recently it was brought to my attention that some of my friends in the industry
went out looking for a high-speed server for storing and editing their high-res
video without checking in with me
now i am far from the lone authority when it
comes to this stuff so it's not like it's impossible to build something
really awesome without my help snazzy Labs managed it just fine it's just also
pretty easy to get completely taken for
a ride and when i saw how much i justine
mkbhd and jonathan from tld paid for their
jellyfish well i wasn't mad i was just
hurt and disappointed i mean guys here's the thing with the
exception of tld actually didn't build him anything but for the others of you i
put together reliable mass storage for you because that was
what you said you wanted if you had just told me you want high
performance at any cost come on guys it's me
i got your back so i've channeled all of that frustration
into today's video where in collaboration with our special guest
patrick from serve the home great site
by the way worth checking out after the video
serve the home i'll be creating what i call
the jellyfish fryer a faster more reliable and just plain
better solution summer break just started but it's never too early to
start looking for a new laptop for back to school every origin pc laptop is
ready for whatever games or school projects you're going to tackle and you
can check out their special deals at the link below
so yeah guys those numbers you saw at the beginning of this video that was no
typo that was correct a
120 terabyte jellyfish costs its lucky
owner about 35 000 us dollars and that's
assuming that they don't require lumaforge's vague
performance boost option or more than a handful of video editors connected to it
but the thing is it gets even crazier than that not only does a 120 terabyte
jellyfish not actually have 120
terabytes of usable capacity it's closer to 80 by the time you account for the
storage space that's lost to redundancy and the about 10 percent of extra
reserved space that lumaforge has left to ensure that zfs functions correctly
now here's the thing this pricing might not
offend me so much if there was something magical about the jellyfish like i don't
know if it used uh Intel ruler NVMe ssds
and it fit into like a a ruggedized case that you could throw on your back as
you're slogging through the jungle on an on location shoot or something like that
but it's not special and to put it in
context not only was i able to clutch together a solution that matches their
pricing i was able to do it while still
overpaying for my server the 45 drives
tornado is not cheap and i outfitted it
with all solid-state drives instead of mechanical
ones at the same usable capacity and you don't even have
to be a tech expert to build something like this because we went with an
off-the-shelf bare bone server most of the work was done all i had to do was
spend about 15 minutes shucking the drives from their packaging
and popping them in here i did a separate video and with 27 of these 3.84
terabyte iron wolf 110 nas ssds i've got
over a hundred terabytes of raw
solid state storage ready to go
so from there all that was left to do was
phone a friend to show us the right way
to configure it because is it correct to say that configuring an SSD based nas is
not the same as a hard drive based nas that's 100 true all right so you want to
introduce yourself then sure hey guys i'm patrick from serve the home we
started sth 10 years ago building solutions just like this and now we
review server storage and networking hardware all the way from scrappy diy
ebay stuff all the way up to high-end six-figure plus enterprise gear so i
kind of assumed that we would be using freenas but in addition to that you came
with a bit of a trick up your sleeve right i did okay why don't we begin
though with the basic install sure okay so freenas installer super easy it
actually automatically does this so you don't really need to do anything
and you get some really kind of old-looking ascii yeah i feel like i'm
like gaming 30 years ago so what we'll do is we're going to select two drives
for our boot drives so these are the 250
gig ssds that shipped with our stornado they are and then
we're gonna go fancy and we're gonna do a fresh install would you like to put a
password in sir sure make it easy password serve
the home now that we're booted up and we're in the gui we can start to configure our
server and yes it's more complicated than a jellyfish but i mean i think it's
fair to say where are we at like 50 clicks
less than that it's really not that hard now we'll go into a little bit more
detail about how we're configuring this drives and patrick will probably talk
about it in a blog post later on in the video but for now once this is done the
big thing we need to do is apply that special script which is going to do a
couple of things number one is it's going to apply some
SSD specific optimizations that freenas
intends to include in the next version of their software but that for now
they've backported into this version for us to do this video the other thing it's
going to do is it's going to change the way that these four 10 gigabit network
ports on the back function to be more like a jellyfish
so this is basically sacrilegious in the networking world but
the way we want this to work is such that if i were to take a network cable
plug it into the back of my nas and then plug the other end into let's
say like a a Thunderbolt 10 gig network adapter and
a laptop i could just connect directly to this
thing like it's a big old gigantic high-performance usb drive now
that's not the typical way you would do things no it's definitely not and what
