Correction for around 12:35: NetApp RAID is actually entirely software based. The RAM stick shown IS a write cache with a battery to keep data in memory in the event of a power failure, but it is used by the software RAID implementation, not a RAID card. Separately, while the seller we purchased this from used it in a SAN configuration (iSCSI for VM storage disks), these NetApp setups are referred to as "Storage Appliances" and can be configured for both NAS and SAN protocols.
@@dliratx You are correct in that it uses WAFL and the performance is better with it but you are wrong with the power outage aspect. Power outage protection for NVRAM. (non volatile RAM) is battery backed which is called the NVMEM battery. Combined with WAFL for speed, NETAPP doesn't actually commit a write to disk when the OS tells it to, same for deletes. Its stored in this NVRAM until 1 of 2 conditions is met. Either every 10 seconds, or when the NVRAM fills to 50%. Its then flushed to disk. The cache is set up into 2 sections. Each = 50% of the total NVRAM. Lets say that NVRAM size is 2Gb then it splits that into 2 sections by 50%. So there is always 2 cache banks at any given time. Due to this delay in commits to Any data in in this NVRAM when a power outage occurs, MIND YOU one that affects the data center to kill the UPS power also, then that data sitting in RAM is backed up by this redundant battery that direct attaches to the PCI lanes of the NVRAM slots. In fact it is plugged in right next to the NVRAM banks. Usually first 2 banks in a controller head. WAFL does nothing for protection. It stand for Write Anywhere File Layout. Combined with speed for writes, it makes better use of disk sectors and block sizes. If there is a bad section, Data ONTAP (NetApp's OS) can ignore that block and still write the file. Where tradition RAID would either fail that drive or have an inconsistency in the data as it wants to stripe to the next block in line not the next "available" block. It also extends the life of a drive for just a bad or failed sector of one platter on the drive.
It’s not often you find a negotiation where one side is thinking “are we basically stealing from them” while the other is thinking “I’m just not going to question why they are doubling our asking price”
@@Doso777especially as they are at the end of their lease. Getting rid of it quicker might save them potential extra fees and they get something back that can be allocated for fixing the building before handing it back etc
i met hardware brokers who buy these and sell the disks to corporate customers who cant buy older model disks anymore or just prefer the prices they said they made quite allot
this video is just two guys looking for white Castle and on the way they are going to buy a server because, why not! it was only 5000! .....seriously, the ravages of pot in canada man .. 😂
Don't know if this has anything to do with Linus stepping down as CEO, but the recent videos have a way more loose and goblin-energy vibe to them. Love to see it!
I'm sure it is related probably because a huge burden has been lifted off his shoulders so he can focus on tech and content and hopefully fit his family in there somewhere too
This needs a sequel! A buy like this isn't unattainable for us normal folks, so seeing what you can do with just this hardware would be really interesting!
I want an American Pickers type series where Linus and Jake(or mix it up!) do things exactly like this. I'd also like to see Linus visiting some of the more historic tech related sites and things like that.
This is what peak LTT content looks like, it has everything like great info, energy, enthusiasm, real world application. Couldn't help but laugh at the total budget thing at the end. Wish we could have a series where you buy off some of this gems to get your money's worth back. Or scrapyard wars, I'd be willing to settle down with scrapyard wars instead. Also huge shot out to the iPhone camera, that little bugger behaved like a champ IMO.
I was wondering why the shots looked washed out and flat. It looks like it changed between 4:13 and 4:15 though; I wonder if that's when they switched to their main camera.
@@Malicious2013 Hmm, sounds like a Tech Pickers Challenge. Give each pair of contestants a budget and have them roam around a state looking for tech being sold that they can resale or someone can appraise afterwards. Highest appraised value wins.
Same. I was the disk swapper guy that swapped your drives. (And troubleshooted things when things went horribly wrong, very infrequently. When I wore this hat, I was basically the sysadmin's sysadmin. Kind of cool.) My boss was literally a computer system that told me where to drive out and go to work that morning. 😆 We were cogs in the machine and kept the gears of corporate giants oiled. It was an awesome job, but kind of thankless.
I mean, basically, they were hoping someone was going to buy it and take it off their hands because if someone didn't, they were going to have to PAY an eWaste company to come and do that, so I guarantee their company actually made out in general, still Linus bringing swag is still pretty cool of him.
@@scottbitz5222 Fair but they also could have parted it out and sold it all for more, I think they just wanted rid of it and got their ROI back from the 11 years of service it performed.
@@kelmanl4 Most of that is disk shelf only. Harder to part out old storage tech with no controller like that and on such high end equipment that is no longer supported or find parts. NetApp holds their parts very close in house. hard to get them 3rd hand without buying them from company selling off old hardware such as this. On top of that, they were low end disk shelves to boot. Only 3Gb bandwidth on the SAS connectors and while 24 disks shelves, only 600GB 15k RPM drives. Great drives but very dated. DS4243 = 4 U 24 disk shelf 3Gb SAS connector
Speaking as a NetApp specialist, I almost shat myself when Linus pulled the controller out of the rack by himself. Hint - there are folded handles either side of the chassis - use them (along with a second pair of hands). Congratulations of your purchase, may it give you many years of faithful service (and at least one month of lost sleep when it shits the bed).
Something that old should not even be switched on. OnTap will be so out of date and updates will be lacking now. We've just gotten rid a of a 3240 last year and our 2520 is now out of support. NTLM bug is going to kill us!
@@mikem3271 I doubt Linus or LMG will be using OnTap or the NetApp specific features on those legacy disk shelves like the ACP ports (With ACP being in-band with SAS from OnTap 9). From what I know, both the controller and Diskshelf featured are EOL, which is why it was probably so cheap.
I just want to thank the owners of the hardware who accepted a real low ball offer and then had to stand around for an hour or more. Just for us all to get a rundown/tutorial on the equipment. Also shout out to the Fab Rats swag on one of the owners hats. 18:40
At the end of the video Linus says the listing was actually supposed to be $500, not $5,000. So Linus offering $1,000 wasn't exactly a low ball from the seller's perspective all things considered.
@@OGPatriot03 yeah and given he's never featured one on the channel before, I think the way he presented himself lowballing is how it feels to get that content
Besides getting a better price than meant to this is a form of networking. They might have no intentions of working together but sharing knowledge can be extremely useful.
As an admin for multiple 32Gb Fibre Channel SANs with brocade switches and IBM Storage this is a good explantion for why a SAN only makes sense for bigger operations. We changed from the "layer" approach with multiple different storage devices (Flash, HDD, Tape...) to just everything NVMe since NVMe storage got really cheap in the last years and the maintenance contracts for the older HDD devices got exponentially more expensive.
@@EmeraldWitch I think he means using SAN storage units based on NVMe (flashcards), rather than multi tier storage units with SSD/fast/archive class storage that requires constant balancing. In the past 10 years I've seen our company go from storage units of 3000+KG to 30 KG units that store more and and are way way faster (sub ms response times).
