What Can a $60,000 Media Server Do?

[@kossler]

My first guess is that the $60,000 Media server can serve media.

[@snazzy]

*A genius, I say!*

[@HearMeLearn]

Common misconception actually

[@kossler]

@@i2Sage It's a joke bud. No need to be hostile lol.

[@kasperleusink2318]

I think you need do spend at least 10x more for those kinds of features 🧐

[@JohnLemieux]

What is it’s purpose? *To Serve Media*

[@bradenfitzpatrick]

I will always be in love with the university science lab vibe of your office. Absolutely chef’s kiss

[@snazzy]

We ain't gonna be a lab in name only!

[@MrPenntrack]

My 96 year old grandma's name is Margaret and my other (deceased) grandma's name is Doris. Now I know they'll both live on as servers. I feel entertained and educated! Thanks Snazzy!

[@snazzy]

Wow! What are the odds of that! They sound like lovely ladies.

[@thefreddit]

As a TrueNAS SCALE user on a custom box, I appreciate this kind of sponsorship. It’s a savvy publicity move and makes me more likely to buy their (prosumer series) products in the future.

[@vidyajamesu]

Videos like this are super useful, Quinn. I'm studying to become a sysadmin and this is exactly the kind of stuff I need to know! Gratz on the kickass new server!

[@snazzy]

You're already smarter than I am with this stuff, I'm sure! Certainly fun to play around and learn though!

[@SpaceDroplet]

Funny how a LTT films the servers so differently and has such a different level of experience with it. What a different perspective and in depth

[@Schykle]

This is the kind of content I did not expect, but am *VERY* grateful for and thrilled to see! Massive respect to iXsystems for hopping in on this and to you for pulling it all together and delivering this super informative content

[@blondiebxl]

I love it when Quinn gets crazy excited about things I not even understand half of. This machine looks perfect to store my document and holiday pictures on.

[@smalle]

It’s wild that I started watching this channel for audiophile things, and now here we are years later talking about TrueNas Enterprise servers, which I’m also interested in. Thanks for following my interests Snazzy, you da man!

[@snazzy]

And you for following mine! ;D

[@shanemshort]

it's important to note that the intent log is *not* a write cache. this is something a lot of people get wrong when referring to ZFS. the intent log exists weather you put it on a dedicated device or not, it's basically a journal for the writes occurring on the system.

[@FlaxTheSeedOne]

To further add, its only a journal for syncronous writes. As async ones get directly acknowledged.

[@Tecnoc22]

Looks like the NVDIMM is being used as a slog in this case? Not really familiar with how that works, but it is an interesting setup. I was watching to see how all the pools and caching would be done, but it wasn't really covered. Looks to me like the HDD pool is using 5 vdevs that are just two drive mirrors, with the two kioxia ssds mirrored as L2ARC and a single extra drive for a hot spare. SSD pool would be a 6 drive RAID-Z2, again with a hot spare.

[@photoscotty]

I just recently upgraded/replaced my main PC and got the idea to turn my old one into a NAS using TrueNAS scale. So far I'm incredibly happy with it and wish I had done so sooner! Right now I only have 11TB of storage, but I'll be growing that very soon.

[@photoscotty]

@@udance4ever i7-6700 (non K), 32 GB DDR4, Maximus Hero VIII mobo. Probably overbuilt for my purposes honestly. But it works great.

[@tanmaypanadi1414]

is it set up for redundancy? if so how much ?

[@LaczPro]

"It's really light" (and proceeds to get red because of the weight of the server). Man, this is so cool having server content on Snazzy Labs again. And this is just the beginning!

[@mightyhalo]

Yo, that's a pretty well made video! We were already considering a box like this for one of our deployments, and this is a lot of good info. Thanks!

[@JacksMacintosh]

Dude thank you so much for making this video. Seeing how easy it was to make a time machine got me to look into throwing truenas on an old PC in the basement, and seeing how easy things like setting up home assistant would be clinched it for me. In the process of learning the ins and outs now, but the system is up and running and so is the time machine. Thanks again!

