 Whether you're a casual part-time wedding photographer or you're working on the next big-budget Hollywood movie Every media production professional has run into this problem at some point They don't have enough space for all their photos graphics Assets or video clips. What's the solution? Well a lot of the time people will run out and buy things like these and whether they've got a hard drive inside them or an SSD external drives like these ones always run into some of the same limitations They connect to your system using buses like USB or Thunderbolt that are not easily shared with other users So today as a spiritual follow-up to our recent budget 4k video editing workstation I'm gonna be showing you guys what I consider to be the budget 4k video editing NAS Instantly see your current and past network activity detect malware and block badly behaving apps on your PC or Android device with glassware Use software code Linus to get 25% off at the link below I'm gonna put aside the internals for now because really where the story starts is the case. So this ticked all the boxes quiet reasonably professional looking and it can accommodate with the optional hard drive sleds up to 18 hard drives fractal sent along the case for this video along with All the expansions, but I haven't looked at the reviewers guide. So I don't really know how any of this works Well, there seems to be a slight problem My original email said the Define 7 XL holds up to 18 3.5 inch hard drives the reviewers guide says 14 max and it's bolded. I Don't know how this works. Oh, here we go So now what I want to do is reconfigure my fans before I start stacking hard drives in this thing now We're about ready to install drives But I found yet more conflicting information in the users guide three and a half two and a half universal drive positions 18 Which one is it fractal? So for this project, we're gonna be using the ideal drives these are Seagate's iron wolf pro NAS drives. So these are the 16 terabyte variant, but they are available in a variety of capacities They come with a five-year warranty including Seagate's rescue data recovery service that's freaking awesome and as they're pro iron wolf drives they're rated for up to 24 drives in an enclosure because with drives that are not designed for NAS use and for Operation in close proximity to each other the vibrations of the next drive over can actually affect the operation of Another drive so these are good for up to 24 and since we're gonna be putting 18 Or 14 in this chassis. These were a perfect fit. We got to put the anti-vibration rubber grommet Then we line that puppy up on the bottom of our drive now with an SSD You guys have probably seen me use as few as two screws or one Or none and some double-sided tape But I would never recommend that with a hard drive when it comes to hard drives You mount them with as many screws as you can because even if your drives are designed to withstand the vibrations of nearby drives They are not designed to withstand the vibrations of nearby drives that are not mounted correctly So all four of our screws go in That's 16 okay, none of the documentation said anything about 16 what the crap oh Oh, well that happened we're up to 19 drives which sort of leads me to wonder how much farther we can go like You know what you can call it good at 20 right I mean 320 terabytes of raw capacity in a $200 case let's start talking about some of our other components yes, this is a Strix gaming Motherboard or whatever, but what it also is is a good value board with lots of memory expansion Which could be important if we want to run DMs or other server functions on our NAS It's got support for third-gen Ryzen processors with a BIOS update of course. It's got lots of PCI Express expansion it's got two m.2 slots, and we'll get to why we need those later and Finally it manages to boot in headless mode without a graphics card installed and without an APU installed Where you would be able to use the onboard graphics? So that saves us some money because even though we're going to need a graphics card in order to configure our system We don't actually necessarily want to leave one in there unless we have some purpose for it like we want to use GPU hardware acceleration for media encoding for a Plex server or something like that So we're going with a second gen Ryzen 2600 non X because it's using the original Zen architecture instead of Zen 2 those individual cores are not as Fast now we could go with something heavier if we intend to use this thing You know again as a you know a media server That's going to have to do you know heavy video encoding or whatever the case may be But our intent for the build today is to just have it be a file server And this is going to be plenty plenty of horsepower for that now I did consider going Intel for this build But even though we're using regular unbuffered memory one of the things that pushed me to AMD was their unofficial support for ECC or error checking memory on their consumer processors now it does require support from the motherboard and Conveniently this one happens to support it as well as costing a little bit more But if you were going to run something like ZFS for your software raid It is a recommended feature to have and you should spend a little bit of extra for some unbuffered ECC RAM Cooling is another item that I waffled about a little bit on this build So I ultimately decided to give it a shot with the AMD box cooler and then as long as my thermals and acoustics were fine Stick with that and then if they're not then I can always upgrade down the line one thing I spent extra on that would normally be considered a splurge item But in this case actually makes a ton of sense is a modular power supply Why don't we just say this the recommended way to do this would be to get your hands on Some custom cables for the power supply All right, that's 16 and we've got both one more harness as well as one more plug on our modular power supply to handle our other four drives. I just really doubt that this is gonna work Turns