@@aragnut6180 Yeah you are right. Currently we use IBM Flashsystems in a Hyperswap configuration with 4 Controllers. So even if a whole datacenter goes down, not a Single Client will go down with it. It just loses 4 of 8 paths to its storage
@@eco909 the Fs9500 units? You must have a pretty good low latency line between your sites to have sync mirrors (and not too much distance). We're currently using async as the round trip is about 20 ms (oh boy does performance suffer if you accidentally set it to sync mirror)
As a storage engineer this video was a blast :) It looks like a great deal, but consider power consumption. I recently replaced 2 similar storages around 70TB each, with 1U IBM FlashSystem 5200. Old storage needed 2800W, and new one is only 300W :)
I used to work for IBM and we had moved some of our DBAs highest usage DBs off of XIV Gen3 and StorWize 7000's to multiple FlashSystems (Thanks SVC!). The DBAs still complained that it was 'too slow' and 'customers were complaining'. I told them that if being on nvme flash and 32Gbit FC was too slow for the customers, the issue isn't the storage, it's the application and DB architecture. Nothing I can do about that as this is literally the fastest (at the time in 2016) shared storage that exists. They didn't like that answer.
@@WhiteG60 Or the partitioning and queries. An unpartitioned (aka full table) search of a larger table for whatever criteria can mean reading hundreds of gigabytes of data.
Small mistake at 9:27 : iSCSI *does* run over TCP/IP (the i stands for internet). To be fair though, there are non-TCP/IP protocols that are commonly used for SANs, such as Fibre Channel.
One my systems still has a Fibre Channel controller in it...I just don't have anything to connect it to anymore: I used to have Sun StorEdge A5200 which, while cool to have, was ridiculous on power usage and has the same "the discs are eye wateringly expensive and you can't even get that much capacity out of it" problem as the SAN in the video. (I think the A5200 could take a maximum of 22 x 300 GiB discs. And that would probably cost you over £3,500, which is not a great price for 6.6 TiB...)
Likewise, the performance limitations of SMB don't come from running over TCP/IP. It's from limitations in what SMB lets you do, e.g. resulting in having to do many more protocol transactions than to do the same thing in other remote filesystem protocols e.g., NFS.
@@TOT3m1c SMBv3 introduced a lot of improvements, iirc. Although the file copy performed by SHFileOperation - which is what you're effectively using if you drag and drop files in File Explorer - is crap at actually taking advantage of them. Which is why people end up using robocopy for doing batch copies over the network (largely because it can actually take advantage of the multichannel capabilities by using multiple copy threads).
I know they are harder and more time consuming to make, but I love these IRL content videos. Finding deals on sites like FB marketplace and Craigslist are so enjoyable to watch and be inspired from, hopefully we can see more in the future
These jbods were probably made by Xyratex, before they were bought by Seagate. The company I work for uses the same hardware line in our product. If you want to use them with SATA drives you want to be aware that only the bottom controller slot will be connected to the drives. For both slots to work, you need the dual port SAS drives.
They are Engenio storage which was LSI then NetApp. Rebadged by Dell as Md3xxx, IBM as DS4xxx, DS5xxx and some others. That one would probably not accept SATA drives, and even if it did you would use interposers that turn them into SAS drives.
@@jonathanbuzzard1376 Yup, used to manage some IBM DS SANs. They would only accept branded drives, and if SATA they required the use of an interposer. The Dell branded ones I know had someone reverse engineer license files to unlock features, but not sure about the other rebadged units.
@@jonathanbuzzard1376 We had a IBM DS35xx series SAN. Thing won't accept anything but certain IBM labeled drives no matter what. Some of those are NL-SAS but not SATA.
I worked in Xyratex in the UK in Engineering NPI area until they laid us all off in 2016, I stayed until 2017 to finished the clearing out of the site. Those probably made in Sacramento site if 2012 it gradually moved to Mexico in 2014/15. Had good memories of the people I worked with and still keep in touch with a few.
@@ShhTime Nah, I recall him saying on stream that he just wanted to purchase a certain GPU that he found on marketplace, and that he was so excited to get a good deal on it that he wanted to reconsider bringing scrapyard wars back. Therefore, it's clearly not coming back yet. IMO, they should hold a scrapyard wars but without Linus, or at most give him a teammate who isn't well-known at all to call sellers and pick up the goods.
Data center wars. The spiritual successor of scrapyard wars. Where Linus and co. Go around buying discount servers in attempt to make scrapyard Google.
Yes please! The enterprise market is way more diverse IMO, and there's a lot of variability in the offers. It's also not just about finding/negotiating the best deal, but also getting all the obscure platforms that can be had for cheap working together.
This just makes me want a scrapyard wars server edition. Just find two small business' that need some IT infrastructure upgrade and send two teams after them. Linus/Anthony vs Luke/Jake.
@@Adowrath oh whoaI was wonder about the recent absence. I had to look up what you meant as at first, I assumed there was some newly spawned solo ASMR channel stealing her away! Looking forward to her return to spotlight when she feels ready. Retro gaming wouldn't be the same without her.
@@Thurgosh_OG Emily took a bit of a behind-the-camera role as she was going through realizing she is transgender - Anthony's the "deadname" so-to-speak.
I know this video was not necessarily "up to standard" in terms of video quality but I would actually love to see more run and gun style videos like this. It managed to still be informative and interesting while being incredibly entertaining, natural and fresh.
I'm sure this was honestly entirely impromptu, but I love the old feel of just, "Go, go, go!" but with everything Linus has learned over the years. Hoping to see more stuff like this as Linus gets more "freedom"!
he likely had traffic assist (I dont know the precise name for Porsche, VAG uses different one for each brand) on, which is just ACC with lane assist and side assist, but still should have paid more attention to the road.
My buddy's dad used to do this and scared the crap out of me. He was one of these people who couldn't talk to you without looking at you, so if you were in the back seat he'd turn around and be talking away while you could see all the things in front that he should be paying attention to.
I spent about 6 years looking after 2 of these in clusters (FAS3220). They were amazing when working but absolutely petrifying if they went wrong! I nursed ours into retirement in 2021 where most of the volumes were starting to suffer with ‘WAFL’ errors that couldn’t be repaired. You guys are definitely going to have some fun trying to get these running again. Just a tip these are likely using ‘cluster mode’ as opposed to ‘7 mode’ due to their age. If I remember correctly these use different commands. You might also struggle getting hold of the software these days too so definitely recommend getting the root account from the previous owners. Good luck!
The current company I work for started with about 10 people in a very small office and seeing the random cable thread across the ceiling and over the exit sign for the wifi brings back so many amazing memories....this video is fantastic, on so many different levels
That last bit with the value breakdowns, totally gave me Scrapyard Wars vibes! So glad you're considering bringing it back, honestly my ultimate favourite series in the entire history of LTT!!!
Worked in a data center for over 10 years, this brings back so many memories of SAN upgrades. All I can say is those shelves filled with hard drives are HEAVY! I would love to get my hands on one of those shelves for my home lab.
