- Our video editors rely on high speed access
to dependable storage to do their work.
That's why we have fiber optic networking
and a whole room full of wicked fast servers.
But that's all here,
and CES in Las Vegas is in, well, Las Vegas.
Now, the obvious solution
would be to just send our shooters.
Hey, guys.
- Hi. - Uh, hi.
They could point the camera at the thing,
stick the SD card and the other thing,
and then just transfer the footage back to HQ for editing.
But I mean, come on, on hotel internet?
Please.
So we have no choice but to also send the editors.
And since nobody wants a downgraded setup to do their work
in a fast-paced, stressful situation like CES,
we are gonna be bringing our editing setup
on the road with us, actually bringing it
on the plane with us LTT style.
The solution for the workstations is simple.
Laptops have gotten so powerful these days.
It's the server that's gonna be more complicated.
How do we take that and put it into this?
And how do we take this segue
and use it to tell you about our sponsor?
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(soft electronic music)
(cube beeps)
(bouncing electronic music)
Let's start with the size
since that's the most challenging component of this build.
In a perfect world, the system would be small enough
to be thrown into a backpack.
LTTStore.com.
But to make things a little bit easier,
we set our target as fitting within a carry-on,
specifically, this old Pelican 1510.
That pretty much ruled out
full-sized ATX motherboards and cases,
limiting us to ITX or MATX.
The former meant we probably wouldn't be able to achieve
some of the nice-to-haves, like redundant boot drives,
so we settled on an MATX motherboard,
specifically, this, the ASRock Rack X570D4U-2L2T.
Might not have the sexiest name,
but it means all of our criteria.
Its Micro ATX has dual onboard 10-gigabit network ports,
two M.2 slots for redundant boot drives,
support for up to a 16-core Ryzen 5000 series CPU,
and it has IPMI, which means that we don't even need to have
a monitor attached to it to see the output of the system.
We can just remote into it over the network
and control it from there.
Even rebooting the system, flashing the vials,
we can do anything we need to do remotely over the network.
So this is great.
But as you can see, the 19.8 by 11 inch dimensions
of our Pelican case don't leave a lot of room
around the motherboard for a case,
and finding one that would fit an MATX motherboard
but also fit inside our pelican was,
well, let's just say this wasn't our first choice.
Meet the InWin CJ712.
Its main selling point is that it fits.
Oh wow.
Just barely.
Like, I kid you not, it is a 10th of an inch smaller
than the Pelican case.
Is this even gonna fit?
Jake validated this so I wouldn't put it past him
to troll me.
(case bangs)
(latches click)
There's definitely some things about this build
that are making me uncomfortable already.
So if that was Jake's intention,
then mission accomplished, I suppose.
Side panel comes off a little something like that.
Can you believe Jake would've rather been on vacation today
than built this computer with me?
I can imagine him watching this video enjoying my struggle
as I try and figure out what the crap
he intended me to do with this.
Here's something Jake left instructions about.
I haven't seen one of these in a long time.
Given it's intended use
as a case for a low-powered business machine,
the included power supply makes a lot of sense, 265 watts.
But for what we're doing, that ain't gonna cut it,
especially from PowerMan, whatever the devil brand that is.
So we got our hands on the best Flex ATX power supply
that we have in our studio.
It's not a lot more, it's only 350 watts,
but it's at least from a reliable brand, Silverstone,
and is 80 Plus Gold efficient,
so hopefully it won't need much cooling,
which is good 'cause this case does not have it.
We can do something about the cooling challenges.
For starters, we can replace the slim 80-millimeter fan
with at least a full width 80-millimeter fan.
All that requires is a little bit of creative
(coughs softly) modification.
We're supposed to use this fan
as an exhaust rather than an intake,
so these little bits here are Dremeled out
to make room for the motherboard. (jeers)
While it would've been pretty cool
to put a 16-core CPU in here,
unfortunately, with the drivetrain installed,
which, well, it's a server so we're gonna need,
there's only 45 millimeters of room to work with
above the CPU.
The kinds of coolers that will fit in that space,
like Noctua's L9A, wouldn't even be able to handle
one of those 16-core CPU's at its base clock speed,
let alone when turboing.
Our next best option then is an 8-core Ryzen 5700X
with a much lower 65-watt TDP.
It's not as cool as stuffing a 16-core CPU
in a box like this, but it should be plenty
for our intended use case.
If we needed our CPU to perform parity calculations
for software RAID, a CPU like this
could be a performance concern.
But given that we're running a simple RAID 1, or mirror,
which is just the same bits of data being written to
and read from both drives,
we're not expecting that to be a problem.
Um, oh boy.
That was fine what I did.
