- Hey guys, this is Austin.
And this is the 250 terabyte project.
Now this has been one of the biggest things
that we've ever undertaken
as we literally started working on this last year
and we've literally been shooting this video ever since.
This entire project was really built around these two units
from 45Drives.
The original Storinator which we did a couple years ago
with Linus, as well as the brand new Stornado
which is an all SSD server
which allows us for everyone in the office
to be connected via 10 Gig Ethernet,
to share files, to edit things with tons of space
and tons of speed.
Building an entire server for the first time
has definitely not been a smooth process.
So this video actually begins in April
when we first got our Stornado.
So inside here, we have the Stornado.
Now unlike the Storinator which we used
for our previous project, this is all SSD flash storage.
And 45Drives was awesome enough to hook us up with this
for free because we're trying to do something
a little bit bigger than what we've done in the past.
It's so heavy.
(laughing)
So inside this Stornado is essentially what will be
our new editing server.
So right now, we use a series of Samsung T3 and T5 drives
to do all of our edits.
Now they actually work pretty well
and it's nice to have the portability
but the problem is that say,
Jimmy's working on a project tonight
and I wanna take over,
he has to eject the drive and hand it to me.
We basically have no redundancy if a drive fails
or if someone loses something.
Whereas with this,
everyone will be connected via 10 Gig Ethernet
and theoretically, we can all work on the same project
at the same time.
I wanna get this thing open.
This is rad.
Wait, did they load us up with 64 GB of RAM?
8, 16, 32, wow.
Are you for real right now?
(laughing)
Dude, look how cool this is.
They gave us a custom front plate.
Did you design this?
- Yes.
- Oh, you did.
Oh, dude. That's gonna be awesome.
So we can basically just swap that out?
Oh, dude.
This is so cool.
The next task was actually to get
the Stornado up and running with a ton of super fast SSDs
which happened in June.
So inside here, we have a whole bunch of 800 GB SSDs.
So these are the Nytro Series straight from Seagate
who were very gracious to provide these
for the Stornado project.
But essentially, with ...
Actually how many drives do we have again?
Four,
five,
six,
seven.
So the cool part about these SSDs
is that they're not just standard drives.
So let's actually open one of them up.
You'll see that these
are SAS based.
Now this is not something that you can just, say,
throw into an average desktop PC.
That makes sense.
These are actual, proper enterprise class drives
which is important 'cause this server is going to be up
for years at a time.
We need to make sure that all these drives
are as reliable as possible and importantly also,
as fast as possible.
Especially when you talk about 10, 20, 30 drives
in one single system,
reliability becomes a huge, huge factor.
And the last thing I wanna do is start editing a video
and realize that,
"Oh.
"Right.
"I lost my 31st drive
"and the entire thing just caught on fire."
Which thankfully is not the case here.
Also, it'd be weird if the project caught on fire
but that would still suck.
Now in July, I actually thought that
we were pretty much done with this project.
The Stornado was up and running
and it seemed like we were going to be ready to go.
That is surprisingly quiet for an open server.
All right, so we are up and running.
So right now we have 22.4 terabytes available.
Now this is not actually completely set up
so the main thing I wanna do right now
is just test to see what kind of optimal speeds.
We're going to wanna build some redundancy
and we're going to wanna make sure that
if multiple of these drives fail,
Actually, no, what number are we gonna aim for?
Probably like two drive failures before we lose anything?
Look at that.
So we have our two 240 or 250 GB SSDs
and then we have all of our 800 GB SSDs.
That my friends,
Oh look, look. Wait, sorry. Hang on.
There's a whole other page.
Keep going.
That's so many discs.
Oh, I love it.
All right.
I think we're ready to actually start speed testing
and see what we're able to get over our 10 Gig network.
So again, not totally final.
We still need to get our switch involved
and kind of run lines to everyone.
But this should give us a pretty good idea
of what kind of speed we're going to be able to get
over the network with all of our SSDs.
So to start with, we have a 28 GB file.
Now if I just paste it over here.
We're getting
4 gigabits a second.
Nice. All right, that's pretty fast.
So actually, really our bottleneck right now
is just purely the SSD that we're using.
This is literally just isn't fast enough
to saturate the 10 Gigabit network.
Oh, oh, I'm excited.
All right.
So let me actually try to transfer something
which is on the internal SSD on the MacBook
which should be somewhere in the neighborhood of like,
2 GB per second.
Oh, that's fast.
That is 8 gigabits per second.
