah look at that raid Z2 it it picked
for us this is what you're doing you don't have a choice and then we'll just
hit repeat because we can make an additional one that's going to give us a formatted capacity of about 150
terabytes also before we're done here we're going to add our level 2 Arc you
can see there's a cache type of edev so we'll just add that select our one
terabyte NVMe drive and plop it on there there are a few more steps we still have
to do I want to set up email alerts so if you know a drive were to die they
actually know it doesn't tell you what to go hey my drive's dead you have to
get an email for that we're also going to have to set up a data set some user
accounts so they can actually read the data off of it we're gonna have to set up the software for our remote sync
which is called tailscale and then set up the sync process but we're going to
do all that when we're on the phone with Mark also we said we were going to build two of these today that was fake news uh
we already built the first one it was probably like six nine might even been a
year ago that we built this thing and shipped it to Mark's team because we
don't actually need both of them to build on camera this this way we actually get to do the sync remotely
it's already with them all the way in Los Angeles we're up here in Vancouver
so this will be an even better demo for thousands of miles away there are a few
things we need to finalize before we actually ship the machine but we've got
it working enough now that we're ready to hear from its new owner and do a live
demonstration where we blow Mark's mind with an automatic scheduled backup
across this unassuming black wire over
hundreds of miles we're recording good audio for you over here what up oh hi
Mark oh hi Mark oh
God damn it so how's the Naz treating you yeah the Nas is amazing and then I
also love the idea too because we're gonna do a second one that's like at
another location so then we're like really really I have no idea what you're
talking about you don't say is that it
no way thank you for sharing your future
plans with me yeah maybe they didn't brief you too
much on this but um that's what we're doing today oh really yeah we're gonna
do an off-site backup and you are going to sleep so much easier at night knowing
that every night everything that you ingest to your main editing Nas which
can be used by any of his editors both local remote whatever if Mark just wants
to check on something everything that he dumps on there is going to be replicated
to this one so that in the event uh
of a fire or other disaster the data
won't be lost because the hardware has a value sure in thousands of dollars
what's the data worth to you mark twenty
dollars minimum just kidding per kilobytes Priceless it's Priceless and
that is the punch line years it's like it's the peace of mind even just having
the mass I wish I I should go grab it but I'll send you a b-roll shot of it
but like it was stored on these little Western Digital hard drives into
Tupperware in my freaking closet everything I own is in a Nast here and
then now if we have a fire here knowing that it's backed up a second physical
location knock on whatever a game changer absolute Game
Changer do you have any regrets not going with a Das because like I gotta I
Gotta Give Them credit they did the research like your plan was not stupid
it was like the Mac plan no I think it's
working well for us I think the other thing that was different that kind of
was something we had to wrap our head around
um was that we don't necessarily have like a bunch of editors in here working
physically in like on site right where
you need a network that we're all connected to Ethernet we don't have a
lot of editors first of all but second of all like we just kind of put it on
proxies on Dropbox that's kind of our workflow our main need was just like a
one Central Computer that had the raws on it that stored it all that when it's
time to export the video you know we all work on proxies then we just all we we
remote into that and Export it from that computer so yeah it's working amazingly
it's the freaking best it's just the best and it's something we wouldn't have
been able to figure out our own at all and our solution was going to be a lot
more expensive than the one you guys proposed so you were able to like look
at what our actual needs were and being like look you don't need the Ferrari to
go to the grocery store you know you just need for what you guys need this is
what you what the perfect like solution would be just one of those things where
just like having this because this is what we are we're cut we make videos
this is our core product right so it's like our our Fort Knox for everything
just didn't even have a lock on it and now it's actually organized and locked
and I can sleep at night so you're probably gonna go back and actually use
this footage like very rarely but it's there yeah that's
right it's there but we just had this
situation we're getting a bunch of our videos translated and we had to we used
this like because we had to go back and
like get the stems and stuff and no if we didn't have the server like that made
our lives infinitely easier we went back like 40 videos right that's awesome I'm