was the reaction you got from industry professionals when you asked them to do
this well my first reaction when we talked about it was i said wait you want to do
what so for 20 plus years the industry has said no
you use switches and those switches allow you to scale out and use more
clients you have can have more security features i mean it's it is the way that
you handle this type of situation when you have a high performance storage of
multiple clients so i'm going to give the counter argument to that because the way that i
see it when you're dealing with a techie person or
a sysadmin type person on site that's managing let's say a video production
sure switches are the way to go no doubt about it but if you've got people that
are accustomed to just plugging in an external drive and
working off of their laptop well i'd say that it's not crazy to
imagine that it's far lower friction to say look it works exactly the way you're
used to you plug in one cable you plug
in one cable and you have access to your storage
except instead of a Thunderbolt cable you use this weird thing so that's it
we've got a healthy 26 drive raid z2
with a hot spare so in the event that any one of those drives fails
it starts rebuilding it immediately and you might notice that capacity looks a
little low 77.91 tib so those are tibi bytes if we
convert that to terabytes that's actually 85.6 terabytes so we are coming
in right around the same capacity as the jellyfish for actually a slightly lower
price because we're like 900 less or something like that okay we
should be ready to connect directly to the back of our nas here
transfer some files do some video editing wow
can look at that even with the eight core core i9 you still spike it when
you're just opening up a project like this um and wow we we peaked at around
two and a half gigabit per second
so scrubbing is actually not that demanding as we go
through this 8k footage here so we're sitting right in the neighborhood of one
and a half to two gigabit per second while playing back looks like it settled
in a little bit lower than that let's speed up our playback
that's gonna hurt you okay so it's not a terribly impressive demo
because it's just one 4k stream but the
nas works i think we need to kick this up a notch we do
so we just completed our 12 machine lan center these are all
ryzen 2700xs they've all got 10 gig lan
and we're gonna grab ourselves a few
quad 10 gigabit mix connect all of them at the same time and see just how many
video streams we can do alright
so there it is four Ethernet cables
and theoretically we fire this up
and we have access to it we
we fire this up
well that'll help we
fire this up and we'll have access to it
so we've got three links running through
our switch down there that are in an lacp group so that's basically link
aggregation so that's for a total of 40 gigabit plus
40 plus 40 so that would be
120 gigabit so that is effectively the
same as if we had three of those quad ports and they were just plugged
directly into the back of the computers then all of our machines are plugged
into the switch and we've loaded up adobe premiere trials
on each one of these machines with the intention
of hitting all 12 of them at once
and seeing just how many 4k video
streams our server can handle so uh Jake
oh you're already on it look at him go these young kids today they got so much
energy you know so just as a recap here guys this is 16
mpeg-2 files that were encoded at 100 megabit per second so that would be
comparable to what you would record in the 4k high quality preset on something
like an a7s2 now you can see here that this
is a freaking lot of bandwidth especially when we have a lot of motion
across all the clips and we can spike as high as four to even five gigabit per
second and that's why we are just playing back
never mind if we want to scrub through the footage
if we scrub through the footage we are actually going to be able to saturate
our 10 gigabit link here so you can see i'm sitting in the nine to nine and a
half range isn't that absolutely beautiful but
performance is still smooth this is actually a shockingly good editing
experience this is it moment of truth you ready are
you just doing that one no i'm gonna do all of them oh you ready yeah okay
one two oh crap this one's at one quarter res
oh they're all at one quarter road dang it no one quarter res is not good enough
for us okay changing the res start
start so all six of mine are going
are we dropping frames or is it smooth looks pretty damn smooth looking pretty
smooth to me okay so i got our overall feed here
nice nice how we doing it's a casual
25 gigabit 25 gigabit i think we can do
better so one challenge that we've got is that
while we'd love to just throw more video streams at each one of these machines
we're up against a technical limit within adobe premiere where it only
allows 16 sources for this multi-cam setup and also up against a CPU limit so
our CPU is actually sitting anywhere from around 70 up to 90 percent as we're
going through and playing back all these files so clearly we can't just throw
more streams per machine but what we can do to hit our network
harder is scrub
all the machines so i think we need some helpers
okay so thank you gentlemen the test here is simple we are trying to suck as
much bandwidth as we possibly can from the video server sitting on this
chair over here now we're playing back 16 100 megabit
streams per machine as it is
but that's not enough that's only about 25 to 27 gigabit
child's play so if we scrub through the
footage we can get each of these machines to
pull about nine to nine and a half gigabit and we want to see just how hard