Or like, 30 seconds to transfer 25 GB file over the network.
Ooh, that's fast.
So that is actually,
8 gigabits per second is about 1 gigabyte per second.
Yo, that's fast.
Oh.
Oh, this is good.
Fast forward to August
and while it seemed like our server build
was missing a few critical components.
So we actually started to, you know, put that together.
So you guys have already seen the Stornado.
We also have our original Storinator
which will make its way in here.
We also have some fun goodies.
This is one of my favorites.
So this doesn't look like anything particularly cool.
However, inside, this houses a Mac Mini.
So there's a lot of reasons
why we've chosen to go with a Mac Mini.
First of all, we actually do need something,
especially for our LTO drive that does have Thunderbolt 3.
But importantly, the Mac Mini is fairly affordable
and it also has a 10 Gigabit Ethernet port,
which means that this computer can live in here,
live on this shelf.
We'll also have a monitor, we'll have a keyboard
so you can really easily walk up to the rack,
do whatever it is that you need to do configuration wise,
although hopefully a lot of that stuff will also be able
to be done upstairs on the network
but something such as the LTO
will need to be run from the Mac Mini.
I love the fact that for a power cable up front,
it literally hit the button,
it just presses the power button
on the back of the Mac Mini.
That's so cool.
So on top of the Storinator,
we actually are going to have another Storinator
at some point.
We have our ...
I forgot how heavy this is.
We have our Synology NAS
with 70 terabytes of additional storage.
Dude, this, so heavy.
- I thought you were the shredded one.
- So all of these different units,
the Storinator, the Stornado, the Mac, the LTO drive,
all this stuff needs to communicate somehow and primarily,
we're using this 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch
to run all these things upstairs
so everyone upstairs will have 10 Gig Ethernet.
Honestly, we're just stealing Linus' setup.
- Kind of. Yeah.
- I mean. We're stealing Linus' setup.
But to be fair, Linus was the one who literally hooked us up
with the Storinator in the first place.
Like, at the very beginning, it was Linus' fault.
So we're just-
- Completely his fault.
- [Austin] We're just literally just always
a couple years behind Linus.
So stay tuned.
We'll have 80% more ads two years from now.
So especially when you're dealing with the server,
a UPS is incredibly important.
- The big thing that's cool about this though is that
in the event of a power outage,
there are a couple different banks of outlets in there.
So when the power goes out, we can tell it,
"Hey, prioritize these devices.
"Keep these on even longer.
"Shut down this one, this one first."
And they can actually send a signal to the Storinator
and the Stornado to say,
"Hey. I've lost power.
"Start your safe shutdown process."
So that way, nothing hard crashes.
- All right, let's get this stupid thing out.
Oh my God. It's so heavy.
All right. Coming down.
And I am down.
So with that, we have our UPS installed.
So do you wanna try do the Stornado next?
- Sure.
- Be very careful not to drop
our incredibly fast and expensive Stornado.
- That'd be rad.
So we're gonna just line it up.
Yup, line it up.
- Okay, okay.
- We're good. We're good.
That's fine. That's fine.
We're good. Yup.
- Hey.
- Yup.
- It's working. Oh my god. We got it.
- Boom.
- I mean, some slight tightening.
But we have the Stornado in the server rack.
- It's earthquake proof.
- And now the server is finally done.
So it is October and now well, okay, I say done.
It's always going to be a work in progress.
But it is actually fully functional.
We're all using it right now.
Now what happens when our storage is full?
Or more importantly, what happens when we need more storage
that needs to be safely backed up?
Well, that's where our LTO drive comes in.
You see this empty hole in the rack?
Yeah. So LTO is magnetic tape
and actually I wanna do a whole video on this at some point
but essentially, this is a really cheap
and long term backup solution.
However, currently our LTO drive is being repaired.
So it normally goes right here.
This has been an unexpectedly huge project.
I did not think when we first start talking about doing this
late last year, that it would take anywhere near this long
to get everything up and running.
But the best part is that it is finally up and running now.
So as you can see, this has a lot of room to grow.
We have lots of additional space.
And realistically, there's a lot more
that I wanna do with this.
But the most important thing here is that
we have a really easily accessible bit of storage
for everything we need here in the office.
So as we edit videos, we can use the Stornado.
As we wanna back them up, we have the Storinator
as well as we have our LTO drives.
And the cool thing is that there's so many more things
we can do in the future
that part 2 of this video will come out in
2021.