 I think you just have to press it again. Yeah, just do it again. I am actually really excited about this video because on the one hand it's some really cool server gear from our buds over at Seagate and 45 Drives, but on the other hand it's a project that has kind of a personal element to it for me. So if you guys are in tune with sort of the rest of the tech YouTuber community, you might know that we actually hooked up some of our buds with storage servers over the last little while and I was a little bit surprised to find out that some of those folks had actually changed out their storage servers or added storage servers without checking in with me again for a variety of reasons and I'm going to have a more detailed video following this up in the future. We'll talk about those reasons, we'll actually maybe get an opportunity to talk to them directly about what exactly happened. But the bottom line is the observation was that an unraid box full of magnetic hard drives was not really suitable for editing off of because it wasn't fast enough, but that's something that I definitely know and if I'd known that people wanted a high performance solution I could have helped them out, it's just that they went with another solution that I kind of looked at and I went, well gee, that doesn't on paper make a ton of sense. So today's video is about exploring what else is out there for editors who are looking for a high performance network based storage solution and whether compared to some of the more boutiquey options we think we can DIY something a little more exciting. And today's video is brought to you by Ridge Wallet. With a Ridge Wallet you don't have to carry around any of those, well it's not so much that you don't have to, it's that it incentivizes you to not carry around stupid things like gift cards with $1.27 left on them or old hotel room keys or whatever else because they just don't have space for them. Check them out at the link in the video description and you can get 50, excuse me, 15% off. We'll have that down below. Alright so guys, here's our target. This is the LumaForge Jellyfish. Can you see my screen okay David? It's not too bad? Okay. So this is a, you can actually get it in a variety of configurations, mobile, tower or rack with the tower and the rack from my understanding being very similar. I have actually spoken with these folks although they're not talking to me anymore now that they know that I'm trying to beat their product for the same price or less. So all I can go based on is what they told me before they figured out my ulterior motive. So let's go ahead and choose their tower because the tower is quieter. So you can see here their pricing is $29,995 and that gets you 80 terabytes of raw storage with 53 terabytes available. So the reason that you've got less available than you have raw storage is because they're using ZFS with like a RAIDZ, oh shoot, okay don't quote me on this. I believe it's a RAIDZ2, two RAIDZ2s and then I believe the two are striped together which is kind of like a RAID60. Don't quote me on that. I'm going to have to check my notes and make sure that it's all right when I do the follow-up video. So I kind of went, wow 80 terabytes for 30 grand, that's got to be some pretty amazing like lightning fast storage-ness and stuff. But there's only one small problem, that 80 terabyte configuration, 80 terabytes of raw storage configuration is actually using mechanical drives. Mechanical drives my friends. So a quick search over on newag.com would reveal that the storage in this machine, let's choose 10 terabyte drives for a nice round number, 10 terabyte hard drive. So eight of those would be, let's pick something, let's go straight for the enterprise. So eight times $300 is $2400. What happened to my other $27,000 here? I don't know. So what I could have done was I could have put together a project where I build something comparable for a lower price. But then I saw how completely out of whack they were on their pricing and I thought, you know what, I think we can do better. So this is the project that I'm introducing today. The all solid state storage LumaForge jellyfish killer. Yes, my friends, for the price of the 120 terabyte jellyfish, we are going to attempt to build a completely SSD based server that absolutely smashes the doors off of the jellyfish. So there's no guarantee that this is actually all going to work out that way, but I'm feeling pretty good about my chances. So to start with, we need to unbox something from 45 drives that I've actually never had occasion to use before, so I haven't experienced firsthand. This is called a 45 drives store NATO. It's actually a relatively recent product from them. And I thought there wasn't really anything that special about it until I started doing research for what kind of a server enclosure I could use for this project. And I just couldn't find anything else that quite fit the bill, because the thing is part of 45 drives, oh wow, this is some interesting packing. You guys, come on, better glue 45 drives. So part of 45 drives is shtick, is that instead of relying on backplanes, which take your SATA or your NVMe or your SAS connection and then divide it up to multiple drives, they directly attach every single drive in their machines to the storage controller. Now this has a cost in terms of the wiring that they have to do inside their enclosures, because they have to run an individual cable to every single drive, and it has a cost in terms of controllers, because instead of using a single eight-port controller to run, let's say, times 32 drives or something like that, they actually have to add more SATA or more SAS controllers to their machines. But they claim the advantage is that you reduce the complexity in other ways. You reduce the points of failure by just using a proper