we can make it hurt okay so i'm peaking at around four gigabit per second on
each of mine and we're looking at about 40 gigabit overall so i think our link
aggregation is not working it's not working all right so the good news is we managed
to play 184 4k video streams off of our server and
we managed even to scrub around through them
during that process the bad news is that it looks like
unless we can get link aggregation working properly it would in fact
be better to go straight out with uh
10 gigabit connections to each of the computers i just didn't feel like
spending the couple thousand dollars on a bunch of those quad 10 gig cards so
we're gonna call this we're gonna call this good enough for now
so that's a pretty cool demo if you're into editing video off of a shared
storage resource and it's actually pretty similar to the one that lumaforge
used when they launched the jellyfish just
bigger and badder because it's all flash and somehow at the same price
but we haven't even addressed some of the other really cool things about this
configuration yet so lumaforge is using two striped raid z2s so that's kind of
like raid 60. so a stripe of raid sixes and that means
that they can suffer anywhere from two to four physical drive failures before
they lose any data now we can only take two drive failures
and then a third assuming that one of them manages to rebuild with our hot
spare so one to three over time that's
kind of similar i guess but the story is a little bit more
nuanced than that so patrick you guys have a calculator that people can use to
calculate what the expected time to data
loss is for a particular configuration and what did we come out at with this
one right here yeah this one we basically had less than a
.02 chance to have it fail
over the next 10 years so we think it's pretty reliable and part of that is
really just the fact that the hard drives are a lot slower than the ssds
when it comes to rebuild which means that even if a drive fails your array
spends less time in a degraded and vulnerable state than
if you're using hard drives a couple other advantages of ssds are
that these ones are about a hundred times less likely to read a bit
incorrectly compared to even reliable hard drives and they've got
some other practical advantages too no vibration no noise and if you're on the
go like you're uh you know if you were to put something
like mechanical hard drives on the back of a jeep in the jungle for an on
location shoot that is a super bad idea and this
wouldn't be nearly as vulnerable to those kinds of vibrations which by the
way yes do kill drives you were telling a story
about yahoo a little while ago oh yeah yahoo a long time ago
actually put drives on storage arrays that were going across the parking lot
and one of the things they found was that when they got the systems powered
up and the drives powered up on the other end they had a big problem with
drive failures and the reason for that was that those carts were actually using
solid casters and that caused so much vibration that the hard drives ended up
failing so that's like a good example of why hard drives even though they're
generally reliable even you know if they get a little bit shaken up while they're
powered off a lot less reliable than solid state drives in that scenario so we're not
actually necessarily done yet we had some further optimization ideas i mean
patrick really really wants to use a switch because as we saw unless you have
a ton of streams coming into a single machine you're nowhere near 10 gigabit
needed for each individual station but that's going to come down to you know
how the user wants to use it for now we were trying to just go after well here
you can have this but diy we could also
get better performance and lower power consumption by using more modern cpus
caching was something that we talked about and it's something that lumaforge
actually offers as a performance boost
option for the jellyfish they add an octane right cache
with some more RAM and then we think maybe faster cpus they wouldn't confirm
that for me uh for an extra 3 500 but you recommended against using something
like an octane right cache for an all SSD based machine can you explain why
that is yeah so you tend to use caching drives
especially when you're going to hard drive and the idea was you have something that's faster than hard drives
that's able to absorb random reads random writes and then smooth it out so
it's more similar right so it's more sequential and better for the way that
hard drives like to be accessed but solid state drives are different than hard drives and because of that you tend
not to put as much caching in front of
solid state race and so in this case we just didn't think that we needed it
all right so we maybe aren't quite done but that is it for today but the sort of
wrap up for this video is a bit long but it's also really important so try not to
tune out guys we did this video for a couple of reasons one was to demystify some of the
marketing mumbo jumbo that goes on with solutions like the jellyfish compatible
with mac Linux and pc
what does that even mean of course it is it's a commodity nas running free open
source software but the other reason was to acknowledge
that while we do prefer to do things our way
that doesn't mean that our way is right for everyone and in fact even between
the two of us and ix systems support staff
we still ran into a few hiccups today
so then i actually reached out to marquez mkbhd to send over a couple
short clips explaining why the jellyfish has been great for him
what's up Linus i'm kbhd here so there were a couple things that the jellyfish
