 Okay, hold on. Oh God. After being greatly disappointed when some of my fellow YouTubers showed off their 30 to $60,000 jellyfish network storage devices, I set out with exactly the same budget to build something that could absolutely run circles around the thing. Now, given that we could afford SSDs for what they charge for hard drives, it wasn't surprising when we fried their jellyfishies. But for some reason, apparently people are still buying enough of these jellyfish things that OWC recently purchased LumaForge, the company that makes them. Did we not make our point, people? Do you have any idea how much money we could have saved if we didn't go full stupid and build the thing purely from solid state drives? The answer is $45,000. That's right. On this table is everything we need to build a machine that is better than the jellyfish in just about every possible way and costs one fifth as much. So let's fry the jellyfish once and for all. And we're gonna do so with the help of our friends over at Pulseway. Big thanks to Pulseway, not only for sponsoring this video, but for building such fantastic remote management and monitoring software. With Pulseway, you can manage your whole organization's IT infrastructure on the go with their mobile apps and even create and deploy custom scripts to simplify your job. Check them out at the link below. I'm sure you're thinking, Linus, you can't possibly make something for one fifth of the price without some pretty big compromises on the hardware. I mean, when it comes to a gaming PC, yeah, you can save a few hundred bucks building your own over getting someone to do it for you. But if you try to cut 80% of your budget, you're gonna end up with something like this. Where's it going? Really impressive. Ah, I'm stuck. No professional would use that. Well, you're wrong. Excuse me, wrong. So very wrong. Lunaforge has a few different models, but we're gonna be targeting their tower slash rack models specifically because, well, partly they're the most ridiculous. And also partly we like the idea of rack mounting storage and we actually intend to use this thing in the long term. So we're gonna replicate the 240 terabyte rack model with the optional boost package. We'll talk about what that marketing nonsense actually means later. For our case, we've gone with iStar USA's E4 M24 HD, which includes even more drive slots than the rack or tower jellyfish and should fit the rest of our hardware nicely. One challenge though, is that Lunaforge is not very forthcoming about the specific components of their systems, lest somebody Google the part numbers and figure out how hard they are being bleased. But there are some things that we know from last time around and some others that we can glean from their product pages. First off, Lunaforge's big selling point is that it's all direct attach. You just grab your network cable, plug it directly into the machine you wanna edit on and bam, it works just like USB with no network switch required, even for multiple users. But being the reasonable person I am, ah, ah, I just can't fathom why anybody would want a setup where you have more than say two or three people editing off of the same box and you don't just run a network switch. Microtik even has a 12 port 10 gig switch for only $500. So for the amount that I'm paying for Lunaforge's special sauce here, I could buy a pallet of 10 gig switches, but okay. I'm gonna put myself in the shoes or sandals as it were of the person who thinks that that's an ideal workflow and I'm gonna grab two Intel quad port 10 gigabit network cards. That gives us a total in this system of 10 10 gig ports. For storage, Lunaforge uses ZFS, a file system and volume manager wrapped into one that they've got running inside CentOS, a Linux based operating system. Like last time though, we are taking a different route and we're gonna go with True NAS Core, formerly known as Free NAS, which also uses ZFS as its file system, but has a more user-friendly management interface. Based on their specs page, it appears that Lunaforge is using groups or V-DES of 10 drives running RAID Z2. What that means is each group of 10 drives in your jellyfish can sustain two drive failures before you actually lose any data. And since they have 20, 12 terabyte drives on the 240 terabyte model that we're trying to replicate, we could suffer up to four total drive failures before we actually lost anything. That is as long as they failed two in each group, if we lost them like this, we'd be plum out of luck on all the data on these drives. We're not too worried about that though, because Seagate sent over 22 of their Exos 12 terabyte enterprise drives, which boasts two and a half million hours meantime between failure, low power consumption and excellent