Insane Storage Server - Fully 10 Gigabit Network, $1,500 Switch
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2015-05-07
·
1,798 words · ~8 min read
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so the last time i updated y'all on the storage service sorry can you even hear
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me over this thing the last time i updated y'all on the storage server that
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is used to manage all the data that's constantly flowing around here was back
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in 2012. i mean Linus media group wasn't
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even a company running out of my garage yet today's video is going to be a close
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look at one of the new servers that we're adding before the move to our new
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office and the 1500 dollar ouch
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network switch that's going to be directing traffic on our new and
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improved fully 10 gigabit network
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fractal design listens and the define r5 case was made with feedback from you the
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pc community so click wherever you want
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to learn more how about here and here
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all right so let's start with a look at our new network switch it's not that our
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old gs752 tsx sucks or anything it's got
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a ton of regular gigabit ports and enough
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internal throughput that we'd be really hard pressed to even put a significant
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load on it as things stand but while four sfp plus 10 gigabit capable ports
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was fine in the old days when we only had three employees total we've grown to
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eight team members now four of which will need access to a handful of servers
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at lightning fast speed at all times so we're going to be adding a netgear xs
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712 t 12 port 10 gigabit Ethernet switch
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so here's a diagram of how the network layout is going to work we'll use two of
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our existing 10 gigabit ports running in a teaming mode called lacp and direct
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attach copper cables to connect the sfp plus ports on our new 12 port switch
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bear in mind that this renders two of our rj45 ports inactive so this will
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give us a total of 20 gigabits of connectivity speed between these two
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switches this is important because our main high performance storage server
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general bulk storage server will be on the xs 712 t side of things so let's say
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a hypothetical 40 somewhat gigabit clients from the other side all wanted
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to hit it at once we'd want them to have a nice fat pipe to reduce bottlenecks
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the next high-speed 20 gigabit link will be two teamed 10 gigabit Ethernet
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connections to our brand new server that i'm building today wanik server will be
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replacing our current storage server ruskin server as the day-to-day
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performance server it will deliver slightly better drive performance thanks
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to its faster adaptec 6805 raid card but
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since ruskin server has such a massive array of ten
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three terabyte seagate consumer drives in raid six some of which are actually
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refurbished an incredibly irresponsible setup but one that delivered mostly the
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space we needed and that we couldn't afford to replace up until now
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this one won't deliver that much more storage and actually not that much more
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speed it's instead focused on reliability so it uses eight seagate
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enterprise grade six terabyte drives in raid six for a total of 36 terabytes of
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storage that can lose up to two drives before suffering catastrophic data loss
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and on top of that there are drives that are actually designed for this workload
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instead of general consumer drives and there's some other cool stuff going on
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in the server as well so the revision of ruskin server that i showed off in this
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video when we first went to 10 gigabit was using some weak sauce itx board and
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a low power lga 1156 xeon that stuff's
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for chumps man the backbone of wanik server system is much beefier we're
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using an asrock x99 wse 10g an x99
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motherboard with basically every single bell and whistle and then some that
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weighs in at a whopping 600 dollars it
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works with Intel xeon processors although that's not something that's
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officially sanctioned by Intel since it runs a consumer x99 chipset with our
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plan being to install an e5 2618l
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low power 8 core for great multi-threaded performance and very low
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power consumption it can also handle up to seven PCIe 3.0 slots at 8x to 16x
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bandwidth giving us tons of options for raid or other expansion it can handle up
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to 128 gigs of ecc ddr4 memory although
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we'll only be installing 32 gigs of kingston value RAM that was generously
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provided by kingston at the moment and last but certainly not least it's got
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dual onboard 10 gigabit Ethernet ports
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powered by an Intel x540 controller that is some kick ass on board networking
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when you consider the cost of buying an add-in card with two rj45 ports running
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that chipset so the process of building the system was pretty straightforward
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mostly i actually reached out to an old contact of mine at norco the rackmount
