This is a mini ITX rackmount enclosure from MyElectronics,
and this is the Turing Pi 2, a 4-node Raspberry Pi cluster board.
In this video, I'm celebrating 250,000 subscribers
by racking up the Pi cluster. Now, why would I want to rack-mount it? Well, a few reasons:
First, it's no good running a server on my desk completely unprotected and
likely to get swiped by Red Shirt Jeff. Second, I have a network rack, so might as well use it!
And third, I wanna do some fun things with the Turing Pi next year, and the first step is to
get it mounted more permanently... So let's take a look at this enclosure. A couple months ago,
I asked if anyone knew a good 2U enclosure for mini ITX. There are a lot of 1U ITX enclosures,
but unfortunately the Turing Pi 2 is just tall enough it wouldn't fit.
MyElectronics reached out and told me they had a spare 2U ITX rack enclosure, and would love for
me to use it, no strings attached. So thanks to them, I have this shiny black and blue enclosure.
This case was a limited custom build they don't list on their site, but they told me if enough
people are interested, they might tweak the design and produce a model specifically for
boards like the Turing Pi 2! So maybe send them an email or a tweet if you're interested.
The number of screws required to pop off the top is a little annoying, but
once inside, it's a nice, roomy box. It has two front-panel USB 3 plugs,
a front panel power switch, and it came with a 180 watt Flex ATX power supply,
this FSP180. That should be plenty to power the Turing Pi and anything I'll run on it.
I installed a Noctua 80mm fan in the back,
and it has mounting points for a mini ITX motherboard and up to five SATA SSDs.
One thing that a lot of people have asked about on previous builds is an
IO shield. So the Turing Pi 1 never came with an official IO shield, and the Seaberry that
I talked about didn’t have one either. But the Turing Pi 2, I asked “Do you have an IO
shield for it?” and they said “Not yet.”, so I went ahead and designed this little one.
I put this up on Thingiverse in case you but a Turing Pi of your own.
So the great thing about standards is that this is Mini ITX, and Turing zoo never
actually talked to MyElectronics, but because they use the same standards that’s Mini ITX,
this Mini ITX case works perfectly with this Miji ITX board. So, when I put this board in,
the standoffs are already in the right place, the IO shield is in the right place, and all I
have to do is screw the board in and u have this Raspberry Pi cluster inside the case just like
any other PC build that uses ITX. So MyElectronics includes all the parts that I needed to to install
up to five SATA drives. I don’t need to do that for this build, I just have these two
crucial drives that I’ll be putting in, but they have all these screws—these screws are Torx E10.
This case has a little bit of a weird way of mounting SSDs. I have two Crucial MX500
SSDs, these are SATA 3. They’re a little bit of overkill for this build, but
for the things I’m going to do with it, I will need some storage space, and I’m going to put
these two 2TB drives into RAID 1, so I’ll have 2TB of total storage space but 4TB in the build,
and I’m going to share these across the cluster by using NFS.
The way that these SSDs are going to mount up to this case is a little bit strange;
it has these holes over here on the side, and the easiest way I’ve found to do it is to
stick these two screws in through the holes—so I stick a screw there, and stick a screw here—and
I’m going to put the SSD up against here and screw them in. As you can see, it’s not the most
efficient way of mounting these things, but it fits well in the case.
I think if they were going to mass-market this case, I would rather see some hot swap trays.
Okay. Those two are in, we’ll set this back down.
Alright, so the drives are in, I’m going to connect it up to the board.
The two slots are here, SATA 1 and SATA 2. MyElectronics sent me these two SATA cables;
you can use any that you want, I like these because they’re black. I
actually asked “Does the case come in black?” but this was the one that they had, and it’s blue.
Still looks nice, but as Batman once said, “Does it come in black?”
This case comes with a 180 Watt power supply, I think that should be enough juice for pretty
much anything we’d want to run on a Turing Pi. If you were going to run more high powered PCI
devices you’d need a better power supply than that, but I think we’ll be fine here,
I don’t think I’ll need that.
And then we’ve got our two SATA power connectors here—there we go. So we move got power connected,
the fan—as I mentioned in my previous video, the fan header on this board with
the firmware I have on this board right now does not actually turn on the fan header,
so when it does I can just plug it in like this and I’ll have the fan with full PDWM control,
but for now I actually have an adapter since that connector’s not working. Probably by the end of of
this video the firmware might be updated, I know that they’re working on that right now.
