 Recently it was brought to my attention that some of my friends in the industry Went out looking for a high-speed server for storing and editing their high-res video without checking in with me Now I am far from the lone authority when it comes to this stuff So it's not like it's impossible to build something really awesome without my help snazzy labs managed it just fine It's just also pretty easy to get completely taken for a ride and when I saw how much iJustine, MKBHD and Jonathan from TLD paid for their jellyfish well, I wasn't mad I was just hurt and Disappointed I mean guys here's the thing with the exception of TLD actually didn't build him anything But for the others of you I put together Reliable mass storage for you because that was what you said you wanted If you had just told me you want high performance at any cost Come on guys. It's me. I got your back. So I've channeled all of that frustration into today's video We're in collaboration with our special guest Patrick from serve the home great site by the way worth checking out after the video serve the home I'll be creating what I call the jellyfish fryer a Faster more reliable and just plain better solution summer break just started But it's never too early to start looking for a new laptop for back to school Every origin PC laptop is ready for whatever games or school projects You're gonna tackle and you can check out their special deals at the link below So yeah guys those numbers you saw at the beginning of this video that was no typo that was correct a 120 terabyte jellyfish costs its lucky owner about 35,000 US dollars and That's assuming that they don't require Luma forges vague performance boost option or More than a handful of video editors connected to it, but the thing is it gets even crazier than that not only does a 120 terabyte jellyfish not actually have 120 terabytes of usable capacity it's closer to 80 by the time you account for the storage space that's lost to redundancy and The about 10% of extra reserved space that Luma forge has left to ensure that ZFS functions correctly now Here's the thing this pricing might not offend me so much if there was something Magical about the jellyfish like I don't know if it used Intel ruler nvm ESSDs and it fit into like a Ruggedized case that you could throw on your back as you're slogging through the jungle on an on location shoot or something like that But it's not special and to put it in context Not only was I able to clutch together a solution that matches their pricing. I was able to do it while still overpaying for my server the 45 drive store NATO is not cheap and I outfitted it with all solid-state drives instead of mechanical ones at the same Usable capacity and you don't even have to be a tech expert to build something like this Because we went with an off-the-shelf bare-bones server most of the work was done all I had to do was spend about 15 minutes Shucking the drives from their packaging and popping them in here I did a separate video and with 27 of these 3.84 terabyte iron wolf 110 NAS SSDs. I've got over a hundred terabytes of raw Solid-state storage ready to go So from there all that was left to do was that the phone a friend To show us the right way to configure it because is it correct to say that? Configuring an SSD based NAS is not the same as a hard drive based NAS. That's a hundred percent true All right, so you want to introduce yourself then sure. Hey guys, I'm Patrick from server the home We started STH ten years ago building solutions just like this and now we review server storage And networking hardware all the way from scrappy DIY eBay stuff all the way up to high-end six-figure plus enterprise gear So I kind of assumed that we would be using free NAS But in addition to that you came with a bit of a trick up your sleeve, right? I did okay Why don't we begin though with the basic install? Sure. Okay, so free NAS installer super easy It actually automatically does this so you don't really need to do anything and you get some really kind of old looking Ask yeah, I feel like I'm like gaming 30 years ago. So we'll do is we're gonna select two drives for our boot drives So these are the 250 gig SSDs that shipped with our store NATO. They are and then We're gonna go fancy and we're gonna do a fresh install. Would you like to put a password in sir? Sure make it easy password serve the home Now that we're booted up and we're in the GUI we can start to configure our server and yes It's more complicated than a jellyfish. But I mean, I think it's fair to say where are we at? Like 50 clicks less than less than that. It's really not that hard now We'll go into a little bit more detail about how we're configuring this drives and Patrick will probably talk about it in a blog post Later on in the video But for now once this is done the big thing we need to do is apply that special script Which is going to do a couple of things number one is it's gonna apply some SSD specific optimizations that free NAS Intends to include in the next version of their software But that for now they've back ported into this version for us to do this video The other thing it's going to do is it's going to change the way that these four 10 gigabit network ports on the back Function to be more like a jellyfish So this is basically Sacrilegious in the networking world But the way we want this to work is such that if I were to take a network cable Plug it into the back of my NAS and then plug the other end into let's say like a Thunderbolt 10 gig network adapter and a laptop I could just connect directly to this thing like it's a big old Gigantic high-performance USB drive now. That's not the typical way you would do