 Oh, is this new Wannick? Oh no, the Dell is new Wannick. Yes. No, the Dell is. You called it new new Wannick. Confirmed. Maybe I'm just a sucker for punishment. But after this thing kicked my ass for over a year, when I was trying to deploy it as our main video editing NAS at the office, it's back, baby. New, new Wannick. Wannick 2. But this time, I'm gonna be deploying it at home, thanks to our friends at Kioxia, who sponsored this video, sending over, that's right, the Intel drives are out, and these Kioxia CD6 drives are in. They sent over 12 of their four terabyte CD6s, which is gonna make this the ballinest NAS on the block. Not four, eight. Eight? They sent over eight terabyte drives? Well, 7.6, I think. Holy sh- This is gonna be like a hundred terabyte NVMe NAS. For my house. How did I get this out of the office? ["Skyrim 2.0 Remake"] The first thing we're gonna need to do today is downgrade this server, because as- Because as much as I would have loved to take off with 256 gigs of ECC DDR4 memory, I think Jake would have crapped a brick, when all of a sudden he goes to like, perform maintenance on a server, upgrade it, and all of our high spec memory is gone. So let's get all that out of here. And while we're at it, our 32 core Epic 7502P, that's gonna have to go too. The good news though, is that the lowest end chip that we had to replace it with sitting in the office was a 7402P, which is still really fricking fast, and 24 cores, I think? Yeah. Nice. Epic Roam is such an amazing platform, because even the lowest end chips still have 128 lanes of PCI Express Gen 4. That means that even if I populated all 24 bays on this chassis, could have access to the full bandwidth of a PCI Express Gen 4x4 link. Now, on this particular board, four of my bays are gonna be running at PCI Express Gen 3 speed. I think it might be the ones connected here. Yeah, it's this card right here that's in a Gen 3 slot, but that's not a limitation of the CPU. These things are absolutely knocking farts. Honestly, by the time we populated all 24 of those bays with Gen 4 NVMe drives, we would run into memory bandwidth bottlenecks, just trying to read or write to them. So it's a non-issue for us, especially because I'm not even using 3200 megahertz memory, which is the maximum spec for Epic Roam. I ended up with these, just about the most pinner DDR4 ECC that you can get. These are 8 gig, 2666 modules. They're from Kershel, so I expect them to be reliable, but they are not going to be fast. Next order of business, finally, is an actual upgrade. One of the things that my server needs to do that most storage servers wouldn't is transcode video on the fly. I've been pretty upfront about the fact that I have an extensive Blu-ray collection, but I consider the act of grabbing a physical disc and putting it into a drive to be a very last decade kind of thing to do. So in spite of the fact that ripping your own Blu-rays is kind of a legal gray area, I consider it to be morally okay. And besides, what am I gonna do? Have a bunch of Blu-ray players all over the house like physically go and get the disc to put in the, like, come on. All of it is gonna be served from here. But because not every device is capable of playing back a full quality Blu-ray, that's where your GPU comes in. So this is just a pretty basic GTX 1050 from MSI that happens to be low profile, so it'll fit in our case. And this is gonna handle downscaling our original, like, 4K HDR or whatever to something that's a little more smartphone friendly or whatever it is that you need. Of course, in order to get it in here, we're gonna have to do a little bit of rejiggering with step one being, yep, removing the fans. Now, this might seem like a bad idea, but given that we're installing this card in a server and these heat sink fins are actually oriented the correct way, I would expect this card to run just fine, even without the fans on it. So we're gonna go ahead and pop it in here and obviously we'll find out if we're wrong about that later. Next, we've got to upgrade the onboard networking because believe it or not, this server only comes with gigabit ethernet. But that's perfectly normal because while gigabit could ship it with onboard 10 gig, for example, anyone rolling a server like this is gonna be running 100 gig, 200 gig, or even higher in order to take advantage of the insane speeds of the drives that you can hook up to it. So those 10 gig chipsets would be completely wasted cost because they wouldn't be used. Even for us, this 10 gig card is going to be a placeholder because we still don't know exactly what kind of switch or realistically switches we're gonna use. So we haven't bothered sourcing any fiber optic transceivers yet. Now, one quirk of this particular motherboard is that this top slot is labeled optional in the manual. And as far as we can tell in its current configuration, it is not working. We think that's because this mezzanine slot here takes the bandwidth that would otherwise be allocated to it. So four of my slots at the front of the case are actually not going to be usable. So I'm just gonna electrical tape the connectors here and tuck them away in the chassis. But that's okay because remember how I said that if we actually populated all 24 of these bays with the drives that we're using, we'd run into memory bandwidth bottlenecks before we actually were able to use up the full speed. Well, that's true. So there's no point filling all the bays anyway. Of course, what we end up using depends on what we decide to do with the storage in this server because the sky is the freaking limit. Now, you know, Blu-rays, they're 50 gigs, they're big, but that is nothing for an NVMe 1.4 compliant drive that is capable of throughput in excess of six gigabytes per second. So we could do everything from use