HAHA that's the perfect 'motivation' info. 4 N E actor trying 2 emulate him =)) He should do spoof videos where he gets all excited about a piece of toast or a new pet rock =D
This was so cool to see. LTT has many great videos about their own server implementations, but those are necessarily specific to their circumstances. They also have many great data centre videos. But seeing how other small (no that LTT is "small" anymore) companies deploy enterprise hardware is really amazing.
My favorite thing about this video is that they filmed it on an iPhone =D They should get an iPhone X (10) & set it to 720p with the 'HDR' thing & use that 4 all of their videos on all of their channels = will speed up their 'workflow', save them milions in equipment they don't need & make their whole production way more portable. The absurd #FailTrain of some random short fat ugly 'migrant' clown wearing a gigantic trash pile of super-over-priced krap, & STILL shaking the frames around like a drunken fly reveal the irrationality of Linus himself & his 'spec-chasing fetish' =)) "Woo we're shooting our RUclips content in 12K now (or whatever, literally), as if N E 1 will care if they went 720p on it all = LOL 2 the human eye there is no point going past about 1100 pixels wide, as more than that looks LESS realistic (if it's not noisy blocky jaggy fake res) as 'overly sharpened synthetic' vibe rather than 'smooth' (but not blurry) feel, & if U R so 'up close' that U notice 'pixelation' most of the thing is out of your center of vision so don't notice it much N E way so should just bak tha fuk up. I've done testing on this & 1100 wide looks no worse than 4K, & U can test this by playing back 4K videos downloaded from JooToob resampled to 1100 pixels wide in your player = not 'blurry' or 'unrealistic' by comparison at all. Everything over 720p is just meaningless bull$hit, unless it is a case where U R trying 2 get around 'fake resolution nonsense' like joo toob where the 1080p only has about the real res of a dual layer (7GB or so) DVD, & the 4K is about the same as 1080p Blu-ray. All this 'video stuff' is very relevant because the whole reason this & other channels by this guy have such 'fancy equipment' is 2 try & jack their numbers, all of which R ignored by JooToob when they crush the krap out of their videos = pointless =)) What would make sense (maybe) is upsample the 720p to 4K when uploading, then delete it from local storage, as it would just B a way 2 try & get them 2 down-sample better 2 720p. iNotice jootoob videos where 4K versions R available look better than ones where the max available is 1080p, but no matter what the res on this site, it's always a couple steps lower in quality than it says it is =)) Another thing that helps is make sure there is plenty of light so not a lot of 'shadow gradients', as those tend 2 get a lot of 'banding', & also 2 avoid moving the camera around a lot, especially in complex environments like a forest scene full of branches of many complex patterns = takes more 'codec room' 2 store, so less left 4 the person doing the 'action', etc. Their idiotic 'tech quickie' stuff with a blank background is super lame though = should put nice scenery behind, like still or gently slow scenes like a tropical beach or whatever =) Also, have people wear real clothes instead of sweats & T-Shirts = fux sake. & make them do proper grooming, not greasy hair & stubble LOL
Honestly, LTT could EASILY make a series about getting cheap tech from work-from-home transitions. I doubt there aren't many other companies who would give tech for free, if it meant a chance to have their name mentioned in an LTT video, or to have their logo in the video, even if only for a few seconds randomly.
If you're looking for a good ergo chair, there's probably a used office furniture store near you that has used Herman Miller and Steelcase chairs for dirt cheap.
Like FireFly Software just did. The issue with selling corporate assets like that you need to make sure they are really clean of data and settings that are related to your network. You know the things that are unlikely to change when you move stuff to somebody else's drives.
@@RowanHawkins True. But, with LTT, who are professionals in this field, you can at least know that they will make sure to scrub everything leftover, if you forgot any of it.
@@Default78334 Unfortunately the reverse also became true too, I was in the market for a new ergo chair to replace my aging "gaming" chair that was giving me back problems, and suddenly everything was crazy expensive because everyone was buying new chairs for their work-at-home offices. Granted, the price hikes were for new stuff, just might still be a bit rough finding used ones that haven't been grabbed up by others with the same idea.
It really is more than just about the connection when it comes to NAS vs SAN. Because of the fundamental idea that a SAN is a distributed block level storage solution, it can be configured in ways that a NAS cannot. For instance, you can have multiple storage cabinets distributed across multiple physical sites (let's say in all of LMG's offices/labs and Linus' house). You could theoretically create a single block level device that uses physical storage located in all of those different physical locations. The SAN controller will present that as a single device to the connected guest. You can't do anything like that with NAS unless you have other underlying software doing that work before the NAS is presented with the storage. This is why a SAN is a Storage Area Network. It's a network made entirely for storage. Contrast to a NAS, a Network Attached Storage, which is a storage device (or devices) that are attached to an existing data network.
The similarity between NAS and SAN in terms of lettering is probably best avoided for educational purposes. Better to compare SAN with LAN/WAN/etc. A local area network, a wide area network and a storage area network. The acronyms are more related, as are the concepts.
eh. I can think of NAS systems that can be distributed over multiple sites and machines "transparently" to the user. gluster, for example. CEPH probably can too, but I've never read any of it's docs. It's been a while, but I think with effort you can do it with Isilon. NFSv4, using pNFS extensions, can have your metadata separated from file data across multiple servers. Not necessarily supported by all NFS servers though. Bell Lab's Plan9 9P protocol was able to do distributed filesystems back in the mid 80s. 9P is basically a distributed object store, with very little tying it to disk, iirc. The Andrew File System, as part of the Andrew Project, started in 1982. (AFS heavily influenced 9P, then later CIFS and NFS, as I understand it) The truth is, a lot of computing technology is little more than abstraction and virtualisation of simpler predecessors. Bare metal, partitioning, multi-tasking, containers, and VMs are all the same thing, with added manageability and complexity. Same thing with storage.
@@RichardBetel The real problem with comparing a NAS to a SAN, is the fact that the terms are describing unlike things. A NAS is a type of device, a device which can be used for any number of other things. What you call a NAS today, may be called a media server tomorrow (or perhaps something else), depending on its primary purpose. A SAN on the other hand, is a form of network. While it's often used to describe devices devoted to being a part of said network, it doesn't technically describe the device per se. Indeed, any device could be a part of a SAN, perhaps even a NAS.
@@RichardBetel I agree. There are NAS technologies that can be distributed but there's a bit of a difference between distributing a NAS solution and building a storage solution on top of a distributed block level network. The issue is that most of the distributable technologies used in a NAS can be considered parts of layers 5 - 7 (7 being SMB, NFS, etc). SAN lives much lower, between layers 1 - 4. A good example of how that might translate to a 'real-world' example is a SAN RAID configuration. Imagine you have 4 disks. Each disk is located in a different geographic location and a file server in another location. With SAN, you can configure a RAID 0 volume using all 4 of those disks as members of the RAID. Then you can present that RAID volume as a "physical" device to the file server and then share it using whatever layer 7 protocols you want. This is all possible because a SAN is capable of using networks to connect low level physical devices to a controller that converts them into a volume for use by a filesystem. It's like connecting a bunch of SATA drives to a computer but instead of using SATA cables you use the LAN in your house because each drive is located in a different room and the computer that they are connected to is in the living room. This is a stark difference to a distributed NAS. In the case of a NAS, you would have to create NAS clusters (comprised of drives and NAS software) in each geographic location and use software to virtually combine those clusters into 1 logical unit (or however many units you want). You don't have access to the lower level devices and they can't be presented to the filesystem as a lower level device. The use cases of each depends on the needs of the implementation, of course.
