 We could build mundane computers with normal components. We could stick to the convenient list of known compatible parts, and we could stay safely within the boundaries of modern technology. We could do reviews of stuff like smart baby monitors and stuff- Actually, okay, well we do have, on that note, we do have a video coming about the Nemo smart baby monitor, so make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss that. But that's not what we normally do. No, today we're going to be building a 48 terabyte storage server with 64 gigs of RAM, 8 processing cores, an 80 plus gold power supply, and ample cooling, all in a case that's not much bigger than a couple of shoeboxes. Welcome to Insane Compact NAS 2014. Corsair Gaming RGB keyboards feature precision Cherry MX RGB keyswitches for 16.8 million color-per-key backlighting for virtually unlimited customization. Click now to learn more. So I was first inspired to do this build when Silverstone showed me the DS380, a case that they boasted featured support for an ITX motherboard, eight 3.5 inch hard drives, and four 2.5 inch SSDs or hard drives, to which I replied, oh, okay, but what the heck hardware are you expecting people to put in this thing? Storage geeks on a budget are going to buy 12 or 16 port RAID cards and put them in an ITX machine? Are you mad? And they said, no, no, no, no, no, there's a perfect motherboard for this thing. The ASRock RAC C2750D4I server slash workstation board with a passively cooled Intel Avaton 2750 eight-core CPU, support for up to 64 gigs of ECC DDR3 memory, dual Intel i210 network cards, 12 SATA ports, six SATA3 from a pair of Marvell controllers, and six from the Intel controller, two of which are SATA3 and the other four of which are SATA2, a PCIe 8x expansion slot that you can use for RAID card expansion or in our case, a 10 gigabit NIC card, and some really sweet server-grade remote monitoring and management stuff that I've never really had the pleasure of playing around with before, including power controls and even a display output preview that runs in a little Java plugin in your browser. So I said, heck yeah, man! Now this board is cool in general, but its most important feature for this build was actually kind of hidden in that massive spec list, and it wasn't hard drive support, but rather RAM support. We're going to be using free NAS, which calls for some base memory, about eight gigs, and then one gig of ECC, so that's error correcting RAM per one terabyte of raw storage space. So, given that we're planning to use eight six terabyte three and a half inch drives in ZFS2, it's about equivalent to RAID 6 in that two drives within a VDEV can fail outright before any data is lost, but otherwise not necessarily that similar, well we're going to need a whole lot of RAM, aren't we? 64 gigs is possibly slightly overkill, but since the options are going to be 32 gigs in, you know, a regular 4-DIM motherboard or doubling it to 64 gigs in this particular motherboard, well we're better off going a little bit overkill rather than risking losing data because we didn't have enough RAM. So we've got four sticks of Intelligent Memories 16 gig DIMMs that we're going to be using to keep our data nice and safe. They're right on the approved hardware list for this motherboard, so feeling pretty good about our chances. Which leads us to the storage drives. We're using just about the bad-assest storage drives on the market right now, Seagate's Enterprise Capacity Drives. They're designed for use in large storage appliances in the most demanding possible environments, data centers, where vibration from nearby drives all around them needs to be compensated for and performance cannot go down, and failure is not an option, and I mean, not only do these bad boys come prepared for a 24-7 or always-on workload with full drive encryption support and a huge 1.4 million hour mean time between failure, but compared to Seagate's own consumer NAS drives, their ratings are based on 10 times the workload, or 550 terabytes per year with a five-year warranty to back it up, so I'm feeling pretty good about these too. But obviously these drives, what we're using as a small business, isn't necessarily going to be practical for everyone, and these Enterprise Capacity Drives might not make any sense for the typical home user, but for you guys, there's the regular NAS and RAID drives that are perfectly good options for a 1-8 bay storage device, and a cool little tidbit that I wasn't actually aware of is that Seagate sells them with a data recovery insurance plan now that they're calling Seagate Plus Rescue that includes shipping both ways, a replacement drive that they send the data back to you on, and no deductible or limit to the cost of the recovery service with about a 90% success rate, so that's maybe something to consider. I had no idea that was there until I was researching this build. Now, for the rest of the hardware, I had originally intended to install the 8 3.5 inch drives for mass storage with four SSDs for operating system and a large SSD cache, but further investigation revealed that unless your free NAS is going to be used for a database workload, or like a mail server, you may not benefit from an L2 arc or SSD cache at all, and even if you would benefit, you want to keep the size relatively small, like 128 gigs or 256 gigs in most cases, so I decided to change gears and use my 1 TB SSDs for dedicated shares that can be assigned to individual video editors to use as high speed storage for