so glad so we are just about set up here to demo the off-site backup capabilities
um Jake we're gonna live try to sync the
machine that's with you which is thousands of miles away from us up here
in Vancouver to this machine right here and hopefully it'll just work it all
rests on this little cable right here this also means that you'll be in
possession of my entire back catalog of footage so you better not start like a
tick tock and bootlegging all my videos Linus
I mean you you signed the end user license agreement right
the privacy policy did you read it this
was your end game all along curse you you're only one of them you are just one
gear in this machine this is exciting so how long will it
take because I think we have like you have a hundred terabytes it's gonna take
like like a week yeah the first goal
will take you know however I mean you've got one gig connection there we'll
probably set it to run it like half that speed so it doesn't just destroy your internet yeah so you don't go to like
upload a video yeah what's going on why does Google
suck so probably like a week or two and
then once that's done every subsequent sync it only copies the that extra
little bit Yeah so it's a lot faster what's really cool about this is that in
the event that you guys were to suffer from some kind
of a cryptographic attack right like a
ransomware there's really Advanced ransomwares out there that will go and
they will start encrypting everything even on network attached drives that are
accessible to the infected machine so because we're using a technology called
snapshotting where it will actually retain an old
non-encrypted copy on that remote server
theoretically hahaha you will be able to go back in
time kind of like Apple Time Machine and restore it to a state before it was
encrypted and it'll be super inconvenient and it'll suck in fact it
might even be faster to literally get in the car and sneaker net that other
machine back into the office so you can not lose production time compared to you
know copying it back over or whatever but you'll have it
which is better because so I see so when you guys ship it to us it'll already
have all the stuff on it huh uh it will sort of so it'll have everything on it
but we're gonna pull all the hard drives out for safety during shipping because
they can be quite sensitive we want to ship them in a proper hard drive
shipping container so theoretically and we might need to give you a little you
know 15 minutes of remote help with it or whatever but theoretically we already
did this once remember yeah okay so you'll take those drives you'll slam
them into this machine and everything will just pick up I'm truly just
something in my brain it's just like it's just so excited to get this peace
of mind because that's what this is this is like insurance and peace of mind and
something that's been nagging on me forever every time I open the freaking
closet and see that pile of hard drive so okay in theory uh it's running now
hey look at that we're getting about 40 megabytes a second and I think you said
too we can set it on schedules where hey
just do it after 9 00 PM or something right yeah totally and another thing you
can do 2 actually is if it's not too
much of a trek between your two locations you could bring it on site do
the first sync at full gigabit or even I don't know okay so at ball and speeds
and then you can go and take the other one off site after the fact this is
awesome dude we've already uh we've actually already transferred two
gigabytes here really I just I was gonna say like two two gigabytes that's like
my first probably 12 videos when I was filming I think I said camera I think
this whole project is six gigs do you remember it was called like watermelon
smoothie or something oh yeah yeah I know the watermelon smoothie it's a
classic it gets baby Mark I know Still
rocking the backwards cap though show up to that last picnic of the summer time
like a boss and all you're gonna need is a watermelon a coat hanger and a drill
like a boss wow that sideway that
sideways gangster drill movement that's
still cool I still stand behind that drill movement well this is a quick
video we can just watch the whole thing yeah it is kind of short did you clean the coat hanger before you used it for
this have you re-uploaded I didn't have you re-uploaded this as a
short yet no I should you should how
long is this video like two minutes yeah no minute and 42. oh this could then no
offense but uh there's some dead air
again you picked an early folder to look
at dude I'll put this on me no this is great you have an age today I swear yeah
I like the part where the watermelon juice goes in and then out and then in
and then out yeah I still sanitary I still stand behind that barfing
watermelon scene so I think that's it you have a meeting in one minute so we
got that resolved just in time thank goodness timing enjoy the new Nas ziz
you guys are legends eternally grateful thank you so much you
make it so I can sleep at night now it's time to rip this whole thing apart pack
it up ship it and tell you about our sponsor cable mod
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yeah it was less reasonable