Geerling Engineering Asustor video subtitles Last time I was at the radio station with my Dad,
we talked about storage. I asked him how they store their files, and he said they have two
terabytes of network storage, and it's more than 90% full! They need a storage intervention.
I mean, I'm over here with my 48 terabyte all-SSD Raspberry Pi NAS,
surely I can help my Dad, right? So I asked my friends at ASUSTOR, and they sent this:
it's a 1U rack server, the Lockerstor 4RS, and I have to admit... I'm a bit jealous.
In my little home lab, I run two desktop NASes. Between them,
I have enough storage for two synchronized local copies of all my YouTube footage,
plus an offline weekly archive on Amazon Glacier.
I have a whole video where I talk about my 3-2-1 backup plan over on my main channel,
so go check that out. With ransomware attacks on the rise, having reliable storage and backups is
a basic requirement for any business, no matter how small. And a lot of the time,
a NAS like this is the best way to get started. So I'm gonna quickly run through the server's specs,
then we'll go install it at the station.
The 4RS uses a custom motherboard to connect an Intel Atom quad-core CPU to
four SATA hot swap bays. On the back, it has two built-in gigabit ports, two 2.5 gig ports,
and you can even add in 10 gigs with a PCI Express card in this PCIe Gen 3 x4 slot.
The server comes with 8 gigs of DDR 4 RAM, though it has three more slots,
and you can upgrade the thing all the way to 128 gigs. That expansion's a
nice feather in the cap for this server compared to it's closest competitor,
the Synology RackStation RS820+, which tops out at only 18 gigs!
The built-in ADM software has a ton of features perfect for the radio station,
like support for virtual machine disks, Docker, and one-touch backups. It's a full-on server,
too, complete with fans that could double as jet turbines at full blast.
Luckily those fans don't get that loud in normal operation,
otherwise this thing wouldn't be a great fit for a radio studio!
This unit has one power supply, but ASUSTOR also sells a version with two for redundancy,
and there's also a 12-bay version if you need a ton of extra capacity. Heck, if you can fork
over the money, they have pro versions with Xeon processors, ECC RAM, and even _more_ drive bays.
But this unit is a perfect upgrade for the radio station. They have the rack space for it,
and I'm gonna install these four Seagate Ironwolf NAS drives in it,
for sixteen terabytes of raw storage capacity. So let's take this thing over to the station.
I figure since it’s on the way, I might as well indulge.
You can take the bag off of there. It’s a little surprise.
[Joe sniffs the bag]
-Food? -You’ll see!
Alrighty. -All right.
-So, we’ve got four Ironwolf NAS drives, 4 TB. You can set those aside for now,
because we’ve got to install them. And then there’s an accessory box
here that we’ll need to go through in a bit to put everything together. And this
is the Lockerstar 4RS. -Nice.
-There’s the front. -Very nice.
-We don’t need to take the top off or anything. It has 8 GB of ram but you can upgrade it to
128 GB if you ever need to. It also has a slot back here for a 10 GB ethernet card,
and there might be some other things you can put in there in the future if you ever need to expand.
But looking around at the backside,
it does have two 2.5 GB and two 1 GB ethernet, plus 4 USB3 ports.
First things first, it looks like we’re going to need to put the rack ears on, so
let’s get started with that.
-There’s one, and here’s a rack ear, and…we’ve got three that are going
to go on the side with some nice holes, perfect. And then three bags of screws.
The one with only six is the one I’m guessing, because you’ve got two rack ears, three apiece.
So I pull this around,
and get this near the edge so I have a chance to drop some screws on the floor.
Went right in there. Beautifully engineered, we love that.
That’s like, 47 Newton-tons or something there, Jeff?
Whatever they spec and inspect? -Is Newton-tons
a, uh, official unit of measurement? -[laughing] Yeah. Till I can make one up.
-I know that they sell a rail kit for this thing, but I looked and it’s like $150,
and we don’t have it on hand, so what is going to be your solution? Because it
looks like—I don’t know. I don’t think you can support this thing on those two screws alone.