controller port for every single drive. So anyway, because we're going for maximum performance in this machine, I didn't want to run into any kind of SATA splitter or SAS splitter bottleneck, and I decided to go with the Stornado. I was going to use a machine from Supermicro that's actually quite similar to one that we have in our server room, but what I realized is that it only had, I believe, about four, no, four, I believe it was eight SATA channels for 48 drives or something along those lines, so it just really wasn't going to fit the bill for us. So let's... Oh yeah, I sure can. So let's go ahead and crack this open. Anthony, do you want to give me that overhead shot there? Oh, look at that, I can even preview. That's so cool. Look at that, I can center it and everything. Are people enjoying the stream so far? Are they into this? Cool, because I am amped. So it looks like 45 drives actually sent over a significantly higher-end configuration than I anticipated. They might have actually kind of screwed me over on this because I have a cost target to hit here, and they've gone and they've equipped this thing with a dual socket motherboard, and how much RAM do we have? Now, okay, with that said, this might still be okay, because I know that LumaForge does have a performance boost option where they install more RAM and I believe they upgrade the CPU, but they don't actually tell you how much more RAM or how much more CPU they put in. So it's like, we could kind of say, yeah, we performance boosted it, and we could go up against that if we want, but either way, the math is going to be a little bit fuzzy on this project. In terms of RAM, they've gone and equipped us with 32 gigs times 8, so that's around 256 gigs of RAM. Now you might wonder why on earth you would need 256 gigs of RAM for a storage server, and that's a very fair question, but the reason is that because we're going to be using ZFS, probably on FreeNAS, although that's not entirely decided yet, because we're going to be using ZFS, we can actually use our RAM as a cache in a way that can improve our performance significantly. Now, normally, with FreeNAS and ZFS, what you could do is you could install an SSD device or two that you could use to act as sort of like a buffer for writes, so all your random writes go to your SSD, and then it will kind of organize it all and then spit it out in a more linear fashion that's more hard drive friendly. But because we're using all solid state drives, it's very unlikely that we'd get a great benefit from that, so the only ways to really successfully cache a fully solid state server would be either using Optane or using RAM. And the consultant, actually this is a really exciting part of this video, the consultant that I have connected with actually at Computex this year to help us out on this project and make sure that we are setting this up in the best way possible is none other than, oh wow, I'm having a total brain abandoning me moment and I have actually forgotten his name. Oh, this is really bad. Oh boy, hopefully he never watches this. Patrick. I know he's watching right now. Patrick from Serve the Home. So if you guys aren't familiar with Serve the Home, it's an absolutely fantastic site. It's better than it sounds because it kind of sounds like weird nerds cobbling together like servers for their closets out of old hardware or something like that, and they do that kind of stuff of course. But they're actually, they go so much deeper than that and they have a really great understanding of network storage and servers and all that kind of good stuff. So we're going to work with Patrick. He's going to come up here for the final build where we put this whole thing together, get all the little dials tweaked and see how much performance we can pull out of this machine. So you guys can see here I've actually gone ahead and pulled off the second cover here and that is, is that not just absolutely beautiful? I've never seen a Stornado. So the difference between a 45 drives Stornado and a Stornado is this. This is actually a very similar chassis to their AV15, which is the one that we hooked Austin up with where you load a bunch of hard drives in here. But instead they've got this bracket that seems to be like machined like acetone or like a Delrin type material or something. There's a metal outer layer and it's designed to hold, yeah, 32 SSDs, up to 32 SSDs. Let's go ahead and have a look at the rest of our specs here. So as I said before, we're using dedicated controller ports for each one of these slots. So you can actually see the absolute nightmare of cabling. If you get a look through there, David, can you see that? Kind of through that slit there, all these cables that are running to each individual slot and we're using a pair of, I believe they're LSI controllers here. Although LSI has been, I think, acquired a couple of times in the last five years, so I can't keep track of who owns them now. Is it Broadcom now, Anthony? I know it was Avago for a bit. Whatever. I'm just going to go full old school and I'm going to call them LSI controllers because I just can't be arsed to deal with it. There are 9305-16s, I think. Don't quote me on that. It's kind of hard to read from this angle. And then here's another thing that we've gotten here. So this is a pair of Intel X540T2 Ethernet cards. Now you might wonder why we would care about having quad 10 gigabit Ethernet ports on this device. Well, one of LumaForge's big selling points for the jellyfish is that it's like plug and play. So you don't need a switch, like a network switch that has to sit and be powered externally and you've got wiring from your NAS and then wiring to all your editors. It's meant to be just like a drop and go solution where your editors just plug right into the back of it and boom, they've got access