things No, it's definitely not and what was the reaction you got from industry professionals when you asked them to do this? Well my first reaction when we talked about it was I said wait you want to do what so for? 20 plus years the industry has said no Use switches and those switches allow you to scale out and use more clients you have can have more security features I mean it's it is the way that you handle this type of situation when you have a high performance storage in multiple clients So I'm gonna give the counter argument to that because the way that I see it when you're dealing with a techie person or a Assist admin type person on site that's managing. Let's say a video production Sure switches are the way to go no doubt about it But if you've got people that are accustomed to just plugging in an external drive and working off of their laptop Well, I'd say that it's not crazy to Imagine that it's far lower friction to say look it works exactly the way you're used to you plug in one cable You plug in one cable, and you have access to your storage Except instead of a Thunderbolt cable you use this weird thing, so that's it. We've got a healthy 26 drive raid Z2 with a hot spare so in the event that any one of those drives fails It starts rebuilding it immediately and you might notice that capacity looks a little low 77.91 TIB so those are tibby bytes if we convert that to terabytes That's actually eighty five point six terabytes So we are coming in right around the same capacity as the jellyfish for actually a slightly lower price Because we're like nine hundred dollars less or something like that Okay, we should be ready to connect directly to the back of our NAS here Transfer some files Do some video editing Wow? You can look at that even with the 8 core core i9 you still spike it when you're just opening up a project like this And wow we we peaked at around two and a half gigabit per second So scrubbing is actually not that demanding as we go through this 8k footage here So we're sitting right in the neighborhood of one and a half to two gigabit per second while playing back Looks like it's settled in a little bit lower than that. Let's speed up our playback That's gonna hurt you Okay, so it's not a terribly impressive demo because it's just one 4k stream, but the NAS works I think we need to kick this up a notch we do so we just completed our 12 machine LAN center these are all Ryzen 2700 X's they've all got 10 gig LAN and We're gonna grab ourselves a few quad 10 gigabit NICs connect all of them at the same time And see just how many video streams we can do all right, so there it is for Ethernet cables and Theoretically we fire this up and we have access to it we We fire this up We That'll help we Fire this up And we'll have access to it So we've got three links running through our switch down there that are in an LACP group So that's basically link aggregation, so that's for a total of 40 gigabit plus 40 plus 40 so that would be 120 gigabit so that is Effectively the same as if we had three of those quad ports And they were just plugged directly into the back of the computers Then all of our machines are plugged into the switch and we've loaded up Adobe Premiere trials on each one of these machines with the intention of hitting all 12 of them at once and Seeing just how many? 4k video streams our server can handle so Jake oh You're already on it look at him go these young kids today. They got so much energy you know So just as a recap here guys This is 16 mpeg-2 files that were encoded at 100 megabit per second So that would be comparable to what you would record in the 4k high quality preset on something like an a7s 2 Now you can see here that this is a freaking lot of bandwidth especially when we have a lot of motion across all the clips and we can spike as high as 4 to even 5 gigabit per second and That's why we are just playing back Never mind if we want to scrub through the footage if we scrub through the footage We are actually going to be able to saturate our 10 gigabit link here So you can see I'm sitting in the 9 to 9 and a half range isn't that absolutely beautiful, but Performance is still smooth. This is actually a shockingly good editing experience This is it moment of truth you ready. Are you just doing that one now? I'm gonna do all of them. Oh you ready yeah, okay? one Two oh crap this one's at 1 quarter res oh Oh, they're all at 1 quarter red dang it. No 1 quarter res is not good enough for us, okay? changing the res start Start so all six of mine are going Are we dropping frames or is it smooth looks pretty damn smooth to me and pretty smooth to me Okay, so I got our overall feed here nice nice. How we doing? It's a casual 25 gigabit 25 gigabit I think we can do better so One challenge that we've got is that while we'd love to just throw more video streams at each one of these machines We're up against a technical limit within Adobe Premiere where it only allows 16 sources for this multi cam setup and also up against a CPU limit so our CPU is actually sitting anywhere from around 70 up to 90 percent as we're going through and playing back all these files So clearly we can't just throw more streams per machine, but what we can do to hit our network harder is scrub all The machines so I think we need some helpers, okay? So thank you gentlemen the test here is simple We are trying to suck as much bandwidth as we possibly can from the video server sitting on this chair over here now We're playing back 16 100 megabit streams per machine As it is, but that's not enough. That's only about 25 to 27 gigabit Child's play so if we scrub through the footage We can get each of these machines to pull about 9 to 9 