Extreme Studio Makeover: Storage Edition!

[@ASUSTOR_YT]

Thanks so much Jeff Geerling and Dad Geerling for featuring the Lockerstor 4RS in a video! As always, everyone is free to leave a comment, question, criticism or praise in the form of a reply! Thanks again!

[@MegamanEXEv2]

Send the rails lol

[@ASUSTOR_YT]

@@MegamanEXEv2 Lmao. The NAS's rails are sold separately because we don't know which configuration the customer or KZbinr has. Many of our customers do not opt for the rails because their rack may not be compatible with ours or they have their own solution. Our rail configuration is not proprietary and will support other rails for different racks.

[@Carterthielftw_]

@@Kosphy You are aware that Atom CPUs do not support ECC ;)

[@rendoesmath]

dude IT"S SICKK

[@ASUSTOR_YT]

@@Carterthielftw_ These Atom CPUs do support ECC RAM. We use the C3538. Intel's ARK shows it supports ECC RAM. Despite the name, these Atom microprocessors, codenamed Denverton are server CPUs.

Oh yes, another Geerling channel! Really love that now we have an entire channel of content with Papa Geerling!

[@linuxgamecast]

Good to see an Aphex 301 alive and kicking. Have one in the rack in the studio. Useful bit of 80's tech.

[@JeffGeerling]

Indeed, and I love your teardown and review! kzbin.info/www/bejne/b3uYdJh_mLR9oc0

[@SyberPrepper]

I love and Dad and Son dynamic. I've really been enjoying your interactions and the respect you have for each other. You do a great job putting the videos together. I've never heard of Asustor before (relatively new subscriber to your channels), so I'll be checking them out. Thanks.

[@WhoFlungPoo2024]

I started in FM in 1964. Then went to TV in 1965, running the RCA TK-30A image orthicon camera. No video tape when I started but when I enlisted in the Navy the same year, my station had just purchased its first Ampex 2-inch VTRs. Spent a little over 4 years as a Tradevman, servicing a Lockheed Electronics antisubmarine warfare simulator. My entire evolution was in the vacuum tube age and transistorized circuits were just entering play. [Note "transistorized." ICs were unheard of!] The advances in your shared industries are beyond mind-boggling! Take pride in your Dad and the obvious relationship you share. In both your cases, the apple didn't fall too far from the tree. BTW, the neatness of your father's engineering office, coupled with the cleanliness and orderliness of the rack-space sez it all. He's a true pro.

[@ericshelley1463]

Watching this reminds me of helping my stepdad at the radio station where he was chief engineer. I found it really interesting just how old some of the equipment was, not to mention just how little storage they had on site.

[@donaloflynn]

Jeff, I'm loving these videos. Congratulations on having over 5000 subscribers on this channel already! I'm sure it will be multiples of that before long. Would you and your dad give us a full tour of the studios and talk us through the equipment in them and in the racks? Having been technical manager of a station with a much smaller budget and in makeshift accommodation, I'm so jealous of the great setup at your dad's station.

[@josephmathiesen723]

TFW you see your own dad’s desk in the background of a video you subscribe to. Awesome video Jeff! Thanks for updating the station!

[@minerzcollective6755]

So awesome that you help out your dad too! You don’t see the big channels helping out their family members. Keep up the great work 👍

[@pkneeyahx]

Jeff Geerling to the rescue! Who knew Lindsay Graham had a radio station?

[@markv1027]

No Joe, you are not the only one that gets the pleasure of slow Windows updates. LOL! Awesome device, I will have to look into this for our operations. Oh great looking setup, hope to get over there some day and get a tour..

[@radijoe]

Any time you are passing through let me know!

[@User0000000000000004]

Don't look into it. It's junk.

[@xandercode]

Saw the video title so had to check it out. Ill be watching this space 😊 Look like your dad is adding some content which is cool. Learn more about the radio station all the best Alex

[@steamy7860]

Would love a tour of your dads radio station how it works/runs internet vs FM, really cool video!

[@MStrickkk]

Great Scott!

[@JeffGeerling]

Great KZbin channel!