In the school district I work in, we just replaced our 7 year old SAN that was comprised of 5-10u storage cabinets, one at each building, depending on the size. Now, the new SAN is almost double the capacity and more centralized. We have a 4u storage cabinet and a 2u controller on our main campus and an identical setup at our furthest away building as a back up. This has and will make our maintenance so much easier and straight forward whenever something goes wrong.
I've been working with NetApp FAS for over 15 years, this i s a pretty old cluster, but still fun to play with... Their new stuff is all flash and just as dense as anything else out there.
12:30 - Almost. The system doesn't have a RAID card; the system itself is a giant and very smart RAID card. And yes, it has the RAM of an x86 system on battery backup, which is awesome. Oh, also 17:15 - NetApp's ONTAP arrays are actually NAS first, and SAN functionality is running on top of that.
The inaccuracies in the video were a little hard to watch but, overall, he did a decent job of trying to target an audience of home lab geeks that have no knowledge of Enterprise class storage systems. I enjoyed it.
WAFL for the win - very good software RAID, volume management and filesystem, so good that Netapp sued Sun for ZFS when it came out. Confidential settlement, apparently one of the myriad of reasons why it would be so difficult to get ZFS GPL licensed.
@@KristopherLinville There were hardly any glaring inaccuracies overall. It's easy to make that comment after the fact but they're trying to explain the operation of that rack setup after seeing it for like 5 minutes, and they're trying to rush themselves in someone else's office.
I think using the term HBA for the controller card would have been more accurate but to the majority of the people who watch this channel, they probably wouldn't know the difference.
i love this sort of video! I know on WAN show Linus mentioned enjoying this kind of "used facebook marketplace" shenanigans (smthing about getting a pc for the price of a 4060), and while i know this is far from the same as scarpyard wars, the chaotic energy, especially during the beginning of the video was super fun to watch!
I have worked with these NetApp appliances for years in my previous job, enjoyed them a lot. You got a very, VERY good bargain. Yes the shelves are old but the controller seems a more recent replacement, maybe half the age of those disk shelves. If so you can upgrade the OS from 7-mode ONTAP into the newer Cluster Data ONTAP and then you could mix storage tiers (SSD + SAS + SATA) and controllers as you wanted. The card with battery is probably the Flash Cache, everything was written there after the controllers' RAM and then dumped to disk in background.
Can we all appreciate how patient the sellers were with the LTT team? Not only did they get low balled on the equipment, but they also had to wait patiently while Linus made fun of their jank stuff and film the entire video explaining everything.
@@00zero557A Sad that a lot of people comment quickly without watching the video, even if it's short. I suppose they want to have a better chance at getting likes, but I don't get why they wouldn't at least edit them out to correct mistakes after finishing the vid.
As someone who's basically done this, that was fun. Thanks! Bring back Scrapyard wars. Or at the very least make a video where you guys go around showing your audience how to get good deals off of used sites. I know Gamers Nexus did a video about *how* to buy used (in that case it was GPU's) but actually having real purchasing experiences from messages and bartering through to pickup. That would be cool. Plus - environmentally savy video - because buying used keeps e-waste out of landfills. Maybe I should just make a video like that...
I got the pleasure of getting the old IBM SAN at a place I worked, but one of the first things I discovered is how proprietary everything is. While the enclosures did work as jbod, the drives themselves had some block size thing like mentioned in the video. Simply putting the drive in another PC and taking it out would mean it didn't work in the SAN anymore. There was no way to add bigger drives either. I used the SAN for a little while for extra backups and eventually took it out of my rack as the NAS I built was smaller and way bigger in disk space. At some point I might repurpose the enclosures for something totally different that's not even disk storage. They are built like tanks.
Having Linus break into businesses and critique their networking and try to walk away with decor and vending machines would be a series I would lose sleep over in excitement.
ive been working in cloud computing server testing for about a year now and its so fascinating seeing linus and the team do these kinda vids, cause i actually know whats going on now!!
honestly given the age of the hardware it would be too slow for most of the media stuff you do, but also ample enough for a lot of other use cases as well. I'm a fan of re-purposing older hardware that still has a use case, no matter how obscure. i'm sure it'd be more than enough for the lab for example as a place to dump raw data from testing and archiving, also as just a backup location in another building tbh.
This is really cool seeing these racks in the wild. I know it might be boring for normal folk but I work in the factory manufacturing these racks and have done for the last 20 years. I remember this rack as we had to individually put cage nuts behind the mounting rails which left my fingers in pieces.
Love all your stuff, but this format is still always my favourite. Linus and the team being nerds. Loved the storage wars reference at the end there too!
Speaking from experience, depending on licensing level, that kit probably was closer to $500k-$1m brand new. Also while they are using "raid 10" netapp has an overlay file system called WAFL (write anywhere file layout) which is very write optomised. When the netapp has something to write to disk, it will write it wherver the heads currently are, and then sort out optimising later.
2:10 The DS4243 and DS4246 support sata or sas drives. If you want to mix and match sata/sas in the same disk shelf you need use the interposers. 2.5 sata ssds also work, you can use Dell 3.5 to 2.5 caddie converters instead of the expensive netapp ones.
Ohhh!! The end with calculating how much it's worth "to the right buyer" made me think of LTT "Storage Wars" edition - this would be so cool - go to random businesses that close operations, and try to flip their equipment? I don't think it's going to be very economical for an organisation of your size, but maybe once a year type of series, like secret shopper? Edit: nvm - the scrapyard wars seems to have similar vibes, totally forgot about it (although my suggestion is still a bit different)
Last time I moved a SAN setup, we took out and individually packed each drive in anti-static sleeves and stored in a box with foam inserts to protect them in transit. Also, for road use, people would use Pelican cases with drive cutout foam. Makes it a lot easier and safer to move, plus the rack units are a lot lighter without the drives inside of them.
Modern hard drives aka anythingfro this century part the heads off platter. You can move them just like they are being shipped to you. They will be shipped full of drives anyway.
Jake is right, you need to put a car stacker in your garage. While you're doing that, you can also start up the LTT car channel. You gotta give the people what they want!
I work at NetApp and really liked the video. Sometimes it’s hard to remember their are consumer IT people and enterprise IT people. Seeing how a respected consumer IT RUclipsr looks at something that is industry standard in my world was really enlightening. Nice find!