and a half gigabit And we want to see just how hard we can make it hurt okay So I'm peeking at around 4 gigabit per second on each of mine And we're looking at about 40 gigabit overall so I think our link aggregation is not working It's not working All right, so the good news is we managed to play 184 4k video streams off of our server and We managed to even to scrub around through them during that process The bad news is that it looks like unless we can get link aggregation working properly it would in fact be better to go straight out with 10 gigabit connections to each of the computers I just didn't feel like spending the couple thousand dollars on a bunch of those quad 10 gig cards So we're gonna call this we're gonna call this good enough for now So that's a pretty cool demo if you're into editing video off of a shared storage resource And it's actually pretty similar to the one that LumaForge used when they launched the jellyfish just Bigger and badder because it's all flash and somehow at the same price But we haven't even addressed some of the other really cool things about this configuration yet So LumaForge is using two striped raid Z2s, so that's kind of like raid 60 So a stripe of raid sixes and that means that they can suffer anywhere from two to four physical drive failures before They lose any data now We can only take two drive failures and then a third assuming that one of them manages to rebuild with our hotspare So one to three over time that's kind of similar I guess But the story is a little bit more nuanced than that so Patrick you guys have a calculator That people can use to calculate what the expected time to data loss is for a particular configuration And what did we come out at with this one right here? Yeah, this one we basically had less than a 0.02 percent chance to have it fail over the next 10 years So we think it's pretty reliable and part of that is really just the fact that the hard drives are a lot slower than the SSDs when it comes to rebuild which means that even if a drive fails your Array spends less time in a degraded and vulnerable state than if you're using hard drives a Couple other advantages of SSDs are that these ones are about a hundred times less likely to read a bit incorrectly compared to even reliable hard drives and They've got some other practical advantages to no vibration no noise and if you're on the go like you're You know if you were to put something like Mechanical hard drives on the back of the Jeep in the jungle for an on location shoot That is a super bad idea, and this wouldn't be nearly as vulnerable to those kinds of vibrations which by the way yes Do kill drives you were telling a story about Yahoo a little while ago Oh, yeah, Yahoo a long time ago actually put drives on storage arrays that were going across the parking lot and one of the things they found was that when they got the Systems powered up and the drives powered up on the other end They had a big problem with drive failures and the reason for that was that those carts were actually using Solid casters and that caused so much vibration that the hard drives ended up failing So that's like a good example of why hard drives even though They're generally reliable even you know if they get a little bit shaken up while they're powered off a lot less reliable than solid state drives In that scenario, so we're not actually necessarily done yet. We had some further optimization ideas I mean Patrick really really wants to use a switch because as we saw Unless you have a ton of streams coming into a single machine You're nowhere near 10 gigabit needed for each individual station But that's going to come down to you know how the user wants to use it for now We were trying to just go after well here you can have this but DIY We could also get better performance and lower power consumption by using more modern CPUs Caching was something that we talked about and it's something that LumaForge actually offers as a performance boost Option for the jellyfish they add an Optane write cache With some more RAM, and then we think maybe faster CPUs They wouldn't confirm that for me for an extra $3,500 But you recommended against using something like an Optane write cache for an all SSD base machine Can you explain why that is yeah? So you tend to use caching drives especially when you're going to hard drive and the idea was you have something that's faster than hard drives That's able to absorb random reads random writes and then smooth it out so it's more sequential So it's more sequential and better for the way that hard drives like to be accessed But solid-state drives are different than hard drives and because of that you tend not to put as much Caching in front of solid-state arrays and so in this case. We just didn't think that we needed it All right, so we maybe aren't quite done, but that is it for today But the sort of wrap up for this video is a bit long But it's also really important so try not to tune out guys We did this video for a couple of reasons one was to demystify some of the marketing mumbo-jumbo That goes on with solutions like the jellyfish compatible with Mac Linux and PC What does that even mean of course it is it's a commodity NAS running free open source software But the other reason was to acknowledge that while we do prefer to do things our way That doesn't mean that our way is right for everyone and in fact even between the two of us and IX system support staff we still ran into a few hiccups today So then I actually reached out to Marquez MKBHD to send over a couple short clips Explaining why the jellyfish has been great for him What's up Linus MKBHD here? So there were a couple things that the