resistance to vibrations from nearby drives, which there's gonna be a few of them. Also the five-year warranty is a nice touch. That's a Seagate part number. But HP enterprise model, HP enterprise. Now funny story, we would have actually used Seagate's Iron Wolf Pro consumer grade NAS drives, but at the time of filming, these Exos enterprise drives were actually cheaper. So weird flex Seagate, but okay. Now, according to Lunaforge's website, the performance boost package doubles the stock 128 gigs of RAM. So we're gonna be running 256 gigs of 3,200 megahertz crucial registered ECC memory in eight channel mode. That should give us a really nice balance of cost and performance. And we haven't had a single stick of this stuff fail in our last handful of deployments. So we absolutely love it so far. As for the ingest capacitor, well, that's a fancy name for a write cache, which ZFS calls a slog. This limited amount of faster solid state storage prevents the hard drives in the array from getting bogged down when data is getting written to the machine at the same time that somebody is trying to edit off it. Like for example, when you're ingesting footage off of your cameras. Now we don't know how big the drive they use is, but we figured a two terabyte NVMe drive from Sabrent would be plenty for most ingest workflows, given that camera media larger than that is pretty unusual. As for read caching, you see I'm holding two drives here. ZFS utilizes something called Arc, which is a portion of the system memory that acts as a live cache for frequently or recently used files. Problem is when it comes to media work, they're full of large files and you can have enormous projects. So even our 256 gigabytes of RAM could be easily filled up. Thankfully, there's a special feature called level two Arc that allows us to add a second NVMe drive that will be a, well, slower than memory, but still faster than hard drive caching layer before you start reading directly off of the spinning rust. LumaForge doesn't actually include this in their systems, but since the motherboard that we chose has an extra M.2 slot and we have lots of budget leftover to play with, we figured, hey, how many times do you live? However many times you live, it's not enough times to risk downtime or data loss due to a power supply failure. That's why we actually deviated from the Jellyfish's original design. This right here is the twins pro 700 watt from FSP and it is super cool. Like the 1000 watt consumer grade unit that LumaForge uses, it fits in any standard ATX case, but unlike that one, it can sustain a complete failure of one of the two redundant power supply modules that goes into the back like so. Another nice benefit of this thing is that it actually allows you to plug into two independent power sources. If you had, say for example, a UPS and a just direct into mains power one, really you should just have two UPSes though. And the best part about this thing is that we were really concerned about noise, but it ended up being not quiet, but reasonable enough that you could have it in an open office space and it wouldn't be a huge nuisance. Now, obviously if you're gonna have your Jellyfish fryer like on your desk right next to your head, you might wanna choose something else, but never fear because you can afford literally the most expensive enthusiast power supply on the market with all the money you saved. And then you can go get it gold plated at a local shop. One optional upgrade would be to pull out these hot swappable sleds and replace the Sunon fans that ship with this case. Something like a Noctua industrial PPC might have a longer lifetime. But for our purposes, it's not like Sunon is a bad fan manufacturer. And given that we're going to be putting it in a server rack anyway, we're just not that concerned about noise. And the convenience of having these plug right into these little daughter boards that go into the drive back plane is pretty good. One thing that's a little funky about our configuration is that this power supply has fixed cables on it. And unfortunately, it's only got, I think, like two Molex connectors. Well, we need a total of 10 for all of the hard drives that we have installed in this thing. So what we'll be doing is adapting SATA to Molex because it's the only connector on here that's still got five volt built into it. Otherwise, we'd love to use the PCI express connectors, which you don't need in a storage server. Now that doesn't sound great, but as long as you pay attention to the max amperage that these cables and these connectors are rated for, it should be okay. As for the rest of the machine, we chose AMD's Epic platform due to its excellent price, performance, and feature set, which is basically everything. Specifically, we've