-Yeah the two screws in the front—no, it’s meant to have a rail kit or be
installed on a sliding shelf or something. What I’m going to do is I’m going to
mount the back of the rack—I’m going to mount upside-down a 1 RU shelf to support the back,
and then these’ll support the front. We’re going to see how that feels. And go with it, I hope.
So what do you say we put the drives in now? -I think that’s a good next step.
-A little extra weight to carry. -Yeah, maybe we put the drives
in the trays, and then we can put the trays in once it’s in the rack.
-That’s true. That’s a good compromise. -Yeah.
-So pop that open, tray one. Pop—beautiful! -And these trays are all metal,
with plastic, kind of facades. -Yeah. So that’s going to go like that.
I’m guessing this is 16 and that’s not. -They should both have 16, I think
there’s a kit for— -Oh, different size,
yeah these are just smaller. Yeah, tiny. -But if you ever wanted to upgrade to SSDs…
-Yeah, I could tell by the weight. Kind of jumped out of that bag there, Jeffrey!
So here, I’m going to take this on the side.
How many different techniques do you think people have for putting screws in?
-Some people probably don’t put the screws in, just push!
-[laughing] Oh, that’s true too! -The crazy thing is, you could grab
a hard drive from 30 or 40 years ago—which you probably have one in this building—
-I probably do! -And it would fit right in there! Although
it might be IDE or SCSI or some other interface. -I’ll show you one other thing, you want to see
this real quick? -Sure.
-Something that’s kind of cool. The other drives we used to use, this was generation 3 or 4,
look at that! Floppy! I bet it still works, too. Anyone know the satisfying sound of a floppy,
do you remember that? If I had—if I could find one I would play one in there.
Do you remember guys used to write software to make sounds out of the, uh—
-There’s a—what is it, Device Orchestra, on YouTube.
-Oh yeah, yeah! -He’s one of them. He does toothbrushes
and typewriters and and things, but there’s also a guy, I forget the channel,
he has like, 80 floppy drives and a scanner and a dot matrix printer and all that kind of stuff.
Not a ratcheting screwdriver! -Augh! Come on!
I only give ‘em three, and then the fourth one, if it doesn’t go,
I throw the hard drive. -Hmm.
-Across the room. -Don’t know if I would do that with these.
-They’re easily replaceable. See? You let them know that, look at that!
-I was only slightly nervous about the fan noise inside of there, but I realized you have other
things in there that are WAY louder. -Yes, I do.
-I don’t think we’re going to have a problem. -Well that UPS at the bottom, you know that
donated UPS thing, that’s the—yeah, you got the one that’s the quietest of all of them.
All right, let’s get it in the rack. So we take this baby, put this in here…
-And of course, since I’m holding the camera I get to let you do all the work here!
-[laughing] You just slide in and catch the shelf back there,
then line it right up with the hole right there on the front.
There it goes. And there’s that one. All right, they both look the same.
-All right, let’s get those hard drives installed. -All right! Hard drives. Carry them all at once?
-Ehh, I don’t know about that. -Maybe not. I think I can take my time.
Shove them in here. One. It’s very satisfying because everything here is NEW.
-Ha! Yes. A rare treat. -Two.
Three. Four. Okay.
-And the most important part—you want to do the honors of peeling?
-Oh, I love that. There’s that little thing to grab here, isn’t there?
-Dad fingers. -It’s not made for my fingers,
and then your eyes get old, Jeff, don’t do that. -[laughing]
-Avoid that one. -Need to go get your reading glasses?
-Yeah I need to go get my reading glasses. I see the tip here. I got it going here.
It’s still satisfying. Look at this! THAT is satisfying. Never gets old.
All right. So. What do you want me to do, show you how this cable has been run to our super
duper 1 GB switch here? And run around, out, back, I’m going to plug it in the 1 GB port.
Should I do numerically? One, two, three? Or just go at the bottom?
-Doesn’t matter too much. -Okay. Says the youngster! Okay.