[@tHe0nLyNeXuS]

Please make sure to disable EZConnect (if you have it enabled) until Asustor releases new firmware that is not vulnerable to the recently discovered vector for the Deadbolt ransomware.

[@GeerlingEngineering]

Don't worry; as mentioned in the video in the last segment, only the essential services are enabled. EZConnect and the other cloud services aren't enabled by default, so we left them off.

[@GReadyPrints]

So cool , you and your father make a great team 😎👍 one day ima set up one of these bad boys for myself 😉

[@henrik2117]

Your dad is a tech nerd, too! That's so cool! 😀

[@DaHaiZhu]

OMG: We used to drive halfway across the state to get a Ted Drews Frozen custard!!! YUM!!!

[@Radiovate]

Makes me miss my radio engineering days.

[@jorgemtds]

That's one lucky father!!! 😀

[@MStrickkk]

Always disable windows updates in every way possible and use WUMT to update it manually when you're ready for it.

[@accik]

Fantastic video again! Love this second channel :) Any plans for some PC upgrades or other server related?

[@GeerlingEngineering]

Yes! The plan is to make this into a series, as we get more things around the studio upgraded. Probably also a series on some of the existing equipment / locations (e.g. tower site, studio console system, etc.).

[@accik]

@@GeerlingEngineering Wow looking forward, thanks!

[@joeyjojojr.shabadoo915]

The best part about Windows updates is when you are the 'family technician' and the wife or mother-in-law (or mother) as YOU to fix or troubleshot their Notebooks and it's YOU that ends up having to sit through multiple reboot cycles as Windows updates, because they found a way to turn off auto reboots and a closed lid means the same thing as an OFF button to them.....

[@alexlandherr]

I have the very same setup in terms of individual drive capacity and number of drives.

[@davidbubble6863]

Floppotron ftw!

[@todddixon3778]

7:30, at our stations, I call that a “radio we”-we should do that-looking at the engineer.

[@mohixx117]

Gooooose bumps!!!

[@bdot02]

Careful who you buy your drives from, bought several Seagate drives from Newegg that turned out to be counterfeits. Just be sure to check the verification sticker.

[@GeerlingEngineering]

In this case, the drives were sent by Seagate directly, so we're confident in their source. But you make a good point; buy from reputable dealers!

[@richards7909]

Is there a Red Shirt Dad too? :D

[@Jimfowler82]

Great video. It’s like a before and after 30 year compassion 😉

[@SamOween]

For some reason youtube wouldn't open the link to this video from your other channel. Love your content as always!!

[@GeerlingEngineering]

D'oh! At least you got here regardless. Glad to see you here :)

[@SamOween]

@@GeerlingEngineering dad content is always the most wholesome

[@kevinshumaker3753]

1 caveat I see: You need some type of controlled access to the NAS that prevents malware encryption by a connected PC. Most malware today have no problem encrypting a share drive on an infected PC. Thus your comment at the beginning 0:45 having a NAS as your protection against ransomware may be useless if that storage gets encrypted by the ransomware. Edit: even with the blurb at the end, you have SMB sharing (and NFS?). The internal NAS protection protects the NAS itself from getting infected, but doesn't protect the share data from getting encrypted by another PC...

[@GeerlingEngineering]

To be clear, the NAS is not protection against malware-having a reliable backup system in place (with an offline backup) is the protection. If you assume that a client system will, at some point, get infected (which it likely will), then you plan for the fact that anything that computer can touch will also be infected.

[@kevinshumaker3753]

@@GeerlingEngineering Definitely adjust your backup system, too, to the amount of time/data you can afford to lose, then too. Whether it's a month, a week, a day, or an hour. (My last corporate position had hourly snapshot backups, going into a daily (7 day), weekly (4 week), then monthly (as much as they had storage for, varied) and tested the backups roughly quarterly (full restore to a backup system) as it doesn't do to have the backup system if you don't check that it's actually working... A previous employer had backups, until they had to try to recover data, and found 'oops'. My last employer had the quarterly test restores, better than nothing...