But for now I’m just going to plug this into the 12 Volt supply using this adapter from StarTech.
So the fan will just run full blast for now.
So next up I have USB 3–this case actually has two USB 3.0 ports on the front,
and the Turing Pi 2 has that USB front panel header which is connected to node 4,
which is this bottom slot. So this board has two USB 3.0 ports on the back,
and those are connected to here, and two USB 3.0 ports on the front.
I’m going to plug this header in—let’s route this somewhat intelligently. There we go!
The next connections are the front panel power button and LED, and the Turing Pi 2 has a front
panel header, but again the firmware is a little bit delayed, so right now I’m going to plug it
into the JTAG header on the back where these signals are actually connected to right now, and
then once I get the new firmware I’ll be switching them to the front panel header connectors.
There are also a few PCI Express slots—at least cutouts where they would be if you had a Mini ITX
board with a PCI Express slot over here, and then a header that would put them 90 degrees.
This board doesn’t have that, this board has Mini PCI 2 slots,
and then the other two Pi’s or NVIDIA Jetsons will have their own things. So there’s USB 3.0, and
this other one has SATA built in which will power these two drives on node 3.
I’m not going to use those right now, I actually have a couple blanks coming to me in
the mail right now, but let’s put the lid on this thing and get all the screws in.
One thing I would like to see—so if MyElectronics is watching this video, or if you’re asking
MyElectronics to make a case like this for you, it’d be nice to have a panel on the top that just
comes off, maybe with a couple screws on it. This one goes around the sides, and four screws on the
sides, four screws on the top, that’s a lot of screws to get out just to get access to the top
if you’re doing something like swapping a Pi out or swapping an SSD. The other thing that would be
nice is having better thermal management so that the fan can pull air across the board.
I know that for a lot of PC builds, the motherboard would have its own CPU fan,
but for a Raspberry Pi board that’s not really a thing—at least, not yet.
Let’s stick this over here and plug it in and see what happens.
This power supply doesn’t actually have a power switch, so I have to rely on the power button,
which is fine, that’s how you usually manage servers, but it would be nice to have an extra
power switch on the supply itself, but that’s just not the case for these slim power supplies.
With power connected, I have to wait a few seconds for the Turing Pi's MCU to boot,
then I can press the power switch, and the cluster starts booting up, one node at a time.
Now, my main goal today is to make sure I can turn
on the cluster and have everything work when it's screwed into my rack.
The last thing I wanna have to do is pull it back out to re-seat a cable inside.
So I know the power button works, which is good, but now I wanna make sure the Pis can see all the
peripherals, like the two SSDs on node 3 and the front and rear USB 3.0 ports on node 4.
So first, I'll log into node 3 with SSH.
I can use the lsblk command to make sure the two drives are showing up,
and there they are, sda and sdb. And to make sure they're identified correctly as Crucial MX500s,
I'll run sudo fdisk -l, and there they are, the last two drives, 1.82 tebibytes each.
Later on I'll put 'em in RAID, but for now I'm happy they're working,
so I'll switch to node 4 to test the USB 3.0 ports.
If I run lsusb, I can see everything that's attached to the built-in USB
2 hub on the CM4, as well as the USB 3 hub on the Turing Pi's VL805 chip.
And if I plug in this little UASP flash drive, I should see it when I lsusb again... Right...
there. And to make sure it's showing up as a USB 3 device, I can run lsusb -t,
and now it shows me that the drive is listed as a Mass Storage device, using the UAS driver and it's
running at 5000 megabits, which means I should be able to get the best performance possible.
And if I unplug it and plug it into one of the ports on the back?
There it is, so I know all the USB 3.0 ports are working on node 4.
There are still a couple firmware bugs Turing Pi's ironing out before
the big release in a month or so—one time while working on this video I even had to
use the JTAG interface to flash an updated bootloader, but I'll spare you the details!
I have big plans for the cluster now that I got it working in my rack,
so thanks especially to MyElectronics for sending over this enclosure.
The next step is communicating with the cluster, formatting the RAID array,
and setting up cluster management software, so make sure you're subscribed to see it!
Until next time, I'm Jeff Geerling.