All right, so this guy will probably go, I’ll probably be able to start over there,
see that? Plug in, go off the side, come over, and probably hit there. There’s a million ways
to do power cords, Mike Waldman! -[laughing] I don’t know if we need
to call other people out on this. -Oh, okay. But he was the best.
-He is the cable management king. -He was the king. We’ll come around
here and tuck this baby right in there. -And is this power strip connected to a UPS?
-It’s connected to the UPS at the bottom, the noise-maker!
-46 decibels? My office is 32,
you know, you can get it better than that— -Yeah, well, you’re not standing next to my—
-This is a radio studio! -Yeah.
-Although you can close this door and that helps quite a bit.
-That would be true. -All right. Well!
-So, you ready? -Yeah.
-The pleasure of turning it on. This looks like the power button! Universal power symbol.
-Yep. -Ooh,
not too bad! And now look at that, it’s safe to work here!
-I can hear the hard drives spinning up. -So now you’re more familiar with this than I am,
what is it doing? We’re spinning up the drives— -Yeah, it does a staggered spin-up,
so it doesn’t do a big power surge. I think it usually does two then two,
I don’t know if that’s the order it did it. -Now I see network indicators here. That
looks like hard drive spin-up, so the indicator— -Yeah, the light is blinking, that’s kind of like
“Set me up, please!” -Yeah.
-We’ll need to do that from a computer. -Gotcha.
-There’s a few different ways you can find this thing on your network once you have it set up.
You could scan it with Fink or with some network utility. ASUSTOR actually makes this thing called
ASUSTOR Control Center, which I popped on here, and it looks on your network for any ASUSTOR
devices and it found the one here. You could also just go to this IP address in your web browser and
I think it’s port 8001. But if you go here you can open it straight up from the Control Center,
which is convenient. And I will accept the certificate, because it has a self-signed.
And this is the initial setup wizard. So at this point we have a few decisions that we need to
make. We need to figure out what RAID level we want to use, how we want to set up the drives,
if we want to have two volumes or one volume, all that kind of stuff.
The setup wizard is asking for a RAID level, have you thought about what you want to do for this?
-Uh, highest one ever! No, that’s not—I know that’s not how—
-That’s not how RAID works! -[laughing] I know! What do you think,
though, what’s your personal preference? -I mean, for the radio station,
you definitely want stability, and you’d probably want to have some amount of performance—like,
right now I know that you have RAID 1, right? -Mm hm.
-In this current storage server. So obviously each RAID level has its tradeoffs. With RAID 1
and RAID 10 there’s mirrored redundancy, so for each disk there’s a complete mirror copy of it.
Those offer some good things, like you’ll be able to lose half of your drives (if it’s the right
half of your drives) and you’ll still be good, and it’s faster because the computer doesn’t have
to do as much parity calculation as you would in RAID 5, RAID 6, RAID levels like that. You would
NEVER—well not NEVER, but you would ALMOST never do RAID 0, because if any drive fails,
your entire system is gone, all your data’s gone. Also, this ASUSTOR has Btrfs which is a newer kind
of storage technology. And there’s also ZFS, which this particular NAS doesn’t support. Those two
are a little bit more advanced. You can do some more things with them, and a lot of different
custom NASes that people build, you’d probably want to use one of those. But they do require
a little bit different monitoring, and there are some tradeoffs with them as well.
But for you, I mean the main decision is do you want a little extra capacity with only one drive
out capability with RAID 5, or with just four drives, I would
think if you’re going to do two-drive redundancy you could do RAID 6,
but that’s a lot of parity calculation, you could just stick with RAID 10. So what do you think?
-I was leaning toward RAID 10 for my minor little investigations anyway, so I agree. RAID 10 is it.
-All right. Yeah. So the other nice thing is that if you have a cold spare hard drive,
if you ever have a failure, this NAS can actually send you a text message or an email
or something like that, and you can grab that spare and slap it in there and that’ll be it.