[@mohamedezawi6815]

That’s the most breathtaking unboxing I’ve ever seen, literally 4:44

[@DivyangM]

Somebody watching this in future is like: Meh, my phone's memory is faster than that.

[@MattHalpain]

Super video ! Fun to see the hardware run the data in RAM for fast access and editing.

[@BillLambert]

I don't know if I'd call it a $60,000 server with those specs, but it's still very nice. I'm running a similar NAS based on Supermicro and AMD Epyc, and I probably spent around $15k. Of course, iXsystems stands behind the M40 whereas my support involves alcohol and four-letter words, but that's half the fun.

[@johnathanrice3569]

I built one for about 8000

[@Akshun82]

Have been using TrueNAS since it was FreeNAS. Still rocking CORE on one system and set my parents up with their own media server on SCALE. Super solid system and the support and community are amazing!

[@ben5676755]

Awesome! I actually have been thinking of building out a box from my old parts. Series like these would be super helpful.

[@muhammadazlanshah777]

Videos getting better and better!

[@eldibs]

I just rebuilt my TrueNAS server today to upgrade the motherboard and CPU and it was literally as easy as just swapping the hardware. I was debating trying out Unraid for a bit, but the ease of the platform upgrade completely sold me on sticking with TrueNAS. Also, DIMM is Dual In-line Memory Module.

[@13Cubed]

Nice - I use a TrueNAS Mini X+ with 128GB RAM + 10GbE for my production work. Great system, running TrueNAS Scale.

[@snazzy]

Sounds like it!

[@grimmsalem]

Just think of all the videos we could have by now if he just open up the box when he got it

[@snazzy]

😬

[@KushalPandya]

2:30 is such a beautiful frame, it is snowing outside, and there's a desk in the room with a beige monitor from the 90s, quite nostalgic.

[@Jaw0lf]

Amazing to see what a full server can do and great to see it in a normal(ish) situation.

[@pbales8951]

Even though I don't personally have a use for a server like this, I absolutely loved this video. So informative!

[@cornerliston]

“Instantly-after a few seconds.” Love that kind of logic.

[@haroldfong8758]

Good stuff, I don't think I'll ever need something this powerful but you are certainly giving me some new ideas for my next server.

[@jcreek23]

I've been using truenas scale for a while now and I still learned new things in this video!

[@romayojr]

i love truenas scale - im currently running my self-hosted nextcloud instance on a docker container via portainer running on ubuntu vm off of my truenas server and i've only scratched the surface. super excited to run more services on it!

[@callowaysutton]

I'm honestly very curious where they came up with the 60k figure from for just ~300TB. I was quoted ~50k for 1.5PB/1PB raw/redundant which included 4x4TB NVMe write-back and read caches, 90x18TB drives, 512GB RAM, and 2x Xeon Gold 6148s with 2x40GbE QSFP+ as well as 24/7 support. Considering raw costs would've been ~30k (22k for disks, 3k for nvme, 10k for server/CPUs/RAM/boot disk) for 3x the capacity and potential speed (SLOG pales in comparison to simple write back caches), that's some *very* expensive support coming from IX...

[@giornikitop5373]

i'm guessing the 60k is for a fully spec'ed system, which here of course it doesn;t need to be.

[@callowaysutton]

@@giornikitop5373 Nah higher specs than the 60k version were mentioned iirc

[@bikerchrisukk]

Good stuff 👍 I've been using TrueNAS for a few years now for personal and business. I'm glad I did, but it has to be said the learning curve is the opposite of Synology (mainly assumed, little experience with them). Well worth it though, really like being able to transition data to almost any other machine (via replication) and we're not locked into specific hardware. For anyone new to it, I would strongly recommend installing it on almost any machine, throw some low capacity HDD's at it and see how you get on with disposable data.

[@Random_Ting]

truenas sending you that is the equivalent of fiio sending dankpods products

[@mistakek]

How awesome of IX Systems. I've been using TrueNas scale (installed on an old Qnap, cause they suck at security so bye to their OS) to backup my Synology. TrueNas really is a great NAS OS.