to the network share. So that's something that I talked to Patrick about and he's like, yeah, I think we can simplify the setup of that to the point where someone could build something like this and have that experience for themselves without paying an arm and a leg for it. Or they could pay an arm for a leg for it and they could have an all solid state server instead of one with spinning rust. Now let's have a look at a couple of the customizations that 45 drives has made. So we went for, instead of a redundant power supply because we're looking for a configuration that's more like the tower, we went for a single quiet power supply. I want this to be something that someone could install in their office and be ready to rock with and all of the fans are Noctua high airflow fans for this particular configuration. So these are NF-S12A FLX fans. All right, now let's talk about the thing that made this project feasible. So I actually was already getting pretty close to being able to be competitive with enterprise grade SSDs from the likes of Intel or Micron. But the problem was that we were sort of in like that awkward zone where either we were going to have to tackle this from a let's be way, way cheaper and the same performance perspective which wasn't going to be as much fun for me or we were going to blow the budget a little bit in order to beat it by performance by, beat it in performance by a lot. And I really wanted our budget to be pretty much identical and that is when these hit my inbox. So this is just shy of three master cartons of something pretty special from Seagate. Now if you had told me even three years ago that someone was going to develop a product designed for home users to put SSDs in their NASs and their network attached storage, I'd have said no way. It's not ready, the only way that that's ever going to be economical is well just to wait, to wait more. And wait more we did. This is Seagate's Iron Wolf NAS 3.84 terabyte SSD. So just like the rest of their Iron Wolf family, it includes their, actually, oh does it include that? Hey Anthony, can you double check if it includes, oh yeah it does, look at that, it's right on the label. So just like the rest of the Iron Wolf family, it includes their rescue data recovery services, so that is pretty freak and sweet and it's rated for 24-7 operation, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, just like their Iron Wolf family of hard drives. So this is it, with four terabyte SSDs, these are priced at around 750 bucks a pop. It looks like we can get there. So where did I put my laptop? Oh wow, where did I put my laptop? Oh good, there it is. So let's go ahead and fire up a ZFS calculator and then we're going to get all these drives installed. So this is a really cool calculator over on Wintelguy.com. So we're going to use probably RAID Z1 single parity, our drive capacity is 3840 gigs. Our drive cost is going to be somewhere between 700 and 800 dollars a unit. I didn't say they were cheap, just to be very clear you guys. And then number of drives per group. So we've got, how many drives do we have? Three, four, five, six, seven here. And then I believe these are both full master cartons with 10 units each. So we've got 27 drives. So there's a number of different ways that we can break that up. Now I was actually, I had some very old information and I thought that it mattered a lot. How many drives you had in each one of your VDEDs. So that's your groupings of drives for ZFS. But apparently that's very outdated information, doesn't actually matter. So there's a number of different ways that we can tackle this. So let's go ahead and have a look together. So if we wanted to use all 27 of our drives, we could go nine drives per group. We could say RAID Z1 single parity and we could go, okay we're going to have three RAID groups and let's go ahead and calculate what that gives us. So total raw storage is 94, usable storage capacity is about 80. So let's go ahead and fire up the jellyfish here. So if we only need 80 terabytes of usable capacity, we actually get to compete against the $35,000 jellyfish. We can have up to four editors. So that's how they denote how many Ethernet ports they're going to put in the machine. So we've got four Ethernet ports. Let's go ahead and click this. Storage expansion, nope we already told you how much. Yeah sure, performance boost. We're boosted. And then let's have a look. So our total is 40 grand. So let's see how we're doing against that. So our total cost, wow, it asks me how much my drives cost but it doesn't actually calculate that for me. Oh total cost, okay. So it's costing us 20 grand in drives which gives us about $20,000 to spend on a Stornator. That should be okay. Or a Stornado, Stornado, sorry, sorry, sorry, Stornado. Yeah wow, I think we're going to be okay here. So I guess they sent over the Turbo Stornado which starts at 10 grand. We did make some additions though. So I believe we're going to run free NAS but that doesn't affect the price because it's free. We're not running the redundant power supply. We're going to run 256 gigs of RAM. We've got redundant boot drives. Yes, they are 9305 so we've got two of those and we have two dual copper NICs. And our warranties, three here, that looks comparable. We don't have, oh okay. So we don't have any after sales support and that is something that Jellyfish does and my understanding is they also ship you two cold spare drives. So we should probably factor that into our price to have a couple extra drives. That's another $1,500. So let's see how much our Stornator is costing us here. $17,415. All right. So it looks like we are in business. We are like a grand, grand and a half shy of what a Jellyfish would have cost us. And we're all solid state instead of mechanical drives. So let's go ahead and do some drive