More used deals please. Just have some of the off camera LMG form two teams, and see how they can do with a scrapyard wars buying spree. Then Linus vs Luke use what the teams bought
Dude it's a Netapp storage array! When you visited monolith games back in the day, a drive array like this was probably lurking behind the doors. (I set up the Netapp there)
I have decommissioned the old servers and drives in my company just a few months ago, and have learned a lot about SAS drives and servers + controllers. Seeing this again helps me immensely to repeat what I had learned and I can also understand much more what it's all about. Our hardware was pretty much identical, lots of 300/600gb SSD's and countless 1-8TB HDD's, I counted about 180TB. I kept a few hundredTB of DDR3 and DDR4 RAM and some Intel Xenon 6/12 core processors as souvenirs as we disposed of everything.
The PSUs on the netapps are interesting, they actually double as cooling fans even if only 1 psu is powered by mains. Also take a look at the 5V rail, these PSUs are monsters for HDD.
Backups are never within the same device, those are copies! To be a backup it needs to leave the device so you can rebuild from scratch. In the case of that device, the filesystem is just pure magic to make those copies.
11:55 Linus getting exited about the redundant power supplies and I getting exited about the Cinema Displays at the background, I've been searching for a good one for quite a while
One correction: Assuming the shelves in the picture are the actual shelves you got, those are single path only, so no redundant links to all drives (the shelves are still cabled in a ring topology, so still kind of redundant, but not really).
We have been using iSCSI SANs for a while. The follow video where they will try to get it to work will be fun. iSCSI and multipathing can be confusing at first. Replacing the hard drives with something larger could also be a problem since these systems are often locked down and can be used with certain vendor specific hard drives.
I actually really appreciated this being shot on an iPhone, specifically because it's a wonderful showcase of the iPhone's camera quality compared to professional camera equipment. Being so used to the nice cameras you use, it's a great comparison.
NetAPPs are great servers. Awesome for NFS file shares. The NetApp heads can be used as write through NFS caches. A long time ago, I had two render farms that were 500 miles apart, and they had local NetApp heads to cache the data over the long pipe between the two. I have always loved their products. This is a great find for Linus. I just hope their GUIs have improved in the last decade or so.
I love videos like this one because not only am I learning more about tech it's also a reminder that there's always a bigger fish in this case Linus is a bigger tech nerd than I am and while a bit disappointing it just goes to show that I still have a lot to learn
David did a good job with the camera, i forgot it was an iphone camera for half the video. And Linus, i noticed 2 things: New backpack? Is that with a leather exterior? Looks cool. And what about porche, new car? Its been a while since your last car update and a car video on ltt
The leather backpack is a prototype sample, it's been mentioned on WAN show (or maybe an FP exclusive something, I forget) once or twice. I believe his Porsche showed up wrapped in a DBrand skin material (something super shiny and weird) in some other videos previously.
I remember in the video about how they get so many videos done in a week that the editors talked about how they hate working with vlog content but omfg I love these off the cuff vlog videos so much, a bit more than the heavily scripted stuff honestly
The real issue these days with an old netapp filer is size, electricity, cooling (not that you really need it - mostly), and performance (of course). Those guys you purchased it from were so patient while you jawed on.
I know quite few or understand of everything technical they said but still enjoy all the bit of it. It's like seeing children being amaze and having fun. It's special to see that technology is over 10 years old, I assumed now it's soo much faster and better but at the same time very expensive since that setup was 100K$ 10 years ago!
SAN is pretty common in medical context. Like pretty much everything Linus explained is perfect for storing and archiving medical data. Great to see him explain that :)
Yeah most likely as Linus said at the end they wanted to sell it for 500$ initially so they probably wanted to get rid off stuff that was useless to them.
WOW, I haven't seen a SAN server since I was in highschool, and I was the one to build it. I used a raspberry pi, 7 flashdrives with a powered USB 3.0 hub, and a lot of trust from 2 highschools to setup the storage system across the internet. Custom startup commands to start processes after a power outage/lockup. It hosted a Linux VM as a command line desktop system to run whatever tasks a raspberry pi could do. It was donated to my 2nd school as a study resource of a different server setup.
The compare and contrast between this video and the Asustor, "I should stop building computers" video from the day prior is kind of amazing - similar effective storage and access, but one does so in a much smaller space (if you can afford 4tb-8tb sabrents or whatever.) Tech has come a long way in 10 years, even if it's not so obvious to the average consumer.
Sort of. These shelves are kinda commodity hardware, you can connect one to your PC if you want (with a card and a cable) and fill it with 20TB drives (for 480TB of space), or have some flash in there as well. The shelf controllers are probably only 6Gbps though so you'll only get SATA level flash speeds, but it's still pretty quick.
@12:52 i used to do datacenter support for servers that ran this type of raid controllers, i still remember the tickets, array controller battery replacement.... still cool to see alive in 2023,
19:50 These drives use 520 byte sectors. Regular 512 bytes + checksum. You can take a 512 byte sector drive and low level format it to 520 and vice versa. I usually use openbsd to do it. It takes a long time for large drives, but hey if you need it, you need it.
I had one of these in my homelab, with 4TB drives. I just wrote a script to do it, pass in the device IDs, voila next morning a shelf full of usable storage.
@@morosis82 i had a bunch of FC drives that were 520b formatted that i wanted to use in a sun v880. Just launched a bunch of ll formats in parallel and went to bed. Some drives failed, wash, rince repeat a few times and voila 😁
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Correction for around 12:35: NetApp RAID is actually entirely software based. The RAM stick shown IS a write cache with a battery to keep data in memory in the event of a power failure, but it is used by the software RAID implementation, not a RAID card.
Separately, while the seller we purchased this from used it in a SAN configuration (iSCSI for VM storage disks), these NetApp setups are referred to as "Storage Appliances" and can be configured for both NAS and SAN protocols.
thanks for correcting your mistakes!!
@@dliratx You are correct in that it uses WAFL and the performance is better with it but you are wrong with the power outage aspect. Power outage protection for NVRAM. (non volatile RAM) is battery backed which is called the NVMEM battery. Combined with WAFL for speed, NETAPP doesn't actually commit a write to disk when the OS tells it to, same for deletes. Its stored in this NVRAM until 1 of 2 conditions is met. Either every 10 seconds, or when the NVRAM fills to 50%. Its then flushed to disk. The cache is set up into 2 sections. Each = 50% of the total NVRAM. Lets say that NVRAM size is 2Gb then it splits that into 2 sections by 50%. So there is always 2 cache banks at any given time. Due to this delay in commits to Any data in in this NVRAM when a power outage occurs, MIND YOU one that affects the data center to kill the UPS power also, then that data sitting in RAM is backed up by this redundant battery that direct attaches to the PCI lanes of the NVRAM slots. In fact it is plugged in right next to the NVRAM banks. Usually first 2 banks in a controller head. WAFL does nothing for protection. It stand for Write Anywhere File Layout. Combined with speed for writes, it makes better use of disk sectors and block sizes. If there is a bad section, Data ONTAP (NetApp's OS) can ignore that block and still write the file. Where tradition RAID would either fail that drive or have an inconsistency in the data as it wants to stripe to the next block in line not the next "available" block. It also extends the life of a drive for just a bad or failed sector of one platter on the drive.