[@TheRealLink]

Snazzy, you addressed a pretty complicated topic in a great, down to Earth, easy to understand fashion! Thanks for showing a dive into the server space and TrueNAS without having to go through lots of hoops and such!

[@snazzy]

Thanks!!

[@philarmishaw3730]

I switched from Unraid to Truenas Scale 6 months ago. The difference in speed is incredible!

[@natec1]

Do you have ECC memory?

[@philarmishaw3730]

Yes

[@natec1]

@@philarmishaw3730 I see. That’s the only thing holding me back from going the truenas route. I don’t have any server-specific builds, so I never had a need for ECC. I might invest in it now tho

[@philarmishaw3730]

I use an old Dell r420 server which are cheap and so is ECC ddr3 memory. I made my own disc shelf which is quiet and efficient. Including 8 HD it runs on just over 100 watts

[@natec1]

@@philarmishaw3730 Oh cool. That's good to know. I was thinking about getting some old server hardware, but I've never looked into it. I'll definitely look into that stuff now.

[@notahandle109]

I am using TrueNas Scale these days... in my little townhouse as a home user without even a business... I love the speed.. and I share your ethusiasm

[@antoniomdavis367491]

Why does this feel and sound like a episode of this old house!? I love it!

[@julian.morgan]

I'm really looking forward to watching more TrueNAS content. I've been using unRAID for the last few years and that was entirely because I stumbled across the SpaceInvaderOne YT channel back in 2017, without which I'd have fallen at the first hurdle. Ed who runs that channel is IMO an exceptionally gifted educator in that he excels at conveying not just how to do things in a well planned and organised manner, that's easy enough to follow along with, but he then also explains WHY it makes sense to do things this way. Perhaps most importantly, he rarely if ever assumes much knowledge. Starting from first principles and working upwards is another way to say the same thing. It also means that most of his videos are still a very useful resource many years later. My point is that I think Quinn has a very similar skill set in terms of conveying quite complex information in an accessible manner, and only finding an educational resource for TrueNAS that parallels what's available from Ed for unRAID is likely to give me the confidence to switch to anything else for my home server. That said, the ease and simplcity with which Time Machine backups were done in this video was a real eye opener. I'd really like to see how access to that back up works in real life - because having a theoretical back up is NOT the same as the back up being recoverable in the event of a critical failure IME.

[@vidx9]

Looking at those speeds is so satisfying

[@TechnoTim]

Great video Quinn! Great server too!

[@zerofox3d]

I remember buying Prince of Persia 2, came on 14 floppy disks. Had to archive all of my Dad’s work files to floppy just to be able to install it on the 40MB hard drive 😂

[@tanmaypanadi1414]

some how i forgot I did the same.

[@giornikitop5373]

if memory serves, pop2 was no more than ~6MB, i'm guessing your talking about the dos version, so 14 disks seems a lot more, it would have been more like 4 or 5.

[@zerofox3d]

@@giornikitop5373 I’m 99% sure it was the Mac boxed version but the floppies may have been hybrid format for PC/Mac. I remember because I was looking at PC games in an old HMV store in the UK (mid 90s) and saw a Mac logo on the box in the middle of all these PC games.

[@JimWattsHereNow]

Great one Quin, looking forward to this series.

[@snazzy]

Thanks!!

[@JacobCothren]

Love that Quinn uses the purple iMac

[@SenZubEanS]

sat there in a box for a year.... dear god.... That's just not right! (cries in old repurposed hardware for server)

[@randomdadpnw]

IXSystems is great. Used them in production at a few startups as well at home. For home I have a 2014 FreeNAS Mini that still works great and a 2022 TrueNAS Mini XL+. The Mini line is priced right for Pro home user. Simpler then rolling your own.

[@snazzy]

Agreed. Lots of value there.

