 So the last time I updated y'all on the storage server, sorry, can you even hear me over this thing? The last time I updated y'all on the storage server that is used to manage all the data that's constantly flowing around here was back in 2012. I mean, Linus Media Group wasn't even a company running out of my garage yet. Today's video is gonna be a close look at one of the new servers that we're adding before the move to our new office, and the $1500, ugh, ouch, network switch that's going to be directing traffic on our new and improved fully 10 gigabit network. [♪ Music Plays And Ends [♪ Music Plays And Ends [♪ Music Plays And Ends [♪ Music Plays And Ends [♪ Music Plays And Ends [♪ Music Plays And Ends [♪ Music Plays And Ends [♪ Music Plays And Ends [♪ Music Plays And Ends Fractal Design listens and the Define R5 case was made with feedback from you, the PC community, so click wherever you want to learn more. How about here and here? Alright, so let's start with a look at our new network switch. It's not that our old GS752TSX sucks or anything, it's got a ton of regular gigabit ports and enough internal throughput that we'd be really hard pressed to even put a significant load on it as things stand, but while four SFP Plus 10 gigabit capable ports was fine in the old days, when we only had three employees total, we've grown to eight team members now, four of which will need access to a handful of servers at lightning fast speed at all times. So we're going to be adding a Netgear XS712T 12 port 10 gigabit ethernet switch. So here's a diagram of how the network layout is going to work. We'll use two of our existing 10 gigabit ports running in a teaming mode called LACP and direct attached copper cables to connect the SFP Plus ports on our new 12 port switch. Bear in mind that this renders two of our RJ45 ports inactive. So this will give us a total of 20 gigabits of connectivity speed between these two switches. This is important because our main high performance storage server, general bulk storage server, will be on the XS712T side of things. So let's say a hypothetical 40 some odd gigabit clients from the other side all wanted to hit it at once, we'd want them to have a nice fat pipe to reduce bottlenecks. The next high speed 20 gigabit link will be two teamed 10 gigabit ethernet connections to our brand new server that I'm building today. Wannock server will be replacing our current storage server Ruskin server as the day to day performance server. It will deliver slightly better drive performance thanks to its faster Adaptech 6805 RAID card. But since Ruskin server has such a massive array of 10 3TB Seagate consumer drives in RAID 6, some of which are actually refurbished and incredibly irresponsible setup, but one that delivered mostly the space we needed and that we couldn't afford to replace up until now, this one won't deliver that much more storage and actually not that much more speed. It's instead focused on reliability. So it uses 8 Seagate Enterprise grade 6TB drives in RAID 6 for a total of 36TB of storage that can lose up to two drives before suffering catastrophic data loss. And on top of that, there are drives that are actually designed for this workload instead of general consumer drives. And there's some other cool stuff going on in this server as well. So the revision of Ruskin server that I showed off in this video when we first went to 10 gigabit was using some weaksauce ITX board and a low-power LGA 1156 Xeon. That stuff's for chumps, man. The backbone of Wannix server system is much beefier. We're using an ASRock X99 WSE 10G, an X99 motherboard with basically every single bell and whistle and then some that weighs in at a whopping $600. It works with Intel Xeon processors, although that's not something that's officially sanctioned by Intel since it runs a consumer X99 chipset, with our plan being to install an E5-2618L low-power 8-core for great multi-threaded performance and very low power consumption. It can also handle up to 7 PCIe 3.0 slots at 8x to 16x bandwidth, giving us tons of options for RAID or other expansion. It can handle up to 128 gigs of ECC DDR4 memory, although we'll only be installing 32 gigs of Kingston value RAM that was generously provided by Kingston at the moment. And last but certainly not least, it's got dual onboard 10 gigabit Ethernet ports powered by an Intel X540 controller. That is some kick-ass onboard networking when you consider the cost of buying an add-in card with two RJ45 ports running that chipset. So the process of building the system was pretty straightforward, mostly. I actually reached out to an old contact of mine at NORCO, the rack mount case company, not the bike one, who provided the 24 drive capable RPC4224 that we've