installation porn here, shall we? Oh, am I going to get demonetized? Is that a bad word? Because you know they transcribe everything you say, right? So 10% off the Ridge wallet? Oh shoot. Sorry, guys. Here, you want to throw that to me? Oh not overhand. Ow. All right. Ridge wallet. There you go. That's a Ridge wallet. So basically it doesn't hold too much stuff and it's supposed to de-incentivize you from carrying around unnecessary junk. They feel great. They're made of like anodized aluminum. They clip on and you can save 10% at the link in the video description. Sorry about that. Sorry. All right. So let's see how much we're spending. So let's go ahead and install some drives here. Probably the overhead. Let's see if I can figure out how these go in. Wow, I got to say these guys have really, really improved their drive mounting mechanisms over the years. I'd like to see like a plasticky mount for the hard drives as well. Although their new friction mount, or not new, it's not that new anymore, but their friction mount with the kind of the, I don't know what to call them, kind of like the spring metal on the sides. That's not that bad either. Man. I wish we had like an onscreen counter for like how many terabytes we're adding to this machine. 3.84 terabytes per drive. Just like that. I should probably also read some super chats or something since I'm not doing anything more useful right now. Where's my mouse cursor? There we go. All right. Okay, 10 more of these, and I'm so amped for this project. It's always really cool when I reach out to someone that I really respect, even though I don't know his name, like Patrick from Serve the Home, and he's like, heck yeah, man. Love to work together. That would be great. He's also got some really cool ideas for how we could take this initial project, which is find a magic server and demonstrate that no, it is not in fact magic. It's just some open source or free to use software and some commodity hardware that someone assembled. In fairness to them, my understanding is that their connector software, like they have a client connector software that makes it so you don't have to go into a web UI in order to configure your server. My understanding is that's pretty cool. But they only just got back to me with a video demoing what that UI looks like, so I haven't had a look at that yet. But I will before the final video. I am determined to make this as fair as I can, even though obviously like I said, I am coming in with the agenda of demonstrating that no, you should not in fact be paying. Given that our drives are what, 20 grand of our costs, and if we were using hard drives with just a small SSD cache, it would be more like four or five grand. I'm just, yes, my agenda is to demonstrate that you shouldn't be paying an extra $15,000 for a service plan. And the privilege of not having to log into a web UI once in a while. So we'll see. It's still possible that I'll be wrong. This could be a total dog. Come on, it could, David. Keep an open mind. Okay. Okay. Keep an open mind. What's that? Canines. Iron Wolf. Oh. Would you folks believe that he's a professional writer? Thanks Anthony. All right. Paul says, take my money. Anthony is king. I'm not sure if that's for smoking me in the head with a Ridge wallet or something else, but there you go, Anthony. Good work. Brian says, take my free super chat. What do people get free super chats for? Is that a thing? I don't know. Okay. WTF name says lag. Oh, sorry. Kenneth says, take my free super chat. What are these free super chats people are talking about? Is this kind of like on Amazon where you get a free Twitch to prime something or other once in a while? I don't know that Google has a service like that. Jason says, here's $2 towards your new build. Yeah, $2. So we only need another, what's that work out to? 20,000 of those and we're good to go. That's okay though. This stuff was provided by 45 drives and Seagate. So you guys don't have to help me pay for this. It's all good. What else we got? Jake says, need your review of the thousand dollar monitor stand. That would actually be another really fun project to see if we can beat for half the price or match for half the price or beat for way less or something or beat for the same price or something like that. What would a thousand dollar, like an actual thousand dollar monitor stand look like? I have no idea. It would have to, man, if it had like a super strong electromagnet or something. So you could like electromagnet it to a thing and then it would be like super solid and then you could like turn off the electromagnet and then you could like mount it somewhere else. Like how over engineered would a legitimate one thousand dollar monitor stand have to be? YouTube premium gives super chats for free. Oh, YouTube premium gives super chats for free. Okay, sold and sent one too. That's absolutely fascinating. Nick says, when is Petabyte Project getting the full SSD upgrade? Never, or I shouldn't say never. Never is a big word. But Petabyte Project is getting an upgrade but it's going to be mechanical storage, not solid state because even this 80 usable terabytes of solid state storage, like I said before, is 40 grand. All right. Let me just see if there's anything else. Apparently I need to get myself a mega pro screwdriver, says James. No more random bits falling out of the handle. Maybe I should look into that. All right. David Lee says free super chat is included with YouTube premium. Okay, thank you. Thank you very much. All right. So this is it, guys. That was pretty much the video today is the physical build, having a look at the machine that we're going to be using to try to beat the LumaForge jellyfish. Isn't that beautiful? I really wish that I had talked Seagate into sending over five more because then it would be full. But it's