[@GeerlingEngineering]

Ha, once a quarter is about 4 times per year more than most businesses! Tape and other offline backups have saved many people's bacon. The time and materials required are well worth the pain prevention when something bad inevitably happens.

[@eDoc2020]

If you're running btrfs I suggest taking periodic snapshots at the filesystem level. There's probably a way to set this up automatically.

[@JeffGeerling]

@@eDoc2020 Indeed! The ADM software has an interface where you can schedule snapshots if using Btrfs.

[@vamwolf]

Interesting laptop dimm sticks

[@moofin4170]

You and your son have the same voice, it’s confusing to not see your mouths amd it’s so hilarious too

[@tanmaypanadi1414]

there is a slight difference . but yeah sometimes I had to guess who was speaking. 😎

[@ChickenPermissionOG]

I could never get both sides to screw in on rack.

[@grandprime7397]

🔥🔥🔥🔥

[@declanmcardle]

@6:30....Hmm, goes off to see if KZbin has a video of a C64 1541 making anti-piracy noises...

[@berndeckenfels]

Uh, where does a radio station store their media library on such small storage and hasn’t it to be HA? Or is that just the back office part?

[@JeffGeerling]

This particular station is mostly talk radio, so they don't need a massive song library.

[@sandmanxo]

Nice product and a good setup for a business. I just wish that Asustor or Synology would release an affordable 4 bay nas for home use. Why is it $400+ to get a crappy celeron, 4GB of ram, and only 1gbps ports in the case of Synology(I see Asustor offers 2.5gbps.) I'm just about to give up and just use an old i7 motherboard combo I have laying around. I lose the hot swap ability and use a bit more power with this but at least that frees up cash to buy some larger disks, as my 2 bay 4TB Raid 1 setup is full after backing up my and my wife's laptop after a few days.

[@GeerlingEngineering]

With the NAS vendors, you pay about 50-60% of the cost for the hardware, and the rest of the software and support. If you have the ability to DIY build a NAS, you can usually get the same or better performance for a lower cost. But these NAS units are geared more towards SMBs where they might not have full-time IT staff to manage storage, but they need a solution that works out of the box and takes minimal effort to maintain over the years. I do wonder why Synology hasn't gotten on board with the 2.5 Gbps ports yet-I wonder if they might want to jump straight to 10 Gbps? The thing is, for a lot of the SMB audience, their networks are currently 1 Gbps and they'd be more likely to upgrade to 2.5 Gbps sooner than 10G because they wouldn't have to rip out and replace all the cabling, and buy much more expensive switches and network gear!

[@sandmanxo]

@@GeerlingEngineering Thanks I never put that together. It's time to setup a TrueNAS machine

[@estusflask982]

@@GeerlingEngineering Cat5e can do 10Gbps at up to 80 feet

[@vamwolf]

@@estusflask982 if nic. Play nice

[@tht1kd]

For curiosity, does your dad's station still use a lot of storage? I know all the ones around me are all just iHeartRadio and just stream from headquarters. They got new switches but the only storage they need are local ads to insert into commercial breaks in the stream. (source: best friends dad used to work at them and let me see the equipment)

[@GeerlingEngineering]

These stations are a few of the ones that still produce local content, though much is streamed in through satellite as part of a network. iHeartRadio and Entercom/Audacy seem to be the two giant networks that control most any popular station, but there are still a dozen or so independent stations around any major metro area like STL.

[@xxcr4ckzzxx840]

Wouldn't Raid 6 be the better Option here ? Pretty sure the CPU can handle it just fine over a 1 Gbit/s Interface. Any 2 drives can fail then, while with RAID 10, you can practically only loose one disk at a time, because the second Hard drive that dies, has a 50/50 Chance to kill the entire Array.