jellyfish did specifically in the MKBHD studio to make our lives easier The setup being one of the biggest ones so this thing was out the box and operational within 90 seconds like it had all the drives installed already everything was fresh out the box all we really had to do was Install the jellyfish app on every computer that we wanted it to be on that's three in my case Plug it in hit the on button and everything set itself up And then we actually had some assistance from the LumaForge team as far as setting it up to make sure it would work perfectly with Final Cut Pro projects so workflow tips essentially so they definitely went above and beyond with that But really truly the beauty of it was going from not having any solution for working on videos at the same time To the next day having one and being able to edit, you know Close a project on one machine open it up on the other and keep going That was something we were able to do very quickly and seamlessly because the jellyfish I think at the end of the day when it comes to spending a bit more for a better overall solution for us than better hardware It can look a lot like the car enthusiast market like some people will buy a certain type of car because They know that will be a great tuner and they'll be able to get more horsepower out of it and work on it and get better Numbers, but they know that's that's more time they're gonna spend because that's their hobby but some people just want to drive to work every day and back and Grocery shopping and pick up the kids and just needs to be reliable and they will spend more on a car That's new just to do that and they can go to the dealer if something breaks down for convenience to fix it And that may seem lazy to the first person but that's just the way it is That's what the jellyfish is So I am fully aware that there are buildable solutions out there that will do better numbers and better read write speeds and things Like that probably even a better looking box than the jellyfish But we've been too busy editing videos off of it to think about any of that So that's where we're coming from so in defense of LumaForge then it's easy to use when I called them They picked up the phone immediately They offer a support plan with next-day replacement drive so that two years down the road You don't have to remember all the IPs of everything and how to do anything like companies like this do need to charge a premium So they can continue to provide support They offer a complete package so you can just forget about it like you're not buying a box you're buying a solution And in fairness to them the hardware that they're shipping is not Actual garbage. It's not one of those things where they're charging an enterprise price for you know Like a sticker that they applied to something consumer grade like they're using ZFS. They're using CentOS. This is Truly good stuff their connector and manager is really simple to use if you have to set up a new share or something There's no command line required and also here's a crazy thing if you go to a major tier one storage vendor Would you say that the pricing of the jellyfish is unheard of? Ludicrous? It's perfectly in line with what you would see from a big vendor And they usually have great margins, and they provide that solution and great support Furthermore Another thing people don't consider and I talked about this recently on Wanshow, but in the film and production industry This kind of pricing is Not about the hardware that you're getting it's more about the value that it provides Like the amount of money that you're spending might be outrageous But given the amount of money that you will make if it works correctly and the amount of money you might lose If it doesn't work correctly It's not really Maybe it's not that outrageous after all now We aren't going to be doing it that way as long as building our own machine is still possible But hey, I felt like I had to say it anyway Speaking of things I have to say the neighbors app by ring yep That's the same ring that makes video doorbells is all about helping you stop feeling like you're alone when it comes to your security It allows you to receive real-time information on what's happening around you from other users So you can put out an alert if you see something suspicious like a possible burglar you can send a notice if you lost something valuable like your pet and you can even give or receive a warning if a disaster is coming your way like a fire or a Flood ring partners up with local law enforcement to stop crime sprees and right now it's available in the US only but More countries are coming soon users have full control of what information is made publicly available to protect your privacy from both other users and Law enforcement and it's free to use and download it's available for Android and iOS today, so go check it out So thanks for watching guys Massive thanks to Patrick from serve the home guys go check him out Go buy one of these tracker hats on their merch store you guys have a merch store I haven't worked you don't even you don't even sell them no these are So this is like exclusive Alright, so thanks to you guys for watching thanks to Patrick for coming out here If you guys like this video hit that like button get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured In the video description we were really happy with the store NATO as well as our iron wolf NAS SSDs We're gonna have links to those down there also link down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this Remember hard drives I remember Like this as well as our Linus tech tips stealth hoodie All right, finally go join our forum. That's down there, too