did specifically in the mkbhd studio to make our lives easier the setup being
one of the biggest ones so this thing was out the box and operational within
90 seconds like it had all the drives installed already everything was fresh out the box all we really had to do was
install the jellyfish app on every computer that we wanted it to be on
that's three in my case plug it in hit
the on button and everything set itself up and then we actually had some
assistance from the lumaforge team as far as setting it up to make sure it
would work perfectly with final cut pro projects so workflow tips essentially so
they definitely went above and beyond with that but really truly the beauty of
it was going from not having any solution for working on videos at the
same time to the next day having one and being
able to edit you know close a project on one machine open it up on the other and
keep going that was something we were able to do
very quickly and seamlessly because the jellyfish i think at the end of the day
when it comes to spending a bit more for a better overall solution for us than
better hardware it can look a lot like the car
enthusiast market like some people will buy a certain type of car because they
know that will be a great tuner and they'll be able to get more horsepower
out of it and work on it and get better numbers but they know that's that's more time
they're going to spend because that's their hobby but some people just want to
drive to work every day and back and grocery shopping and pick up the kids
this just needs to be reliable and they will spend more on a car that's new just
to do that and they can go to the dealer if something breaks down for convenience
to fix it and that may seem lazy to the
first person but that's just the way it is that's what the jellyfish is so i am
fully aware that there are buildable solutions out there that will do better
numbers and better read write speeds and things like that probably even a better
looking box than the jellyfish but
we've been too busy editing videos off of it to think about any of that so
that's where we're coming from so in defense of lumaforge then it's easy to
use when i called them they picked up the phone immediately they offer support
plan with next day replacement drive so that two years down the road you don't have
to remember all the ips of everything and how to do anything like companies
like this do need to charge a premium so they can continue to provide support
they offer a complete package so you can just forget about it like you're not
buying a box you're buying a solution
and in fairness to them the hardware that they're shipping is not
actual garbage it's not one of those things where they're charging an
enterprise price for you know
like a sticker that they applied to something consumer grade like they're
using zfs they're using centos this is
truly good stuff their connector and manager is really simple to use if you
have to set up a new share or something there's no command line required and
also here's a crazy thing if you go to a major tier one storage vendor would you
say that the pricing of the jellyfish is unheard of ludicrous it's perfectly in
line with what you would see from a big vendor and they usually have great margins and they provide that solution
and great support furthermore another thing people don't consider and
i talked about this recently on lan show but in the film and production industry
this kind of pricing is not about the hardware that you're
getting it's more about the value that it provides
like the amount of money that you're spending might be outrageous but given
the amount of money that you will make if it works correctly and the amount of
money you might lose if it doesn't work correctly
maybe it's not that outrageous after all now we aren't going to be doing it that
way as long as building our own machine is still possible but hey i felt like i
had to say it anyway speaking of things i have to say the
neighbor's app by ring yep that's the same ring that makes video doorbells is
all about helping you stop feeling like you're alone when it comes to your security it allows you to receive
real-time information on what's happening around you from other users so
you can put out an alert if you see something suspicious like a possible
burglar you can send a notice if you lost something valuable like your pet
and you can even give or receive a warning if a disaster is coming your way
like a fire or a flood ring partners up with local law enforcement to stop crime
sprees and right now it's available in the us only but more countries are
coming soon users have full control of what information is made publicly
available to protect your privacy from both other users and law enforcement and
it's free to use and download it's available for Android and iOS today so
go check it out so thanks for watching guys massive
thanks to patrick from serve the home guys go check them out
go buy one of these tracker hats on their merch store you guys have a merch store
you don't even you don't even sell them no these are limited edition so this is like exclusive exclusive check it all
right so thanks to you guys for watching thanks to patrick for coming out here um
if you guys like this video hit that like button get subscribed or maybe
consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description we were really happy with
this tornado as well as our iron wolf naz ssds we're going to have links to
those down there also link down there is our merch store which has cool shirts
like this remember hard drives i remember
like this as well as our Linus tech tips uh stealthity
all right finally go join our forum that's down there too