[@fluffyfloof9267]

Oh boy, that is quite a price tag! (here in Germany) But you get what you pay for, i guess. My "home server" didn't come with a fancy web-GUI. If i want to get email alerts, i'd have to set up everything myself, nothing like pointing and clicking through the GUI. For my 4-bay HP/HPE MicroServer Gen10+, i paid ~300 Euros (the lowest spec Pentium Gold variant), pre-owned. I did the CPU upgrade to an i3 9100F, 32gig of ECC. But hey, i have full control over this tiny little box. It's got an Intel i350-T4 on-board, which is mostly passed through to my PF/OPNsense router VM. It runs my whole home network. It doesn't have hot-swap, though. (edit: it scrubs my Z1 pool like a champ, at ~650 MB/s)

[@GeerlingEngineering]

Yeah; I didn't talk too much about it in this video, but you basically pay more if buying a prebuilt NAS than you would building your own similarly-specced server (especially if you can buy similar parts used). The biggest difference with the prebuilt is the hardware and software support, which is more or less valuable depending on your appetite for DIY.

[@bingo475]

Have you done any videos on setting auto-backups to a NAS using a raspberry pi in the past and what software to use for it?

[@GeerlingEngineering]

Not any in particular but I typically use r sync for simple backups (eg entire directory to a NAS folder), or rclone to back up to cloud storage (I show how I do that in my backup video on the main channel linked in the description).

[@markwoll]

Now just get a 12tb usb 3 drive for a backup

[@dazzer529]

Not sure if it already exists ,but should do a tour of the IT equipment used to make a radio station work

[@JeffGeerling]

That's something we've been discussing. We might do a tour of a studio, rack tour, and tower site tour... we'll see!

[@dazzer529]

@@JeffGeerling well I would definitely watch that if they did get made

[@mogators]

That reminds me, I haven't been to Ted Drewes yet this year.

[@GeerlingEngineering]

Time to remedy that; this week temps will be up in the 70s (F)!

[@mogators]

@@GeerlingEngineering Made it there after bowling on Thursday.

[@NnetTucnak]

Is 16TB something cool? I have 16TB NAS just for movies at home since 2018.

[@adamstirk]

RAID 5 for drives over 2TB is not recommended, as another drive will fail before it rebuilds the RAID. In 20+ years in IT that’s the first time I’ve heard them called rack ears

[@abrambearth6890]

You comment about the term rack ears intrigued me. I have been working IT for 17+ years. But, I have heard them called rack ears. I am also about 30 miles away from a Tred Drews. Turns out I live and work "near" them. So maybe it's regional term. Then I thought hey just Google rack ears and the top results is seawater and guitar center. So seems like it is more common to call them rack ears on 19in rack audio equipment. And since they are at a radio station, I bet the have some experience with 19in rack mountable audio equipment. Kind of a funny term now that I think about it.

[@ASUSTOR_YT]

Hi there. This isn't true anymore...mostly. Today's drives come with higher than ever fault tolerances and RAID 5 and 6 work well with our partners' highest capacity drives. The rate to find an URE is now much much lower than it used to be.

[@timramich]

If you use drives that keep going and only simply "error out" on the bad sectors (real enterprise grade SAS drives), the chance of bad sectors being at the same location on two drives is astronomical. Make that 3 drives (RAID 6) and the chance is even lower. Such a thing would be found with scheduled scrubbing, and you'd replace the drive before it was ever close to outright failure (or have hot spares).

[@berndeckenfels]

I have the habit of only screwing in 3 screws for drives.. what do you guys do (not that it matters nowadays :)

[@didotb01]

yow nice T-shirt :p

[@tdeutsch]

Which one of your many Raspberry Pi NAS Video is featuring the details of this “my 48 terabyte all-SSD Raspberry Pi NAS”?

[@tdeutsch]

Must be this one: kzbin.info/www/bejne/fZDTqWVvba55aM0

[@JeffGeerling]

@@tdeutsch That's it! I meant to put a link to it in a card, will do that now. Thanks!

[@d00dEEE]

Come on, Asus! Toolless drive trays are a thing...

[@GeerlingEngineering]

(Jeff speaking) The Drivestor 4 Pro I have at home has toolless trays, and they have their benefits... however I prefer the models with screws for more permanent installations, mostly because I have concerns over the longevity of the toolless snap-fit mechanism if re-using it over a long period. But each has its benefits!