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case company not the bike one who provided the 24 drive capable rpc 4224
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that we've actually been using for ruskin server for a really long time and
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have been extremely happy with so we sent over two more of those cases one
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for wanik to give us a lot of growing room and another for an additional
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machine that i'm hoping to add to the network with a couple of 18 core xeons
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as a network rendering box let me know in the comments if you want Intel to
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support that crazy project maybe we can convince them
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might be tough uh anyway so this case supports standard atx power supply so i
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grabbed a 520 series boot SSD a cooler master v8 50 80 plus gold power supply a
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basic video card that i had lying around and a tower cooler that didn't end up
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fitting so i grabbed an Intel stock cooler and got to work
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the plan as you probably saw on the network diagram is not to have this
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server replace ruskin outright but rather to have russ connect as a nightly
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backup for wanik this has two positive effects number one it gives us something
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to switch to quickly in the middle of the day if wanik experiences some kind
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of problem like a failed drive corrupted os or whatever else and needs time to
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rebuild and number two is it allows us to practice what we preach for a change
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data redundancy like raid is not the
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same thing as backing up and critical data should always be backed up once
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locally and then preferably again site
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in the event of a physical disaster but that won't come for us until a later
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stage now the astute among you may have noticed that my diagram also alluded to
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a 45 drives 100 plus terabyte server and
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you might be wondering what's up with that i wanted to do that build log today
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but the parts haven't arrived in time so you'll have to settle for this one but
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the ultimate plan when that arrives is to dump everything on it reconfigure
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onex server with purely solid state storage pull all these six terabytes out
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of it and then put those in the 45 drive
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storinator that we have coming for a total of about 150 terabytes of raw
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storage that we're going to use as an archive to replace the awful
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shelf of random hard drives system that we have going on in our bathroom right
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now which will also give us quick access to everything we've ever shot
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apart from allowing us to not have to just kind of swap drives onto an
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external drive dock in order to find old stuff so stay tuned if you're into
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completely banana storage configurations guys because it is about to get really
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interesting i mean even now it's like pretty great except for the fact that
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until the new office is built it's going to be deployed in a bathroom speaking of
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bathrooms well actually these tools have nothing to do with working on bathrooms
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they're more for like electronic gizmos tearing them apart repairing them
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upgrading them all that kind of stuff and they're from i
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fix it so these guys have all kinds of professional grade tools and fantastic
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guides on their site ifixit.com one of my favorites is their 54-bit
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driver kit that's part of their pro-tec tools tool kit that's got a bunch of
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like prying tools and tweezers and magnets for getting stuff out of i use
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it for all kinds of stuff tearing apart ssds that have like security torx screws
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taking apart nintendo ds's that use tri-wing bits and all kinds of like
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triangle bit stupid stuff that's hard to find outside of buying an affordable kit
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like that you can use it to work on all kinds of things whether it's you know
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handheld gaming consoles like i said before but i've also used it on
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everything up to as big as an imac in fact i did a teardown with their guide
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with their tools of the imac 5k and it was super simplified i'm not going to
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say super simple because there's some complicated stuff about it but super simplified by ifixit's kit and guide so
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the pro tech tool kit is 65 bucks and is backed by a
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lifetime warranty and if you use the offer code Linus 03 at checkout you can
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save 10 off any purchase of 50 bucks or more so head over to ifixit.com Linus
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which is linked in the video description to check that out now
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so guys thanks for watching this video like it if you liked it dislike it if
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you thought it sucked leave a comment at the link in the video description to our
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forum where you can discuss this video if you have something to say also linked
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in the video description we have a merch link for cool t-shirts like this one a
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contribution link if you love the work we do and you think we should keep doing it and an amazon link so you can change
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your bookmark to one with our affiliate codes whenever you buy hard drives or
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whatever else we get a small kickback that kind of thing helps us out a lot
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thanks again for watching and as always don't forget to subscribe and follow and all that good stuff