out this power supply does only come with one four connector molex cable But I was able to find one just kind of lying around in the warehouse So we've got enough even if you as an end user would end up having to order an additional one Now comes the part of the build that's pretty much just down to however you want to do it To however you want to do things Connecting the drives to data as you can see the motherboard can only accommodate six drives with these connectors on the right-hand edge Fortunately as long as we've got PCI Express slots to spare we can add pretty much as many SATA ports as we want with Boards like this now the most important thing to watch out for if you are expanding your storage is not to get a raid Card you want an HBA or a host bus adapter because most software raid whether you're running it through free NAS or unraid Can behave erratically or at the very least not give you proper drive reporting if you are using a raid card Another thing to watch out for when you're shopping for these is the types of connectors some of them just have the regular SATA connectors that you would recognize and you plug into them and then you've got an octopus of cables coming out that plug into Your drives, but others use connectors that are more designed for SATA or SAS back planes So mini SAS HD or SFF 8087 are some pretty common ones the way that you connect these is with slightly fancier cables So here's a mini SAS HD one. This is an eight port card So you've got just these two connectors that go into the back of the drive and then Way at the other end you've got the octopus. Oh Yeah, it's actually eight octopus. Okay, so it's four per connector picking up cards like these secondhand on eBay can be a great way To add a ton of connectivity to your system. Just one thing to watch out for guys is SAS cards will work with SATA drives But not the other way around if for whatever reason you have SAS drives you can't buy SATA HBAs so to be clear guys, I am not necessarily Recommending exactly the cards I'm using I'm just using whatever HBA cards I had lying around a couple little housekeeping items Still be taken care of I want to cable manage these kind of like this these ones for the bottom can go over here with a couple of cable ties and then I've run myself an extra SATA cable for the future in case I want to plug in a second SSD down the line and Still got to plug in these ones at the top Overall actually, this is not bad for having 20 hard drives in it I could use the built-in fan controller that's in the case But actually that would require another SATA connector and I don't have any right now All I need to do now is put in my temporary graphics card Yeah, this thing is obnoxious what what do you mean obnoxious? Well, okay, I mean like in a good way This is awesome So I'm not that familiar with Proxmox and I wanted to show people how you might configure a system like this in Proxmox I wonder if you ceramic coated this if it would help with the fingerprints. What is it with you and ceramic coating things? Oh, that's cool. Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss our ceramic coating a phone video, which was also his idea Oh, this is heavy, man So I mean like straight into Proxmox The only thing you can really create is a single VDEV pool so we could have one that's like Raid Z3 Although if you're gonna add more drives, that would mean you would need to add 20 whole more drives I mean in an ideal world what I would probably want to do is like maybe three Raid Z1s So that would be three Raid Z1 VDEVs That would be three drives of capacity lost to redundancy and then I'd have two hot spares or something like that I mean if you're running stuff at your house like for me, I have my Ubiquiti controller that runs on a VM on my NAS. I have a Plex server I have lots of different VMs just for doing all these little things home automation and like in Proxmox You can do it really easy. You can actually create containers which are still running in the host OS. So there's very little overhead and It's super easy to maintain. So why don't you just use Freeness? Well aside from my bad experiences with it in the past, it's sort of a question of What's more cost-effective right? Right. So unraid costs money. Yeah, which is sort of a drag not a whole lot But but if I want to use ZFS Optimally in a way that is recommended by the experts who know a lot about ZFS. I'm actually spending more on memory upgrades Yeah, if I don't care about the virtualization, which is not how I've configured this in the first place Then it would cost me to just buy an unraid license in the first place, right and unraid does have some performance Gotchas like if you allow all your drives that you're not accessing currently to go to sleep So you disable turbo right that's bad And also if you configure it to fill up one drive then the next one then what that means is every project can potentially Be IO bottlenecked by the individual drive that it's being pulled off of I just wanted to highlight a few different types of software that you can use for a config like this Okay, so we if we do DF we can actually see it's 214 terabytes of capacity. Oh, no. I mean we lost what was it for drive good heavens three drives. Yeah. Oh man. You can feel it Wow, the vibration is real, you know what actually this would be a good way to check our drive thermals I'm gonna put the covers on and then just like run a hundred gig one and let it finish I'm gonna install net data so we can actually look at the array It's nice that there's so much room for cable management on the back But in the event that you do have kind of a you know, thick boy cable back here I would prefer if there was some way to screw on the side panel That's not that great it's holding but See that is what I'm talking about Cable manager stuff better. We watch out that's power for the drives. Oh, why is it? Why is it like didn't like that right now? Now? I did misspeak before I said that this was $200 It's $200 without the tempered glass side panel, which we obviously