 Alright, so I gave you guys an update on some of the ballin' new server gear that we've had arriving for the new office, including a powerful Xeon-based storage server, the plans for which I've actually already kind of revised, and our new $2,000 12-port 10-gament network switch. But today, we're gonna kick things up a notch with a custom-built Storinator mass storage server from 45drives.com that features over 100 terabytes of high-speed storage. So strap in, guys, cuz this gonna be good. Intel's new 750-series SSDs utilizing the NVMe standard provide speeds never before seen on consumer storage drives. Click my hair to learn more. So the problem we're trying to overcome here seems straightforward on the surface. How to store all our data. But when you go out in the real world and see entire video production houses running off of USB and Thunderbolt external drives, or coming up with long-term archival solutions like write the dates on the sides of the drives and put them on a shelf in the bathroom, completely exposed to dust, moisture, and accidents as if this was the VHS home video dark ages, it suggests that we've been asking maybe the wrong questions all this time. Because it's not about storage, it's about accessibility. The number of times that we've gone to do our review of some exciting new next-gen product and gone, hey, maybe I'll grab some full-quality footage of its predecessor from our old video for comparison, which, aww, it's on the archive shelf, isn't it? Guess I'll do what we always do and download the old video from YouTube, then slice it up in crappy quality. That happens more than I'd like to say, and obviously that's not a solution that makes sense as Linus Media Group continues to scale the amount and quality of footage that we're storing as well as the number of people who need to access it as our company grows. So let's talk Storinator S45, the middle-of-the-road model that we chose that sits in between the more quiet, SMB-optimized 30-drive version and the monster XL60-drive version. In the front, you'll find three 120mm cooling fans to push air through our drives, with a custom Linus Media Group logo painted onto the graphite powder-coated chassis on top. Then behind that, three rows of 15 slots that give us the 45-drive capacity for this sucker. Further toward the back, we find another two 120mm fans that will pull air through the drives, and then the system hardware chamber that exists only to power the other two-thirds of the case. Overall, it strikes an unusual balance between being objectively professional-grade with all the core components, an Intel 2.1GHz 6-core Xeon CPU, 128GB of Kingston ECC DDR3 RAM, a Super Micro motherboard, a 2 plus 1 fully redundant 700W power supply, three 16-port SAS controller cards from LSI, and an Intel X540 10GB network card are from brands with reliability reputations ranging from excellent to legendary, and yet it has a small custom system builder or DIY feel to it that comes from things like the blue LED-lit vandal switch at the back that's used to power the unit on, the flat cable-managed but obviously off-the-shelf Molex splitters that provide power to up to 45 drives at a time, the fairly rudimentary PC builder tool on their site, and the general simplicity of the enclosure design that, other than the fixed backplane, something that I really prefer compared to just loose cables as a smaller operator who's gonna tinker with these machines versus chucking one of the hundreds of them in my data center out, if there's some kind of an issue, it looks like something that could be made in a pretty normal fabrication shop. What a cool machine. But of course, that's not what you guys are here to see. The Stornator isn't the star of the show today, it's more of an enabler. So after installing FreeNAS, a FreeBSD-based storage operating system with native ZFS support that you can learn more about here, it was finally time to break out the hard drives. Now, while Seagate sounded like I punched them in the gut when I told them that I needed 27 drives for this project, they also understood that if you're actually serious about having fast, reliable network access to your 4K footage for a number of operators at a time, you need a lot of drives and they have to be high performance. So many drives, in fact, that they won't even fit in one MasterCarton shipping box. So once we'd figured out how many, 27, the next step was to determine which model of drive we would be using. Honestly, for most people and small businesses for that matter, nothing more hardcore than a NAS hard drive would be required. They're rated for 24-7 operation, they offer reasonable, if not earth-shattering performance, certainly more than a gigabit network connection would require. They go up to 4 terabytes, that gives you 24 terabytes of storage with a couple of disks for redundancy, and they can be obtained for under $40 US per terabyte. They're kind of like the city bus of hard drives. But this is Linus Tech Tips suckers, so I'm gonna ride around in a 747 instead. Sorry, anyway. Because we have more than just hand-cammed vlog footage to deal with these days, sometimes even sponsored projects for customers where data loss is not an option, we opted for Seagate's Enterprise Capacity Drives. Unlike their NAS or even Enterprise NAS drives, which are rated for the adverse conditions and the vibration associated with up to 8 or 16-bay drive enclosures respectively, the Enterprise Capacity Drives feature exotic interfaces up to 12 gigabit per second SAS, big capacities up to 6 terabytes per drive, top-of-the-line performance, 10 times the workload rating of their desktop drive counterparts at 550 terabytes per year, and they do all of this while managing external vibrations so you can pack them in as tight as you can pack them pretty much. Which I guess means it's time to start talking about how that went. So, to start things off, I went with 9 drives in a ZFS 2 configuration. This gives me just shy of 80% storage efficiency with 2 of my drives dedicated to redundancy. I used one of my two SSD RAID array clients here that are both on the same 10 gigabit network and achieved read and write speeds in the 300 plus megabyte per second range. Not too shabby, but I mean I wasn't really sure what to expect at this point. Expanding a ZFS storage server is both simple and kind of complicated. As long as you have the same number of the same capacity of drives, it's extremely fast and basically a few button presses to get her up and running. But don't get your hopes up about simply adding a 10th drive to an existing 9 drive array like you can do with a hardware RAID card. It just doesn't work that way, unfortunately. The good news is that adding another set of drives should yield a significant improvement in performance since it's effectively striping data across the two sets. Unfortunately, that wasn't my experience. I saw the same numbers as before. So after soldiering on and adding my third set of 9 drives for a total of 27 and over 100 terabytes of storage and then realizing that the performance needle still hadn't budged, I figured it was time to throw another client at the problem. So with two clients, two SSD based gigabit clients, excuse me, 10 gigabit clients, copying 20 gigabytes of data concurrently, speeds were effectively doubled. I got perfect scaling indicating that both drive speed and the speed of the network card in our storeinator are not bottlenecks. But unfortunately, I don't have any more 10 gigabit clients at the moment. So this victory and discovery also means that we're done for the time being until we move into the new office where I can give it two aggregated network connections for 20 gigabit per second total theoretical speeds and then hammer this thing with half a dozen clients at the same time to find out exactly where her limits are. So stay tuned for that. Speaking of staying tuned, audible.com keeps you tuned into the books that you want to sit down to read but simply don't have the time for by letting you take your library with you on the go. You can listen in the car at work on the bus in bed or anywhere that you can wear a pair of headphones really with over 150,000 audiobooks to choose from. So there's definitely going to be something for you, especially if you're into having your favorite celebrities read to you. Dustin Hoffman's performance of Being There by Jersey Kozanski is getting rave reviews for his performance. So you might want to check it out and join the book club now to get an audiobook every month at audible.com slash Linus. And if you're on the fence about audible.com, try it out anyway. The first one is actually free. Alright guys, that's pretty much it. Like this video if you liked it, dislike it if you thought it sucked. Check out the link to the forum to discuss it if you want to discuss the video. We also have links for our merchandise, cool t-shirts like this one giving us a contribution and changing your Amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code so we get a small kickback whenever you buy hard drives or whatever else the case may be. Thanks again for watching and as always don't forget to subscribe and follow and all of that good stuff.