[@ASUSTOR_YT]

As Jeff mentioned, we do have toolless bays for our entry level and mid range NASes, but in an enterprise environment, we found nothing beats the quality and longevity of our metal trays.

[@estusflask982]

You look just like your dad lol

[@hmurchison8123]

Parity begone!! #Raid10Masterrace

[@DiyintheGhetto]

I have a question for the radio station. Does it broadcast locally on FM channels, online or both? and If online what do your father use to broadcast with?

[@JeffGeerling]

That's something we'll probably explore in future videos. This studio broadcasts through a variety of stations in the midwest, USA, mostly (both AM and FM), as well as online streaming.

[@DiyintheGhetto]

@@JeffGeerling nice…

[@GeoffereyEakinsTech]

Seems like overkill for 16TB lol

[@MarcoGPUtuber]

#sponsoredbyteddrewes

[@Tntdruid]

16 TB is not much :)

[@EvilModPixie]

Wait what? Atom CPU in a server? what in the heck?

[@EvilModPixie]

If you worry about fan noise you don't understand true servers... We have whatever it takes to cool what is in the chassi. Loud it is than lol

[@ASUSTOR_YT]

Hi there! These CPUs are designed for servers. Intel calls them Atom, but they are not the traditional netbook Atom CPUs you might be thinking of. These are 2-16 core SoCs that come with a wide range of server features including, but not limited to built-in Ethernet, ECC RAM and more. We think of them as energy-efficient Xeons.

[@kchiem]

I doubt rails are necessary for something that small.

[@GeerlingEngineering]

It's surprisingly heavy! without the rails, it could probably bend those single front screws. Deep 1U servers are always a little tricky.

[@ASUSTOR_YT]

@@GeerlingEngineering That's cause it's solid steel.

[@noble_lime]

Why didn't you use used server hardware instead of new, that would have been cheaper

[@tanmaypanadi1414]

sponsored video 🙂

[@acopernic]

A raid 5 is not the solution for backup. Raid 5+1 (or 10) is the solution

[@GeerlingEngineering]

Generally speaking, RAID is not a backup in any situation. But RAID 10 offers better resiliency and performance than RAID 5, while sacrificing half the storage. RAID 5 can give more space if you really need to preserve costs and want 3 or 4 hard drives, but it sacrifices performance (especially on writes) and (to a certain extent) longevity. And arguments can be made that multi-terabyte drives aren't a good fit for RAID 5 regardless (and to a certain extent RAID 6!).

[@redringofdeathgamer]

Honestly. I wont tell anyone. Are you... a clone?🤔

[@hairymongrell]

atom lost me. no plex transcode here.

[@ASUSTOR_YT]

These devices are not meant for Plex transcoding. Our Celeron ones are better for that!

[@pbrigham]

Never understood who the hell wants a Jet engine as storage, the son I heard dose fans you lost me, and please don't tell me is to be placed in a server room, I will never buy anything that noisy server room or not. I like ASUSTOR, but I will never buy this model that is for sure.

[@ASUSTOR_YT]

Hi! You can control the fan speed in the software!

[@GeerlingEngineering]

We also tested; and you can force it to low or hi, or auto. On auto, even during long file copies and the formatting process, it was never audible over the din of the other devices in our rack (especially that UPS on the bottom with its older fan).

[@pbrigham]

@@GeerlingEngineering Thanks for the info, I had already a bad experience with a NAS like this ( not ASUSTOR) where I had to spend a fortune on Noctua fans, in the end, I end up selling at a loss, I will not risk it again, however, I will take a look to other models of ASUSTOR as I m leaving ( Not buying again ) Synology because of the proprietary police they have now on the hard drives.

[@ASUSTOR_YT]

@@pbrigham Hi there! Feel free to ask questions if needed!

[@bigchew3149]

surely your not one of the fuw who dropped 20- 30+Grand on them stupid jellyfish/wallet fryers..ya know where ever thing is 25X Over priced & 40X Under Powered ! WoW i thought tech people were usually smart..lol.!