actually, okay, we were trying to hit a price target, which is why I settled on 27. It wasn't a totally arbitrary decision. I'm like super excited about this. So I believe Patrick is flying up here in two weeks. So in two weeks, we're going to be filming. And then after that, we're going to be bringing this video to you guys. Actually one thing I should do is fire it up real quick and make sure the thing works because it would put a significant damper on our plans if this server was damaged in shipping or something like that. So let's go ahead. I won't leave you guys in suspense. We're going to fire it up here. VGA because that onboard server video, you got to love it, right? Mouse and keyboard. What do we do with those cables? There they are. Awesome. I'm hoping it's pretty quiet. It should be. It's almost all knocked to a fan except for the one in the power supply. Let's go ahead and fire it up. All right. Rock on. That's a pretty reasonable noise level. Loudest thing in the system is definitely the power supply. It's interesting. I thought they were going to send over just like a consumer power supply unit for this, but they ended up going with a Zippy power supply. To be clear, I'm not complaining. That's a nice high quality server grade power supply. It's just not what I had expected. I thought I was going to get like a Corsair RM series, kind of like their AV-512. Oh, I guess now would be a good time to find out what kind of CPUs they put in here as well. That's another thing that I still don't know from LumaForge. They wouldn't tell me what CPUs they're using because that's, I guess, proprietary information or something. So I'm just going to ask one of the folks that I know who owns one, like I don't get what you're trying to accomplish by not just answering my questions because clearly I'm going to find the answer. It's just you're wasting my time. So then obviously that's not putting me in a better mood about all this. Not that I'm going to let my mood affect things. We're going to try to objectively beat it. All right. Let's just go ahead and get this loaded up here. I think your porn comment earlier said about the bots sparring. There's bots spamming porn? That's weird. That's really weird. Huh. How about that? YouTube really is a very special place, isn't it? Man, these super micro boards take a long time to post, eh? The worst is when you're troubleshooting one of them because it's like three minutes between loading up the OS and rebooting and detecting IPMI and all that kind of stuff. It's like three minutes for every reboot every time you try to change something. So the cards report themselves as Avago, but I thought that they had actually been acquired since then because I thought Avago got acquired. Broadcom. Okay. There you go. So LSI acquired by Avago, Avago acquired by Broadcom. You can take a moment to appreciate the Stornado front plate. They asked if I wanted a custom one with our logo on it or whatever because they have this direct to metal printer that they can use to do stuff like this. I was like, no, I actually kind of like the stock Stornado one. I think it's cool. Purple is an underutilized performance color, I think. I love it. Yeah. Royal server. Come on, baby. One of these days, Supermicro, you guys might actually give a care about how long your boards take to boot. I'm not holding my breath for it, but someday, maybe. Come on. Okay. Here we go. So it's working. That stick of memory I pulled out may not have been reseated correctly. 200, wait. No, yeah, that's right. Yeah. 256 gigs of RAM. What do we got for CPU configuration? What are these? Xeon E5 2620 V4s. These are actually not that state of the art. I'd be interested to know why they haven't upgraded to some of the newer stuff, I guess. Maybe they found it doesn't matter. Well, I guess we're going to see. So that's pretty much it for the video, guys. Thank you for tuning in to this live stream, which on YouTube probably won't end up being live. The reason for that is that YouTube actually took a full week, and I still don't know if it's actually done correctly, to transcode last week's WAN show. That's why it never showed up on YouTube. There was no problem with the show or anything like that, but instead of being an hour-long video, YouTube was detecting that it was two hours long and it was full of weird skipping and repetition. It was some kind of a problem on their side. They claim it was something to do with the outages that they experienced last weekend, but I don't actually buy it because the WAN show from the previous week had the same bloody issue. So what we're going to do with this video is we are going to upload it separately to YouTube, so it'll just be a regular VOD. So sorry, guys, if we notify you twice, but what are we supposed to do if they can't manage to take these live videos and publish them in a reasonable timeframe? We can't have people waiting a week to watch something. It's old news by that point. So all right, that's it. If you guys disliked this video, you can hit that button, but if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed, or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description. Also down there is our merch store, which has cool shirts like the, oh, it has cool hoodies like this one. It's finally in stock, lttstore.com. So I actually love this thing. And one of the top features is the phone pocket. So it's big enough to hold an iPhone XS Max or a Note 9 and secure enough that your phone doesn't come out, which I think is pretty sweet, but you can get it out easily. See that? So it's just, there's your technique for putting it in. There's your technique for getting it out. But if you're like, you know, bending over to pick something up, you can never have your phone drop out again. All right. Peace, guys. Peace, guys. Peace, guys.