it as a storage server, which obviously I'll do when I can stream my Plex movies to as many devices as I freaking want, but I could do more than that. For example, all of the computers in the house, instead of actually having drives installed in them, they could all network boot off of this array so that all of their storage is safe and centrally stored in one place. That'd be really cool because not only are the drives built to an enterprise standard, that means full power loss protection, a variety of different security options available, and depending on whether you go for the regular CD6 series or the read intensive CD6 series, anywhere from three to one drive, full drive rate per day endurance, but because we're gonna be running them in a ZFS array, we get access to all kinds of cool ZFS features. Like for example, the ability to really quickly and easily create snapshots. Say if I wanted to back up some or all of my data to a server at the office, I could totally do that, or file system level compression, which would allow me to effectively stretch the, I think it's approximately like 90 something terabytes of raw flash storage. That's a lot, but hey, if you can have more and it costs you literally nothing, then that's definitely the way to go. You ready? Let's power this puppy on. These Bluemetron fans, they're gonna go. Just give them a second. There they go. See, that's why we weren't worried about taking the fans off of the GPU, because they're going. There's your GPU fan. Look at this baller with his like a hundred dollar bills. Bridge wall. Actually no, but we should mention lttstore.com. Hey, got this new CPU reflective design. Whoa, new lanyard? Whoa, new colors of lanyards? lttstore.com. While the CLI side of things might sound a little daunting, unfortunately for people like Linus, you can get ZFS on Linux really easily with the UI. Plus it's actually available as a package in the community app store. So all we gotta do is search up Unraid community apps and you can copy the URL, paste it into Unraid in the plugin installer. Give that a few seconds. Literally a few seconds. It's already done. And then bam, you have a new apps tab. Now there's a lot of really cool Docker stuff. There's a lot of really cool, you know, Unraid plugins in here, but for us, all we gotta do ZFS, return, hit install, and now we have ZFS. Just that easy. It's down on it still, actually. Give it a sec. Okay, it's done. Because of the limitation of Unraid, we still do need to have an array. So we just grabbed a couple of old SATA drives that are, like I wouldn't put anything important on them. They have reallocated NEN flash already. Like they're just there to exist. Yeah, according to the Unraid guys, they're actually gonna fix that in a few versions from now. Give them, you know, a couple months and theoretically this should be a lot easier. And there's gonna be a UI for ZFS as well. Which would be sweet. But ZFS is pretty simple, actually. If we go into our command prompt, we can just type ZFS list. See, no data sets. Zpool list, no data sets. We have to make our data set. Yeah, are we just gonna do a single VDEV? So that's where ZFS can get a little complicated for some people. How do you wanna configure it? I'm probably just gonna go single VDEV. I'm thinking a single VDEV with RAID Z2 so that would give us two parity drives. Yeah. Yeah, so it's gonna lose 15 terabytes or whatever. One parity drive is probably fine. You think? So literally like data center drives and I'm gonna back this up to the office anyway. Fine, fine. Okay, we're gonna call our Zpool Lambo because. It's vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom. Yes! Woo! So we're gonna go down to RAID Z1, which means one parity drive. Yeah. And mount slash Lambo is where it's gonna be stored. Bada bing, bada. If you don't know what it means to have one parity drive, it means that one of these 12 drives could outright fail, which is pretty unlikely. And all the data would still be completely intact. In fact, the speed of the array would probably be not even degraded to the point where it would be affected. You probably wouldn't notice. There we go. 83.8 terabytes raw. So sexorific. But after parity, it'll be a little bit less than that. You get 72 terabytes. That's crazy. That's a lot of storage. Yeah, what was my old one? Okay, while he does that, we're gonna set up a few other things. So one of the nice things about ZFS is we can create multiple datasets within our pool of storage. And those are useful for a number of reasons. Primarily that we can define different settings for different datasets. They're almost like folders, but I can say my movie folder doesn't get compression because video doesn't compress very well. But then I could say my VM storage folder or dataset in this example does get compression. So my old on-raid server was 64 terabytes of spinning hard drives. And I had two terabytes in raid one as a cache. Oh, that's pretty nice. Okay, there we go. So those are all our datasets. Now we have to do the not so fun part of moving all of the stock on-raid things over to the ZFS pools. Some of it we could probably leave on those crappy drives like ISOs. Come on. We could, but now that we've already made the thing, we might as well just change it. It's not actually that hard. We just have to go in to VM manager, turn it off. You know what the most fun part of building something totally overkill like this is? Trying to find a use for it. Because you end up, no, I'm serious though. You end up exploring all these cool new use cases that you would never have had any reason to explore. Like just the idea of having all the storage for all the computers in the house, just on this one box. Why would anyone do that? Once we figure out how to do it, you don't have to do it with such