Netapp deduplication is proprietary and pretty cool too. I do not work for Netapp myself btw.
that's too complicated for me to understand >.
Its called unified Storage System , because it talks, FC, ISCSI, CIFS, NFS - if you have two of them you can do the metro cluster for full redundancy
And another brother is lost to a Facebook marketplace addiction. Let us pray for his wallet and sanity. May they both rest in peace.
hahaha 😂
Yeah I thought this horrible disease mostly effected woman lol.
@@nateo200 Bro, it's 2023, and you're acting like misogyny is still the hot shit on the block...
@@nateo200womans buy furnitures and real cavern guys buys old tech on marketplace it's basic stuff.
@@greg8909 💯
It’s not often you find a negotiation where one side is thinking “are we basically stealing from them” while the other is thinking “I’m just not going to question why they are doubling our asking price”
They are probably happy for someone to get that stuff of the building ASAP. I know i am when we rotate our hardware out of the server room.
@@Doso777especially as they are at the end of their lease. Getting rid of it quicker might save them potential extra fees and they get something back that can be allocated for fixing the building before handing it back etc
@@Doso777 e-waste handling fees are no joke
The book high fidelity has this kind of scenario.
He offered 1k they wanted 5k. They didn't double anything
Hearing that the seller meant to list it for $500 and not $5000 really explains why they were so quick to say yes to $1000, lol
It's a weird scenario whenn Linus think it's a steak and the seller also thinks why they're doubling the price?
i met hardware brokers who buy these and sell the disks to corporate customers who cant buy older model disks anymore or just prefer the prices
they said they made quite allot
@@Apple_Beshy $5000 would be a bit pricey for a steak
Seeing Linus outside of his office is like seeing your teacher outside of school
this video is just two guys looking for white Castle and on the way they are going to buy a server because, why not! it was only 5000! .....seriously, the ravages of pot in canada man ..
😂
@Radin same bro
@Radin Ayo chill
@Radin i saw
We also see his house. Though I'm pretty sure with as much we've seen of it we can probably sneak around it better than Colton and Dennis
Bruh can we take a moment to appreciate how immaculate those controllers were after 10 years of operation.
the way server rooms and infra should be kept, when in a controlled env dust isnt a thing with Hepa filtration.
When you buy from a data center, servers normally come dust free in my experience
@@rustler08 Our san is even older than that and there's like 0 dust on it. Saying that I can't wait to get rid of it
The proper datacenters I’ve worked in are humidity and temperature controlled with lots of filters on Hvac equipment.
we even had sticky paper you would walk over before entering the halls. Impeccable
Don't know if this has anything to do with Linus stepping down as CEO, but the recent videos have a way more loose and goblin-energy vibe to them. Love to see it!
I'm sure it is related probably because a huge burden has been lifted off his shoulders so he can focus on tech and content and hopefully fit his family in there somewhere too
What a nice compliment to have goblin-energy
Didn't he say on Wan that this type of comment is funny because those videos were shot months ago
all he has to do is be the actor and talker. Makes life much easier compared to doing videos and all the day to day stuff.
Oh no there's a goblin
It's awesome how pumped Linus and Jake get about this random enterprise tech.
It's pretty basic acting really
Right? Like I look at this rack and go "yup, still trying to decommission one of these relics" fuckin' thing.
they are still hobbyists at heart 10year old enterprize tech is still "holy shit" stuff.
Yeah. This is pretty normal data center stuff. They need more data center tours
Think you massively overpaid. I’d of asked for it for free
This needs a sequel! A buy like this isn't unattainable for us normal folks, so seeing what you can do with just this hardware would be really interesting!
scrapyard wars "enterprise edition"
@@crEEz0 I WANT THIS
But you need a server room, this isn't really for home use because of the power consumption and noise.
@@crEEz0 This is so underrated. I want to see this!
@@milkoowen6800 i mean.. Its not like there aren't people with server rooms
I want an American Pickers type series where Linus and Jake(or mix it up!) do things exactly like this. I'd also like to see Linus visiting some of the more historic tech related sites and things like that.
Tech Pickie channel coming soon
I would watch a pickers style series from Linus.
@@huntershuey2564 +1
@@tramadol42 +2
I wish they'd do this lol
This is what peak LTT content looks like, it has everything like great info, energy, enthusiasm, real world application. Couldn't help but laugh at the total budget thing at the end.
Wish we could have a series where you buy off some of this gems to get your money's worth back.
Or scrapyard wars, I'd be willing to settle down with scrapyard wars instead.
Also huge shot out to the iPhone camera, that little bugger behaved like a champ IMO.
I was wondering why the shots looked washed out and flat. It looks like it changed between 4:13 and 4:15 though; I wonder if that's when they switched to their main camera.
The value display at the end was a play on US TV shows like American Pickers. 😂
@@Malicious2013 Hmm, sounds like a Tech Pickers Challenge. Give each pair of contestants a budget and have them roam around a state looking for tech being sold that they can resale or someone can appraise afterwards. Highest appraised value wins.
Gosh do I miss Scrapyard Wars! Those were always so fun!
Same! I miss scrapyard wars 😊
Seeing Linus and Jake excited over NetApp gear warms my heart. This was my daily life a few years ago.
Same homie
Now you’re at home with Klaire and Bindi making content that you want to. Living the dream, mate!
Same. I was the disk swapper guy that swapped your drives. (And troubleshooted things when things went horribly wrong, very infrequently. When I wore this hat, I was basically the sysadmin's sysadmin. Kind of cool.) My boss was literally a computer system that told me where to drive out and go to work that morning. 😆 We were cogs in the machine and kept the gears of corporate giants oiled. It was an awesome job, but kind of thankless.
I always wanted a NetApp at the company I work as Admin. But now it got really obsolete.
@@TheBuddyCassius Lmao. That’s amazing. A 64 core beast for your Plex server is the ultimate flex.
It's cool that Linus brought those guys some swag, especially considering the killer deal he got on all that hardware.
I mean, basically, they were hoping someone was going to buy it and take it off their hands because if someone didn't, they were going to have to PAY an eWaste company to come and do that, so I guarantee their company actually made out in general, still Linus bringing swag is still pretty cool of him.
@@scottbitz5222 Fair but they also could have parted it out and sold it all for more, I think they just wanted rid of it and got their ROI back from the 11 years of service it performed.
@@kelmanl4 Most of that is disk shelf only. Harder to part out old storage tech with no controller like that and on such high end equipment that is no longer supported or find parts. NetApp holds their parts very close in house. hard to get them 3rd hand without buying them from company selling off old hardware such as this. On top of that, they were low end disk shelves to boot. Only 3Gb bandwidth on the SAS connectors and while 24 disks shelves, only 600GB 15k RPM drives. Great drives but very dated. DS4243 = 4 U 24 disk shelf 3Gb SAS connector
@@kelmanl4 They could have indeed, but that takes times. It's just easier to sell it for a quick buck, and let someone else make a long buck.