gone with a 24 core Epic 7302P cooled by Noctua's adorable little NH-U9SP3, which is one of the only coolers specifically engineered to cover the massive heat spreader on an Epic CPU. For our board, we've chosen ASRock Rack's Epic D82T. This board is great for a number of reasons. I mean, just look at all that expansion. It's freaking crazy. Have I mentioned, by the way, how much I love Epic? Because thanks to Epic, we've got 128 total lanes of PCI Express to tap in. That gives us all the slots we need for our HBA, which is what we plug all our drives into, our 10 gigabit NICs, including the two that are already on board, our dual M.2s for those caching drives I mentioned before. It's even got two mini-SAS HD ports over here that gives us another eight drives. So we only need a 16 drive host bus adapter. In our case, an LSI 930516I. Check this out too. It's even got a couple of Oculink ports. So that is eight more lanes of PCI Express down there. This thing's awesome. I think the only thing that could make it better is if it was PCI Express Gen 4, which naturally ASRock Rack has. It's just not something that we would get a performance benefit from. So we are using the Gen 3 one. This is fun. While I was plugging power into the motherboard, I noticed that this power supply has a USB connector coming out of it. Turns out that FSP has a little tool. It only runs in Windows, unfortunately, so we can't use it, but they have a little tool that allows you to monitor temperatures, fan speeds, all that kind of cool stuff, just off of a USB header. For boot drives, we used a couple of Kingston 240 gig SSDs, and you can use basically anything for this. The one thing I'd recommend is having two of them so that in the event of a boot drive failure, you have a live backup of it, ready to go. Okay, not backup, but copy there. And I guess that's pretty much it, isn't it? Yeah, we just cut up the door. Turn it on. 24 cores, 256 gigs of RAM, 10, 10 gigabit network ports, 24 drives, 700 Watts of redundant power, and a mirrored 240 gig boot drive for one fifth of the price. Now we just got to boot this puppy up. Ah! There's probably another cable. Oh, look, another cable. We've already installed TrueNAS, so we're just gonna boot right up to that. If you guys wanna know how to install it, Patrick from Serve the Home did a great guide last time we collaborated, so we're gonna link that in the video description. Now that's a lot of network interfaces. Look at that. 10. 10. That's 10 gigabit. 10 gigabit. We could put them all together for 100, maybe. Yeah, we could. 100 gigabit. That would be a big Nick team. That'd be way smarter if we just put 100 gigabit Nick in here and then a switch and still had lots of money left over, but whatever, we're direct attach. Now that we're fired up, we're in that beautiful little web UI. Actually, this has improved a lot since the last time I looked at it. There's all those interfaces. There's those power supplies going reeeeee. Reeeeee. By far the loudest fans in the system are the ones in the power supplies because they're just these little tiny things, but if you're not into it, just swap it out for something else because hey, you built it. You designed it. You can do it the way you like. So we've got two groups of 10 and then like I showed you guys earlier, we could lose up to four before we actually lose any data. And in the TrueNav dashboard, of course we can see our two RAID Z2s, both with 10 drives and on the bottom we have our log drive as well as our cache drive. So cache would be the level two arc and then log is the S log like we mentioned before. I like calling it a slog. Slog. It's got a slog through those index entries. All righty then. Slog through them. What we're gonna show you guys now, because really the main point of this isn't how to set up TrueNavs. We wanna show you guys how we're gonna do the direct attach special magic that Jellyfish ships. So we've got a test system right here on our test card. That's got a 10 gig network card in it. We're gonna go ahead and run the, oh my God, that's not screwed into anything. Did you just pull it out? Well, I didn't not pull it out. You didn't not pull it out. What does that even mean? It means we're about to find out smart guy. Ah, it's probably fine. It's hot swap, right? You tried PCIe hot swap, right? Is that the right HDMI? I think so. Well, it was on before. Oh crap. Well, you didn't screw the thing in. Well, it didn't have a thing and we're just trying to do it quick. The thing's right here, you can just move it. I wasn't expecting you to just yoink on it. No, I didn't. He's a yoinker man. You just, you gotta be careful around this. While Linus tries to fix that, we're on the TrueNAS side. And basically all you need to do to