Don't do it.
Boy, is this ever a skinny computer, hey.
Are you liking how skinny it is, Brandon?
Whoo! It's like a little slice of computer.
- Like cake. - Yeah.
By the way, it's not really part of the video
because Jake already removed it,
but ASRock, in their infinite wisdom,
decided to glue the stock backplate onto this board.
So for whatever reason you want to install a cooler
that doesn't use the stock backplate,
you have to do some careful prying work
in order to get it off.
Very annoying.
It is strong glue.
(plate clangs)
A big reason that we went Ryzen over an Intel-based platform
is that AMD, almost across the board,
offers at least unofficial support
for unbuffered ECC memory.
Error checking and correcting memory is considered safer
for use with the ZFS file system,
which makes heavy use of RAM for caching data.
And we have a bunch of these 32-gigabyte
NEMIX 3,200 megatransfer per second sticks kicking around
from a previous project.
So even though the performance of them not great,
we figured, ah, what the hey, let's go quantity over quality
and throw 128 gigs of RAM in this thing.
This is the part where things get very interesting.
How on earth am I supposed to fit this whole thing in here?
Wait, what?
Okay.
That is an extremely tight fit.
Oh my God, look at the quality of this case.
Even though it's so small,
can you see how much it's flexing?
The motherboard is what actually stiffens the case enough
that you can pick it up
without it just torquing around like that.
There it is.
And see, like I said,
it's far less twisty with the motherboard screwed into it.
All I've gotta do now is plug in all our power cables and...
Oh, that reminds me.
I never talked to you about our boot drives.
This is super cool.
These are discontinued now,
but these low capacity Intel Optane M.2 drives,
they were intended as caching drives
for hard drives in low-end systems,
but for us, they are the perfect boot drive.
They're only 64 gigs each,
but they are super high endurance
and with crazy low prices on the used market
because who would want a 64 gig drive?
Well, we do.
In fact, we want two of them
so that if one of them were to die on the go,
our system can continue to function
without missing a beat.
And ooh.
That 24-pin does not have a lot of slack on it.
That's not bad, right?
Yeah.
That's a nice, tidy little server.
Of course, it doesn't really have any bulk storage yet.
Ah, that's where this comes in.
This tiny package.
This CM6 Enterprise NVMe drive from Kioxia
holds a whopping 30 terabytes of storage.
I mean, it's not like we've never seen
density like this before.
Nimbus Data sent us a 3 1/2-inch drive
that could hold 100 terabytes,
but that used a SATA interface,
limiting the drive to about 500 megabytes a second.
The CM6 on the other hand can do 7 gigabytes per second
in sequential read speeds.
That means that we would need
dual 25-gig network connections
to get anywhere near the speed of just one of these drives.
And just one of these drives could easily handle
multiple video editors working off of it at the same time,
which is perfect for our application.
Now it, does occur to me
that with a street price of around $10,000 each,
carrying four of these across the border,
while perfectly legal, is a bit unnerving.
But that's fine because, A,
this case only seems to support two drives by default,
and B, uh, 30 terabytes of usable storage
after mirroring is actually excessive
for what will be about a week's worth of remote work.
For reference, that 30 terabytes is more capacity
than our previous main video editing server had
until we upgraded it just two years ago.
Actually, before we put this in, you probably noticed
that these drives use the U.2 interface
and our motherboard doesn't have any U.2 ports.
Well, we had a plan for this.
We tried this MaxCloudON four-port bifurcation card.
Unfortunately, it's a little taller
than I'm comfortable with in this case,
and it's designed around PCIe Gen 3,
so we'd actually be giving up
some of our comically high performance.
So instead, ha-ha, I have these.
Ha! Two of these.
These are PCIe x4 to mini SaaS HD or U.2 cards.
And all these do, these are just dumb cards.
They just take a PCIe Gen 4 interface and, bleh,
link all the lanes to these pins
and they connect via PCIe Gen 4 to the back of your drive.
Sick, right?
So we're just gonna go ahead and plug these guys in here.
Boop.
Then this guy goes into the back of the drive,
but it needs power to come from somewhere
so you just inject, say, the power into it,
a little something like this.
Uh oh.
This is a
(equipment clanks)
very tight fit.
(hand pats)
All these cables then just get mashemalated down there.
Yeah, we got this.
This is the way.
This is not the least janky thing I've ever done.
- [Brandon] It's not.
- (scoffs) Hey, be nice.
- [Brandon] What, no, you've done jankier.
- I know, but be nice.
- (laughs) What's not nice about the truth? (laughs)
- Truth's not setting me free right now, Brandon.
I'm pretty sure everything is connected now.