Not a killer deal. That's a 12+ year old controller and drives on the borderline of death.
Speaking as a NetApp specialist, I almost shat myself when Linus pulled the controller out of the rack by himself. Hint - there are folded handles either side of the chassis - use them (along with a second pair of hands). Congratulations of your purchase, may it give you many years of faithful service (and at least one month of lost sleep when it shits the bed).
kudos for netapp shitting the bed - it shits the whole floor
I love the way you phrased this hahaha
Things are heavy, even with drives removed.
Something that old should not even be switched on. OnTap will be so out of date and updates will be lacking now. We've just gotten rid a of a 3240 last year and our 2520 is now out of support. NTLM bug is going to kill us!
@@mikem3271 I doubt Linus or LMG will be using OnTap or the NetApp specific features on those legacy disk shelves like the ACP ports (With ACP being in-band with SAS from OnTap 9). From what I know, both the controller and Diskshelf featured are EOL, which is why it was probably so cheap.
I just want to thank the owners of the hardware who accepted a real low ball offer and then had to stand around for an hour or more. Just for us all to get a rundown/tutorial on the equipment. Also shout out to the Fab Rats swag on one of the owners hats. 18:40
I only came to the comment section to see if someone mentioned the Fab Rats hat. Thank you, you good citizen c:.
At the end of the video Linus says the listing was actually supposed to be $500, not $5,000. So Linus offering $1,000 wasn't exactly a low ball from the seller's perspective all things considered.
@@OGPatriot03 yeah and given he's never featured one on the channel before, I think the way he presented himself lowballing is how it feels to get that content
Besides getting a better price than meant to this is a form of networking. They might have no intentions of working together but sharing knowledge can be extremely useful.
Why not just make it quick and convenience for the seller by taking everything back to LTT before filming all that?
This content is so much fun, I don't have any interest in servers, but I still find this entertaining and informative, super fun to watch this one :)
I'm the same way, I have zero interest in servers but some reason I enjoy watching Linus talk about them.
I love videos when Linus is happy and excited talking about tech, even if it is old tech. Just fun to watch :)
It's wild watching him geek out over a decade-old NetApp array
I love videos when Linus moves. Love to see all the tech installations he makes.
its so cute
Old tech is way more fun, honestly. It's like a treasure hunt, and there's always way better deals to be found compared to new stuff.
As an admin for multiple 32Gb Fibre Channel SANs with brocade switches and IBM Storage this is a good explantion for why a SAN only makes sense for bigger operations. We changed from the "layer" approach with multiple different storage devices (Flash, HDD, Tape...) to just everything NVMe since NVMe storage got really cheap in the last years and the maintenance contracts for the older HDD devices got exponentially more expensive.
NVME requires a new storage controller though, since you need PCI lanes for the disks. They could stick Flash storage in those bays be not NVME.
@@EmeraldWitch I think he means using SAN storage units based on NVMe (flashcards), rather than multi tier storage units with SSD/fast/archive class storage that requires constant balancing. In the past 10 years I've seen our company go from storage units of 3000+KG to 30 KG units that store more and and are way way faster (sub ms response times).
@@aragnut6180 Yeah you are right. Currently we use IBM Flashsystems in a Hyperswap configuration with 4 Controllers. So even if a whole datacenter goes down, not a Single Client will go down with it. It just loses 4 of 8 paths to its storage
@@eco909 the Fs9500 units? You must have a pretty good low latency line between your sites to have sync mirrors (and not too much distance). We're currently using async as the round trip is about 20 ms (oh boy does performance suffer if you accidentally set it to sync mirror)
IBM flashsystems are amazing, their flashcore modules are even better!
As a storage engineer this video was a blast :) It looks like a great deal, but consider power consumption. I recently replaced 2 similar storages around 70TB each, with 1U IBM FlashSystem 5200. Old storage needed 2800W, and new one is only 300W :)
That's a large room heater!
I used to work for IBM and we had moved some of our DBAs highest usage DBs off of XIV Gen3 and StorWize 7000's to multiple FlashSystems (Thanks SVC!). The DBAs still complained that it was 'too slow' and 'customers were complaining'. I told them that if being on nvme flash and 32Gbit FC was too slow for the customers, the issue isn't the storage, it's the application and DB architecture. Nothing I can do about that as this is literally the fastest (at the time in 2016) shared storage that exists. They didn't like that answer.
@@WhiteG60 my team supports our custommers from storage to DB level, so its lettle easier to find problems :)
@@WhiteG60 Or the partitioning and queries. An unpartitioned (aka full table) search of a larger table for whatever criteria can mean reading hundreds of gigabytes of data.
I didn't even know storage engineers exist.. the more you know! :D
Small mistake at 9:27 : iSCSI *does* run over TCP/IP (the i stands for internet). To be fair though, there are non-TCP/IP protocols that are commonly used for SANs, such as Fibre Channel.
Special award for getting "Fibre Channel" correct! 👏 🏆
One my systems still has a Fibre Channel controller in it...I just don't have anything to connect it to anymore: I used to have Sun StorEdge A5200 which, while cool to have, was ridiculous on power usage and has the same "the discs are eye wateringly expensive and you can't even get that much capacity out of it" problem as the SAN in the video.
(I think the A5200 could take a maximum of 22 x 300 GiB discs. And that would probably cost you over £3,500, which is not a great price for 6.6 TiB...)
J
Likewise, the performance limitations of SMB don't come from running over TCP/IP. It's from limitations in what SMB lets you do, e.g. resulting in having to do many more protocol transactions than to do the same thing in other remote filesystem protocols e.g., NFS.
@@TOT3m1c SMBv3 introduced a lot of improvements, iirc. Although the file copy performed by SHFileOperation - which is what you're effectively using if you drag and drop files in File Explorer - is crap at actually taking advantage of them.
Which is why people end up using robocopy for doing batch copies over the network (largely because it can actually take advantage of the multichannel capabilities by using multiple copy threads).
I know they are harder and more time consuming to make, but I love these IRL content videos. Finding deals on sites like FB marketplace and Craigslist are so enjoyable to watch and be inspired from, hopefully we can see more in the future
O'U R so very 'elite' using 'alphabet soup' krap like "IRL' = lame. Don't speak English or N E thing = 2 E Z =) No1 noze wat U meen W/IRL, jakazz.
These jbods were probably made by Xyratex, before they were bought by Seagate. The company I work for uses the same hardware line in our product. If you want to use them with SATA drives you want to be aware that only the bottom controller slot will be connected to the drives. For both slots to work, you need the dual port SAS drives.
They are Engenio storage which was LSI then NetApp. Rebadged by Dell as Md3xxx, IBM as DS4xxx, DS5xxx and some others. That one would probably not accept SATA drives, and even if it did you would use interposers that turn them into SAS drives.