wouldn't need for a build like this That's just the one they sent so we're using net data to monitor the disk usage It's always so funny because ZFS messes around with it. So it's like 20 megabytes what that doesn't make any sense Now that we're updated the first thing we need to do is create our unraid array So the parity disks right here are the capacity that we're going to give up in order to avoid losing data in the event Of a physical drive failure so one parity disk means we give up one drive worth of capacity But it also means we can only lose one drive before we start to lose data after that While two means that we give up a total of 32 terabytes of space But we can lose two drives before we start to lose any data Now it should be noted unraid has a cache feature that allows you to have high-speed SSDs as like a faster storage tier But I use the word tier very loosely because it doesn't work the way you might expect it to You can use it to accelerate writes onto the unraid array But from my experience, especially when working with very large amounts of data like you might when you're ingesting footage It can be a little bit on the finicky side and I wouldn't really use it for that What I would use it for is if I wanted to run virtual machines on this I would run all of my VMs off of a raid one set of SSDs that I plug into my m.2 slots. Oh Oh Cool, they built a new feature based on my feedback When it's formatting it automatically pauses parodiesync because otherwise it takes like a day while we wait for the format We can adjust some of the settings that we talked about before so turbo right is technically called Reconstruct, right? So we're gonna go ahead and turn that on. This is the second tweak I talked about We're gonna use most free So as we write data to the share it'll go to whichever drive has the most free space on it Which means that if we were to write 18 separate video clips it would go this one this one this one this one this one this one this one like that minimum free space is a really important parameter to tune so if we think our clips could be no bigger than 100 gigs then we need to make sure that we key that in now Nicholas assured me that this is going to work But Nicholas also brought me the wrong motherboard twice when we were doing that CPU repair thing Here's our problem our chassis fans are running at 700 rpm Which is nice and quiet but is just not enough to push enough air through all those friggin drives I'm gonna move our cable from our onboard gigabit network to our add-in 10 gig a quanta card Are we 10 gig we're 10 gig share time who's not that busy right now? There's my water bottle you bastard Why would I? I don't know but it has my name on it and also my stickers So right now mark is pulling in excess of gigabit speeds when he's playing back. This is 10 to 1 8k red footage So really not what I had designed the system for and Dennis. How's it going? Okay, so Dennis to is an excess of 1 gigabit, but we're also getting some chop now So we're actually pulling three and a half gigabit per second off of that machine now the right speeds are not fast But the assumption that I made is that you guys are not working with 10 to 1 red footage and instead you're ingesting from SD cards in Which case 60 to 80 megabytes a second should be as fast as you need as long as only one person's ingesting at a time The benefit of unraid that I think outweighs its slow rights in this case Is that if you're the kind of person who's just starting out it allows you to just get one parity drive and As few as one additional storage drive and then just expand as you go as long as every drive that you add Is smaller than the parity drive you can add as many different kinds of drives as you want and you can just add them One at a time that's something that you can't do with a ZFS based solution like free NAS or like Proxmox I'm surprised that this worked as well as it did I Mean that's like between the two of you That's around 350 megabytes a second that we're pulling off of that thing and drive temps have held steady even while we're pushing it So all the ones on the front are around 39 41 degrees and you can really tell which ones are the four that are in the top and at the back 47 48 46 and Maybe this one 43 could be worse though So it works great But of course the million dollar question is how much does it cost and when I say a thousand dollars with no drives so no SSDs not even the USB to boot on Raid off of That sounds like a lot of money, but when you compare it to an off-the-shelf NAS You would be paying more than a thousand dollars for one with just eight bays And it might have specs that are much worse than this one whereas we've got a six core processor 16 gigs of RAM 10 gigabit networking 20 hard drives 2 m.2 since two more SATA drives just comes down to what software works best for us So whether you choose unread free NAS proxmox or whatever else floats your boat This is a great starting point if you're a starting out editor And you want to work with 4k footage or apparently even 8k even if you have a small team Speaking of having a small team guys this video is brought to you by fresh books fresh books is the accounting solution for you and Your small team fresh books makes it easier to focus on your business instead of uncomplicated accounting software It's designed to be simple and intuitive and you can automate tasks like invoicing organizing Expenses tracking your time and following up and the best part is everything is stored in the cloud So you can easily switch between your PC and your mobile device whether it's Android or iOS Start your 30-day free trial right now at fresh books comm slash tech tips Pricing starts at just $15 a month with the $25 a month here handling up to 50 billable clients So thanks for watching guys if you liked this video Maybe check out our budget 4k video editing workstation is a perfect companion for our budget 4k editing NAS That's what it's all about right getting work done keeping all your files organized in one place getting everybody access