scratch disks. This server will have up to a 20 gigabit per second link to the rest of the network, so it should be enough to keep everyone's storage snappy, even if they're accessing SSD storage over their own 10 gigabit links. Then for power, I've gone with a Silverstone SFX 450 watt modular 80 plus gold power supply, since this is actually the first time I've ever been thankful that a power supply has a removable 8 pin CPU connector, since this board doesn't require one, and there's not a lot of space for cable management in this case. So, the setup process for free NAS, once you read the highly recommended, by the way, 60 plus page PDF written by CyberJock from the free NAS forums, is actually surprisingly straightforward. Burn a disk and put it in the system with only the drive that you want to use for your OS installed, in my case, an old 80 gig Intel X25M Gen 1, and the whole thing pretty much does itself once you boot it up. Shut it down to install all your drives, or don't, the ASRock board has full support for hot swap, and then you pretty much boot up and you're dumped at a command prompt, where actually things were surprisingly straightforward. It might look a little bit intimidating if you've never really dealt with that kind of thing before, but it's really not. You're just going to select which Ethernet interface, you're going to check the IP address that was assigned to the system via DHCP from your router, and then you're going to go to some other computer on the network, enter that IP, create a password, and that's pretty much it. You can do the rest of it if you're not getting into the more advanced features of free NAS through the web interface. So, then Linus, why free NAS with a ZFS file system for this build? Great question. Initially, I just kind of wanted to try it since I've never played around with it before, and I heard it was great, and I thought I might be able to save some money, since the three mixed controller setup on this ASRock board will not support a large RAID array across all the different controllers, and I'd need an add-in hardware RAID card, which would add expense and limit me to the onboard gigabit networking ports in teaming mode. Well, after doing the necessary research, I discovered that due to the ludicrous RAM requirements, both in terms of the amount you have to buy and the necessity of ECC support, you won't really be saving any money if you want a really high capacity server like ours anyway, and I discovered that free NAS is surprisingly limited in terms of how you can expand your arrays and whatnot, but I decided to go ahead with it anyway, just so that I could try it, and so that I could salvage my lightning-fast networking, something that will be important if we have multiple editors working with 4K ProRes footage off the same array at the same time, where lots of sequential performance is going to be key. So, at the end of all that, how did it perform then? Well, here you go. These numbers are for a 10 gigabit SSD-based workstation to our server. So, while it wasn't cheap, there's no doubt that when it comes to what we were after, which was sequential performance for multiple users, we ended up with a pretty rockin' and compact little storage box here. Speaking of multiple users, Ting.com! Mobile that makes sense. That's their tagline. And unlike most smaller carriers, because you might be sitting there going, well, I've never heard of Ting before. They probably have cell towers made of pretzels and paper clips and clothes hangers. No, no, it's not like that. They're actually running on the Sprint network, but the key difference, so as long as you have good Sprint service in your area, then you'll get good Ting service, the key difference is that they're buying wholesale from Sprint, and then they give you guys a very, very different sort of deal. So, you're not locked into any sort of a contract. You pay only for what you use. Their average monthly bill per device is only $21, and what's cool about it is you can kind of go, oh, well, yeah, but the way that I use my phone, you know, my locked-in plan where I get a thousand text messages in this many minutes and this many megabytes of data, it works perfectly for me. Every month I use exactly that amount. Well, go ahead and test it, because they have a savings calculator that lets you plug in all the numbers from your last three bills. So how much you paid, how much airtime you used, and all that stuff, and then it just runs a little calculation, goes, bing! You would have saved this much on Ting, or, hey, maybe you wouldn't have. It just runs the calculation for you. So they figure 98% of Americans would save, so it's probably worth it to check it out. And if you do, use our link, linus.ting.com, to get $25 off a new device or $25 in service credit. Pretty cool stuff. So, thank you for watching this video. You guys, like this video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it, leave a comment letting me know what you would have changed about the insane compact NAS here. I'm actually genuinely very curious what you guys would do for a NAS, because there's a lot of variation. And, as always, check the link in the video description. You can buy a cool t-shirt like this one, you can give us a monthly contribution, or you can change your Amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code, so whenever you buy hard drives we get a small kickback. All that stuff helps us out a lot. Thanks again for watching, and as always, don't forget to subscribe.