crazy overkill hardware. Yeah. Well, that's a whole other video. So get subscribed so you don't miss that. Cool. So now we should see some usage on our Z pool. Haha, used six megabytes. Nice. ZFS is not really designed for NVMe storage. It works, but there are some caveats and things you kind of have to do to make sure it plays nicely. The people that developed ZFS never had in mind that your storage was going to be as fast as the memory on the system. Storage now is probably faster than cache was on a CPU when ZFS was created. So there's a few things we need to do. For one, the Arc cache in ZFS, which is really great for accelerating hard drives. We're going to set that to be metadata only. So it doesn't store any actual files on it, just the metadata of the files. If you use Arc with NVMe, it's probably going to hurt your array performance. Especially at this speed. These drives are what you might use as an Arc cache on a hard drive array. Yeah. So level one Arc would be RAM. But like Jake was saying, even RAM is not that much faster enough. Another thing that's important, we have to enable auto trim. I think a lot of the times now is that ZFS is smart enough to do it on itself, but we're going to do it just in case. If the drive isn't trimmed, there's a lot of wasted extra writes that can happen. It's called write amplification with every write. So you want to keep your house in order effectively. We're also going to disable access time, which is something you might use for very specific use cases for us. Doesn't matter at all. That's going to save us some reading rights. You know what? I'm just going to set compression on across the entire array because the nice thing about LZ4 compression on Unraid is if it's got a big file and it's not compressing, it will just give up. So chances are it's not really going to hurt our performance at all. If there's problems down the road, we can set it to off for say the Plex library and then on for the VMs, like I said before. I still can't believe that I ended up with what was supposed to be new, new Wannock at the office. No, new Wannock. Not new, new Wannock. Oh, is this new Wannock? Oh no, the Dell is new Wannock. Yes. No, the Dell is. You called it new, new Wannock. Confirmed. Oh, cool. Do you see him? Yeah, it's just, everything's there. EFS, EFS, EFS, EFS, EFS, EFS, EFS, EFS, EFS, EFS, EFS media system. Copy a file over there, shall we? You got a big file? I got a big file. I got a hundred gig screen cap that I accidentally forgot to stop recording. So here you go. There's a, there's your big, big media file. Oh, I need permission. Ah, oh yes. I got a- Whoops. So normally this would be managed through the Unraid GUI, but- Well, it would just work by default, but mount slash Lambo. I think we have to churn nobody users. Let's just, let's just say everything in this folder, sure. Cool, that's right. All right, try again. Ha ha. Hey, there it goes. Not bad. Wow, man, what a big improvement this is gonna be. Oh, well there's your limiting factor. It's probably SMB actually. Yep. So we're- It's like not multi-tanneling. It looks like we're single thread limited on here. Either way, this is way faster than you have right now. We should find out how much performance we still have left on the table here, just by doing a quick disk benchmark. Oh. I've got about a minute left transferring these files and then you can go ahead and benchmark it. What if I just do it right now anyways? Sure. I mean, I guess that's what we wanna know, right? I mean, we're writing at like 15 to 17 gigabytes a second. Is that fast enough for you? I don't even feel it. You don't even feel it? Yeah. I mean, I'm probably like 10, 12, 12, 14. That's literally a hundred times faster than what I have now. 100 times. I'm gonna need a hundred gigabit networking at home. Well, it's a little late for that. Okay, we're not gonna do that. We could do that. We're not gonna do that. 25. Should we do that? Now, obviously 10 to 15 gigabytes a second is a lot less than the sum of the speed of all of these drives. In a normal data center environment, you might be able to get a lot closer to raw speed from these drives, depending on how they're deployed. Somewhere in the neighborhood of more like 60 to 70 gigabytes a second. One of the big challenges though, one of the best benchmarks of how good a Plex server is, is of course, whether you can enable subtitles. Grows meekly. I'm on the outdoor access point now. We're playing original quality with subtitles baked in. So I'm just gonna leave this here. Epic gives zero Fs about this workload. We could conceivably have a dozen people doing the same thing at the same time. Basically. And the best part of all of this, zero funky behavior between these drives and this server. Match freaking made in heaven, which leaves, no, not that one. I was gonna pull the one that had the nice CD6 logo on it. Anyway, Jake is doing the demo where we show that video playback is completely uninterrupted, even by the complete loss of one of our drives, which is very unlikely to happen. There we go. Look, unavailable. Degraded. But it works. It did have a little hiccup, but, ha ha, hiccup, get it? I get it. But look, now they're working again. I think I might be in love. Just like I love telling you about our sponsor, GeoXia. You can get all the details on their CD6 series enterprise drives at the link in the video description. But the main things you need to know, high quality NAND, lightning fast, PCI express Gen 4 interface, and of course, their long time proven track record for delivering reliable enterprise grade drives. If you guys are looking for another video to watch, you can maybe check out the last time we tried to deploy this server with someone else's drives when it did not go well. That's a bit of an understatement.