[@TadanoHitohito]

I've been using TrueNAS Core and Scale for about two years now. Aside from having to rescue and rebuild a ZFS pool a few months back (my fault for using non-ECC RAM and no redundancy), I've had no problems. It's rock solid and it works.

[@will16320]

Don't underplay it, reliable IT is so important at a Media company - what a fantastic piece of kit to be sent!

[@jondonnelly3]

It's amazing kit no doubt, but it's also has the problems the enterprise gear he had before has. It's still mechanical storage and enterprise server gear, so it's going to be loud.

[@ariffinsetya]

Just build my truenas scale using off the shelf, ryzen and ecc support basically works really well. The iGPU on ryzen 4000G series is enough for jellyfin, even multiple stream down transcode from 1080p even 4k to 480p. Really satisfied with it, ans it works really well without any hassle really for my first time just reading level1tech and read some guide in the web.

[@Mixi1]

Yay, TrueNAS video, awesome!

[@sydtsai]

I really love how the Syno server does have the same feature set for neat tiny black box.

[@mitchellsmith4601]

I’ve had TrueNAS Scale running on an iMac connected to an eight bay OWC Thunderbolt array for six months without a hiccup. ZFS is fantastic.

[@torsten9983]

I am exited for the new videos. I would like to see how a self build system handle the footage and premiere projects like in this video.

[@snazzy]

It's coming!

[@justanotherhuman-d6l]

But what happens when your Gold License expire? Do you loose HA? Updates? How much is Gold for this device per year/renewal period?

[@allencevans]

Would it be safe to assume that although the server has been sat there a year since May 2022, that, given the snow falling, this wasn't filmed May 2023?

[@snazzy]

It sat until about November and we've been filming bits and pieces of this video since then haha

[@costafilh0]

So you replaced a loud server with another loud server? Nice! At least it was "free"!

[@gregneumarke9373]

I was hoping to hear how loud it was. Where did you put it? Is is quieter than the old one?

[@Viviolau]

Dang, kudos to the sponser. Sending stuff just for the love of teaching - amazing.

[@gnomesteel]

Can confirm. I'm a subscriber, but also in the market for a similar system, and I already know about iXsystems.

[@RobSnyder]

Waiting on my 75,000 dollar server from IX. I even saw my presales engineer in the intro.

[@snazzy]

Hahaha that’s awesome. You’ll love it!

[@Yitz42]

Did it hurt anyone else when he scratched his desk turning the server around?

[@neccros007]

You never talked about the read cache. Was waiting to see if I should run it on my own truenas box.

[@MyReviews_karkan]

And I'm out here bragging about my two bay Synology NAS 😂

[@StartUsingYourBrain]

Ix systems rocks we just recently purchased an R50 with 360 terabytes, w/5yrs dmr, of raw storage for $40k to be used as a Veeam repository. The best other competitive price was twice that much and most of the main manufacturers were three times that. They come with Rock solid supermicro motherboards. You can't touch this with any other manufacturer the throughput is phenomenal I don't see how anyone could go wrong.. the only potential downside is that it's a bigger server than you might be accustomed to sticks 1-inch out of the front and back of a standard rack, like snazzy says it's heavy get some help rack in it.

[@TheInternetwatcher]

I really have no idea why I enjoy watching videos about servers but I do.

[@zigglershow5383]

Damn this server is beautiful!

[@h.b.5577]

Dream setup right here, truenas zfs server, first party one from ixsystems no less, plus lto tape backups is really the way to go.

[@dmug]

I like seeing other people’s getups who actually do this professionally. At some point I’ll have to make the jump to a NAS. Right now I just have a usbc Synology with about 40+ TBs connected to my Mac Pro

[@BenjaminPfammatter]

Can you do a guide to set up a server nas vor a home setup and which hardware to use?

[@not_salt_typhoon]

Point of correction. The SLOG is not a write cache and the NVDIMM-N flushes to the internal NAND on the DIMM not to a seperate SSD on power failure or kernel panick.

[@cinobro6393]

Love the transparency!