We’ll do RAID 10 here. I’m going to check all the drives, we’ll go to RAID 10, and
have them all—so it’ll give you not quite 8 TB, it’ll give you 8 tebibytes, maybe? Anyway,
you’ll get 7.27 TB of total storage. -That’s quite a bit
above the two that we have now. -Little bit of an upgrade over the 2 TB right now!
It looks like it might be still restarting. -They’re all blinking like crazy, dude.
We’ve got them blinking. We have some blinking lights.
So far this has been a wonderful Windows experience.
-[lauging] We’re over an hour into this. We were going to record this last little bit
testing the file copy, and this computer now, this is the second time it’s doing updates.
-We are probably the only ones that ever get caught with Windows updates taking a long time.
I bet everyone else gets them really fast. We have 100 MB up and down, so unless Microsoft
has shut off the thing or this is an incredible update we’re all about to experience tonight.
-It did say that you’re about to get some upgrades in a very optimistic manner.
-Yeah it did. It made me think happy thoughts for about half a millisecond.
-You want to take the honorary bite? -I will take the honorary first bite, get a
little strawberry in there, get a little whipped cream, and thank you Ted Drewes, thank you Jeff!
-It’s actually all of the profits that we’ve earned on this YouTube channel
are on the table right now in front of you. [both are laughing]
So we’re switching to this computer, which is…the monitor setup is definitely—
-It’s definitely a little funky. -A little funny.
-Yeah, a little funny, a little ugly… -We’re going to try to do a file copy to that NAS,
you can see it’s nicely stretched out. -So here’s File Explorer. I like to go
from-to. I’ll find our NAS guy over here. There’s Network. Pops right there, hit it.
Hit it. I’m going to copy this to the Audio directory, I already have the Audio Test folder I
made so I know where to delete it. Going to come over here in the Audio drive on this computer,
Drive E, Audio, and I’m just going to copy this across to here. And again,
earlier the machines were doing 11, 10-11 MB, so. See! Look at that, come on Jeff, we can do better,
let’s go. Wake up everybody! There we go. -It’s a spinning hard drive, so I think that
hard drive is slowly ramping up. -Yeah.
-To its full potential. -Yeah, so we’ve got
10-11, the pre and post here is 90s. -The funny thing is, on my Mac I could
get up to 120, that was from an SSD so I’m guessing that we’re hitting the limits on what—
-Yeah, we get to 110, yeah so we’re—that’s a 10x increase right there, sir! That is sweet.
So everything's working, and while we were cleaning up,
my Dad asked a few more questions. First, he asked about notifications:
-Notifications, when this thing goes bad we want to be notified.
-Yeah. So there’s a few things. It actually will show a little red LED on a drive if one of them
is going bad, if it has a SMART status failure or it won’t ride or won’t boot. It also beeps,
and that’s nice, you know, if you’re out in the office and something is happening.
And also you can set up email notifications, SMS, or even push notifications with ASUSTOR’s app,
though with mine at home I just have email turned on.
We also got to talking about security. At the last radio station where he worked,
their entire corporate network was hit by ransomware, and
that was a bit of a nightmare to fix. He wanted to make sure this NAS was protected,
especially since he'd seen news about a new crypto locker called Deadbolt targeting ASUSTOR and QNAP.
So I told him, first of all, it's always important to keep the NAS updated,
just like any other device on the network. But even more important,
turn off anything that you don't use. For my own NASes, I only have file sharing enabled,
and I run Jellyfin for media files. If I need to access the NAS remotely, I use my own VPN.
Don't enable features that punch holes through your router unless it's
absolutely necessary. Even then, the best protection is having an offline copy,
and my Dad's plan is to keep one full copy on a USB hard drive that's stored offsite and offline.
Anyways, I think the storage intervention was a success! The radio station went from 11 Megabytes
per second to more than 100, and from 2 terabytes to 8, giving a bit more headroom for the future.
Thanks to ASUSTOR for sending the NAS and Seagate for sending the hard drives,
and we'll see you next time on Geerling Engineering!