actually been using for Ruskin server for a really long time and have been extremely happy with. So we sent over two more of those cases, one for Wannock to give us a lot of growing room, and another for an additional machine that I'm hoping to add to the network with a couple of 18 core Xeons as a network rendering box. Let me know in the comments if you want Intel to support that crazy project. Maybe we can convince them. Might be tough. Anyway, so this case supports standard ATX power supply, so I grabbed a 520 series boot SSD, a Cooler Master V8 5080 plus gold power supply, a basic video card that I had lying around, and a tower cooler that didn't end up fitting, so I grabbed an Intel stock cooler and got to work. The plan, as you probably saw on the network diagram, is not to have this server replace Ruskin outright, but rather to have Ruskin act as a nightly backup for Wannock. This has two positive effects. Number one, it gives us something to switch to quickly in the middle of the day if Wannock experiences some kind of problem, like a failed drive, corrupted OS, or whatever else, and needs time to rebuild. And number two is it allows us to practice what we preach for a change. Data redundancy, like RAID, is not the same thing as backing up, and critical data should always be backed up once locally and then preferably again offsite in the event of a physical disaster. But that won't come for us until a later stage. Now, the astute among you may have noticed that my diagram also alluded to a 45 drives, 100 plus terabytes server, and you might be wondering what's up with that. I wanted to do that build log today, but the parts haven't arrived in time, so you'll have to settle for this one. But the ultimate plan when that arrives is to dump everything on it, reconfigure Wannock server with purely solid state storage, pull all these six terabytes out of it, and then put those in the 45 drive store-inator that we have coming for a total of about 150 terabytes of raw storage that we're going to use as an archive to replace the awful shelf of random hard drives system that we have going on in our bathroom right now, which will also give us quick access to everything we've ever shot, apart from allowing us to not have to just kind of swap drives onto an external drive dock in order to find old stuff. So stay tuned if you're into completely banana storage configurations, guys, because it is about to get really interesting. I mean, even now, it's like pretty great, except for the fact that until the new office is built, it's going to be deployed in a bathroom. Speaking of bathrooms, well, actually, these tools have nothing to do with working on bathrooms. They're more for like electronic gizmos, tearing them apart, repairing them, upgrading them, all that kind of stuff, and they're from iFixit. So these guys have all kinds of professional-grade tools and fantastic guides on their site, iFixit.com. One of my favorites is their 54-bit driver kit that's part of their ProTechTools tool kit that's got a bunch of like prying tools and tweezers and magnets for getting stuff out of. I use it for all kinds of stuff, tearing apart SSDs that have like security torque screws, taking apart Nintendo DSs that use tri-wing bits and all kinds of like triangle bits, stupid stuff that's hard to find outside of buying an affordable kit like that. You can use it to work on all kinds of things, whether it's, you know, handheld gaming consoles, like I said before, but I've also used it on everything up to as big as an iMac. In fact, I did a teardown with their guide, with their tools of the iMac 5K, and it was super simplified. I'm not going to say super simple because there's some complicated stuff about it, but super simplified by iFixit's kit and guide. So the ProTechTool kit is $65 and is backed by a lifetime warranty, and if you use the offer code LINUS03 at checkout, you can save $10 off any purchase of $50 or more. So head over to ifixit.com slash LINUS, which is linked in the video description, to check that out now. So guys, thanks for watching this video. Like it if you liked it, dislike it if you thought it sucked, leave a comment at the link in the video description to our forum where you can discuss this video if you have something to say. Also linked in the video description, we have a merch link for cool t-shirts like this one, a contribution link if you love the work we do and you think we should keep doing it, and an Amazon link so you can change your bookmark to one with our affiliate codes whenever you buy hard drives or whatever else, we get a small kickback. That kind of thing helps us out a lot. Thanks again for watching, and as always, don't forget to subscribe and follow and all that good stuff.