set up a direct attach setup, like the fancy jellyfish software would do, is essentially just assign an IP address to both interfaces on either side. And then the computer will facilitate transfer between the two machines in what's known as an un-routed subnet. There's no router that's controlling the packets. It's just the systems telling each other where it needs to go. So we're in TrueNAS. I've set up 10.96.0.10 for this computer and we gotta make sure our subnet is the same. So dash 24. And then on that side, we'll do 10.96.0.20. And you could set these to realistically whatever you want. Click apply there. Test changes. Oh man, TrueNAS has a super nice thing. Basically when you're doing network changes on TrueNAS, it will like try them for 60 seconds. And if you don't confirm it in the dashboard, it will just revert back to the way it was. You can't screw it up and like make it so you have to boot it into recovery mode or something to change the settings. And then on our Windows computer side, we have set up the same thing, but 10.96.0.20, same subnet 255.255.255, which is the same as slash 24. There's gonna click okay there, close. That'll start to do its thing. And then we'll just apply on this side and we should be pretty much good to go. Funny story, that machine doesn't have Premiere on it. And it's actually faster for us to just go get a longer ethernet cable and plug into one of our editing stations. So we're just gonna redo the IP setup over there. One moment, please. After a quick reboot to get the network share remapped properly, you can see we've got our J drive, which is our jellyfish fryer. And boom, we are video editing off of our jellyfish fryer. Of course, what we need to know now is, how's it handling it? And for that, naturally we turn to Pulseway. Unfortunately, Pulseway does not yet have support for free BSD based operating systems like TrueNAS, but we use it for all kinds of server related things here at the office. And actually even ones that aren't necessarily server related. With Pulseway, you can monitor all of your systems through a simple dashboard that's available right on your mobile device. From here, you can see I've created a little sandbox account with the machine behind me and one of our servers. I can monitor everything from system resources, like available memory, or if we're running out of storage, to patch policies, to even remoting into these machines and taking control of them. With Pulseway, you can also create custom scripts that simplify your IT management. And if Windows updates are a pain in your butt, you can even manage those remotely and schedule them as well. And if you look around here in the editing den, da da da da da, we've had to do a lot more remote management than usual with a bunch of our staff working from home. So try out Pulseway. It's available for most operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and Mac. And it's so powerful that I'm always learning about new functionality. Apparently you can use it to send a wake on LAN ping, like a magic packet to one of the machines on your network if for whatever reason it's stuck in sleep and you have no way of waking it up because you're halfway around the world. That's cool stuff, even for home users. So it works great. And how much did we pay overall? Before tax, including everything we've currently got deployed, around $12,000 US dollars. That's a lot of money, but it is nowhere near the $58,000 that LumaForge charges for their equivalent. And before you ask, yes, we also accounted for the two cold spare drives that aren't even installed that LumaForge does include with the Jellyfish. We could even comfortably step up to Iron Wolf Pros, which aren't enterprise per se, but do have three years of data recovery included if you're into that kind of peace of mind thing. So yeah, I can understand the appeal of a solution that is all pre-set up for you and has some fancy software for connecting to it or whatever. But for the price difference, you could quite literally hire an IT person for like half a year to spec this thing, build it for you, deploy it, and show you how to use it. I mean, you'd probably have some money left over to send your team on a nice vacation. I see how you snuck that in there, Jake. That's good, that's a good one. You know we can't do workation this year. As for us, this machine is destined to become the new local backup server for our NVMe editing machine, AKA new, new Wannock. So go check out that video if you haven't seen it yet. And go check out Pulseway. Pulseway is absolutely fantastic. Whether you want to simplify your IT management tasks, monitor your servers, remote desktop in, apply patches, Pulseway has got you covered, and you can do everything from their mobile app.