It's fine.
Let's power it up and make sure it sure it works.
I have concerns about thermals in this thing
even with the better fan.
That is a very restrictive front panel.
Right outta the gate,
there are a couple things we wanna adjust.
We're gonna set our memory to, boop, 3200.
And this is interesting.
I went into our NVMe configuration
and I see our two Optane drives, so that's for our boot?
and then, what's this?
Only one of our 30-terabyte Kioxias.
Ah, that's for a good reason.
If we look closely at our cards,
only one of them has an indicator LED on it,
and that is because the second one is installed
in a PCIe x16 slot.
Now, under normal circumstances,
there's no problem putting a PCIe x4 card
in a x16 slot, but in this case,
because it's not really a card, right,
it's just a pass-through,
we might have to set that slot to be bifurcated,
so to operate in a different mode.
So what we do is we go into, PBS I think it is.
Yes, PCIe 16 link with, and we go x4.
Theoretically, we can save this,
(fingers snap)
fire it back up, and it should be detected.
If not, I'm gonna leave it for Jake
to figure out after the weekend
because I gotta go do WAN Show.
Oh, I don't think that was actually the problem.
This one came unplugged.
That's a more likely explanation.
Let's try that.
Boop.
Hey, both the lights are on now.
Okay, well we found the problem.
Hey.
There we go.
All drives detected.
Now the last thing we need to do is go ahead
and set all of our fans to 100%
because we're gonna need all the cooling we can get.
Now we get into the really good stuff.
Let's talk about software.
We installed TruNAS SCALE,
which is the Linux version of TruNAS
already on the boot drives.
Our pool is already set up as a mirror
and we've already got a network share set up.
We might need to change the password
in order to do our demo here, but we'll see what's going on.
As for other settings that we needed to change,
we enabled auto trim because SSDs.
Trim is a really important feature
to increase both the performance and longevity of your SSDs.
No.
(sighs) I understand, for security,
we wanna have it set to something good
when we're actually leaving, but, you gotta,
for a video, you gotta set it to something
that, like, (screen beeps).
All right, I hacked the mainframe and we're in.
128 gigs of RAM, 8-core, 16 threads.
(gasps) Hottest core, 47 degrees
while we're not even doing anything.
How do I get to this thing?
No, do not cut.
Nope, not that one.
Cool, well, anyway, we tested it before
so you guys can see the screen cap of this,
and wow, it's really fast.
But the SSD temperatures are a little hotter
than I'd like to see.
We got in touch with Kioxia
and they said they actually rate these drives
at a maximum operating temperature of 70 degrees.
So 62 is actually fine,
but we might end up modifying the bracket
that they sit on for a bit better airflow.
For now though, apparently it's fine,
but I gotta say, this fan at the front
kicks out a lot of heat.
Now, for everything you saw on the screen capture just now,
we're just connected to our office's 10-gig infrastructure.
But we're not gonna have that with us on the go
and our hotel internet might not even be suitable
for four editors to edit at the same time,
even if they're just pulling down,
like, you know, stock photos and other assets.
Thankfully, we have a solution to both of those problems.
First of all, we're actually gonna be using a cellular puck,
which we have done in the past and works shockingly well.
This will make sure that we have internet access.
As for networking all the machines together and to our NAS,
we're gonna have a total of four editors down there,
we wanted a 10-gig switch that was portable.
And it turns out Ubiquiti has just the solution.
Meet the Flex XG.
It's a four-port, 10-gig switch that is shockingly heavy
but also extremely compact
and can actually be powered with USB-C.
Then, because, obviously,
Apple doesn't actually have 10-gig networking
on their MacBooks, almost nobody puts 10-gig networking
on a laptop, we'll be using four
of these CalDigit Thunderbolt to 10-gig networking dongles
to get everybody up to full speed.
Now, you're probably wondering, why MacBooks?
We are otherwise a completely Windows house
when it comes to video editing.
It's because, for the Adobe suite,
while Apple's M2 silicon might be slower
than the top dog Intel laptops
for rendering and timeline performance,
we've actually found them to be a lot more stable,
which ends up saving us more time
than the extra performance would when we're on the go.
They also have great color-accurate screens,
great battery life, they charge quickly,
and ingesting footage seems to work a lot better
for some reason as well.
We may also bring, like, a top dog Windows laptop
just for rendering out projects.
I mean, with everything on network storage,
it's super easy to move projects between systems,
but that remains to be seen,
just like it remains to be seen
who is our sponsor for this video.
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If you enjoyed this video, you know what?
Oh, let's go full blast from the past.
Why don't you check out the one
where I built a, like, duffle bag,
carryable editing rig for our very first CES.