[@MrKillswitch88]

The boot ssd is only worth around $25 or so as 256gb nvme drives can sometimes be had for less than $20 used while the 1TB U.2 used isn't worth a lot either while the rest of the drives both new and used are still kinda pricey. Kinda wish that laptops could use U.2 as some are pretty cheap for the capacity up to 4TB being cheaper than some consumer drives at times. I do like using sever grade SSDs as I won't have to worry as much due to the higher build quality and much better TBW/DWPD vs consumer drives.

[@TechfulThinking]

How long ago did you make the unboxing portion?? It’s snowing outside 😂

[@finn51189]

what software were you using to steam the mac minis screen? 15:58

[@PixelVogue]

Aww look at baby face Snazzy, now SnazzyBeard 😂

[@KannonRomano]

Ok that zfs file transfer test is a cool demonstration of RAM cache

[@kungfujesus06]

That caching might also likely be client side. The zfs arc by default is pretty scan resistant and for the most part a giant sequential read won't force the file to be arc resident. Now there are tunables to make that not the case, but I don't think that's what you're seeing there.

[@imm311]

Excellent content! God bless you and yours! Praying for you!

[@BertPdeboy]

i liked the component overview! capacitor backed RAM is new to me. too bad you didn't go deeper into the pool configurations to make optimal use of each component. or do all components just work out of the box because the machine is assembled by IX?

[@BelaPa]

Thank you for the presentation! I was wondering if Spotlight Search works properly for you on that server? And if so how did you get it working?

[@dragonheadthing]

10:56 I'd love to learn more about this server-connecting controller and how it works.

[@udance4ever]

yeah me too! this was really eye opening to peek into server system architecture!

[@wclifton968gameplaystutorials]

Are you going to do a video on how to install TrueNAS or FreeBSD from start to finish to complement this video?

[@cinebenjamin]

Yes. :)

[@mrmotofy]

There's already tons of em

[@funnyent]

Great video as always. Very cool machine!

[@ThatBulgarian]

"We want to send you a 60k server so that you can be a marketing agent for a free product" brilliant

[@TheLionManOnline]

Is this really $60,000? I would have guessed closer to $15,000

[@tanmaypanadi1414]

it was sent back in 2022 and IX Systems support price is probably added over on top.

[@utilitarian]

Sat here watching this when my own WD MyCloud confuses the hell out of me.

[@madrat5176]

You have the David Letterman thing going 🧔‍♂️

[@g.s.3389]

a great piece of server. what about power consumption? did you measure it?

[@hujth6]

suuuuuppper interesting, and i dont event have a backup drive 🤦‍♂

[@TheTrulyInsane]

That is one heck of a gift from them! They haven't even done that for Linus, someone loves you! Not me, I hate you, I hate you for eternity for getting this system lol

[@YasinHasan]

can u install a GPU & game on it?

[@CNormanHocker]

If TrueNAS/iXsystems is like that, then, if ever the opportunity presents itself, I will be looking in to it.

[@joeykeilholz925]

TrueNAS goated man... Love em

[@eurodj101]

Been using truenas for a while, on my home built has using an itx celaron cpu mono and hot swap case, been loving it, have some older qnaps which are easier to setup per day but nowhere near the performance

[@Z4KIUS]

the read cache is pretty hard to populate automatically, putting specific file types or sizes on the fastest tier may work better than trying to guess what you'll read, though probably for editing-off-NAS picking by date works well enough?

[@KokoDonchev]

5:42 Thank for the informative video Dr. Doofenshmirtz! (To whoever gets the reference)

[@djvidual8288]

I love NAS projects.

[@tawharanui5011]

Lol, that is like back to year 2000. Reminds me of XServe. A real Margret :)

[@Scarlaxx2]

I wanted to see some server performance but instead you just tested throughput of your network connection to the server. I'd like to see some performance tests done on the Doris server so that I can use it for my server comparison. The configs are similar, I just use little faster disks but not the NVDIM.

[@Petairelevrai]

190Gb is not really big for RAW 4K files though, it's going to swap constantly