@@jonathanbuzzard1376 Yup, used to manage some IBM DS SANs. They would only accept branded drives, and if SATA they required the use of an interposer. The Dell branded ones I know had someone reverse engineer license files to unlock features, but not sure about the other rebadged units.
@@jonathanbuzzard1376 We had a IBM DS35xx series SAN. Thing won't accept anything but certain IBM labeled drives no matter what. Some of those are NL-SAS but not SATA.
@@jonathanbuzzard1376 not sure exactly what model, but i have a similar netapp branded jbod that does support sata
I worked in Xyratex in the UK in Engineering NPI area until they laid us all off in 2016, I stayed until 2017 to finished the clearing out of the site. Those probably made in Sacramento site if 2012 it gradually moved to Mexico in 2014/15. Had good memories of the people I worked with and still keep in touch with a few.
I love how Linus casually dropped the Facebook marketplace line on the last video. It's like the Linus extended cinematic (RUclips) universe
but on the last video he said gpu, so Im hoping for the return of scrapyard wars
@@ShhTime Nah, I recall him saying on stream that he just wanted to purchase a certain GPU that he found on marketplace, and that he was so excited to get a good deal on it that he wanted to reconsider bringing scrapyard wars back. Therefore, it's clearly not coming back yet. IMO, they should hold a scrapyard wars but without Linus, or at most give him a teammate who isn't well-known at all to call sellers and pick up the goods.
@@ShhTimeHe actually said on a recent Wan Show he was thinking of doing another season. So fingers crossed 🤞
I love vlog style videos like this one, it was great to see Linus being happy about 10 year old hardware
Data center wars. The spiritual successor of scrapyard wars. Where Linus and co. Go around buying discount servers in attempt to make scrapyard Google.
Feat L1T.
scrapyard google LMAO
Yes please! The enterprise market is way more diverse IMO, and there's a lot of variability in the offers. It's also not just about finding/negotiating the best deal, but also getting all the obscure platforms that can be had for cheap working together.
wait.. didn't Linus mention this on wan show? He mentioned bringing back scrapyard wars because of some recent tech purchases were fun.
@@poochyenarulez as fans of his work it is our job too peer pressure him into this!
This just makes me want a scrapyard wars server edition. Just find two small business' that need some IT infrastructure upgrade and send two teams after them. Linus/Anthony vs Luke/Jake.
Would be Linus/Emily now! But definitely could be interesting, especially after he said on WAN Show that they would bring it back.
@@Adowrath oh whoaI was wonder about the recent absence. I had to look up what you meant as at first, I assumed there was some newly spawned solo ASMR channel stealing her away! Looking forward to her return to spotlight when she feels ready. Retro gaming wouldn't be the same without her.
@@Adowrath Why not Anthony though?
@@Thurgosh_OG Emily took a bit of a behind-the-camera role as she was going through realizing she is transgender - Anthony's the "deadname" so-to-speak.
I know this video was not necessarily "up to standard" in terms of video quality but I would actually love to see more run and gun style videos like this. It managed to still be informative and interesting while being incredibly entertaining, natural and fresh.
"RUN AND GUN" hahaha perfect description 😄
I'm sure this was honestly entirely impromptu, but I love the old feel of just, "Go, go, go!" but with everything Linus has learned over the years.
Hoping to see more stuff like this as Linus gets more "freedom"!
Linus looking behind him talking to the camera while cars were braking in front of him was by far the scariest part of this video.
he likely had traffic assist (I dont know the precise name for Porsche, VAG uses different one for each brand) on, which is just ACC with lane assist and side assist, but still should have paid more attention to the road.
I freaked out when he did that lmao
Bro he had either Adaptive cruise control going or that Taycan was driving itself.
@@iosdeals Correct, Porsche label it under InnoDrive
My buddy's dad used to do this and scared the crap out of me. He was one of these people who couldn't talk to you without looking at you, so if you were in the back seat he'd turn around and be talking away while you could see all the things in front that he should be paying attention to.
I spent about 6 years looking after 2 of these in clusters (FAS3220). They were amazing when working but absolutely petrifying if they went wrong! I nursed ours into retirement in 2021 where most of the volumes were starting to suffer with ‘WAFL’ errors that couldn’t be repaired.
You guys are definitely going to have some fun trying to get these running again. Just a tip these are likely using ‘cluster mode’ as opposed to ‘7 mode’ due to their age. If I remember correctly these use different commands. You might also struggle getting hold of the software these days too so definitely recommend getting the root account from the previous owners.
Good luck!
The current company I work for started with about 10 people in a very small office and seeing the random cable thread across the ceiling and over the exit sign for the wifi brings back so many amazing memories....this video is fantastic, on so many different levels
That last bit with the value breakdowns, totally gave me Scrapyard Wars vibes! So glad you're considering bringing it back, honestly my ultimate favourite series in the entire history of LTT!!!
I could watch videos of Linus and Jake just going to buy stuff from companies endlessly. Its interesting, but calming. I dig it!
Worked in a data center for over 10 years, this brings back so many memories of SAN upgrades. All I can say is those shelves filled with hard drives are HEAVY! I would love to get my hands on one of those shelves for my home lab.
I had one, empty they're pretty cheap, I got one full of 4TB drives before Chia started to be a thing for like $1200.
First thing you learn: Put in the hard drives and PSUs after you are doing racking them.
Linus seems as excited as a kid around a christmas tree full of presents...and I love it.
HAHA that's the perfect 'motivation' info. 4 N E actor trying 2 emulate him =)) He should do spoof videos where he gets all excited about a piece of toast or a new pet rock =D
This was so cool to see. LTT has many great videos about their own server implementations, but those are necessarily specific to their circumstances. They also have many great data centre videos. But seeing how other small (no that LTT is "small" anymore) companies deploy enterprise hardware is really amazing.
My favorite thing about this video is that they filmed it on an iPhone =D They should get an iPhone X (10) & set it to 720p with the 'HDR' thing & use that 4 all of their videos on all of their channels = will speed up their 'workflow', save them milions in equipment they don't need & make their whole production way more portable. The absurd #FailTrain of some random short fat ugly 'migrant' clown wearing a gigantic trash pile of super-over-priced krap, & STILL shaking the frames around like a drunken fly reveal the irrationality of Linus himself & his 'spec-chasing fetish' =)) "Woo we're shooting our RUclips content in 12K now (or whatever, literally), as if N E 1 will care if they went 720p on it all = LOL
2 the human eye there is no point going past about 1100 pixels wide, as more than that looks LESS realistic (if it's not noisy blocky jaggy fake res) as 'overly sharpened synthetic' vibe rather than 'smooth' (but not blurry) feel, & if U R so 'up close' that U notice 'pixelation' most of the thing is out of your center of vision so don't notice it much N E way so should just bak tha fuk up. I've done testing on this & 1100 wide looks no worse than 4K, & U can test this by playing back 4K videos downloaded from JooToob resampled to 1100 pixels wide in your player = not 'blurry' or 'unrealistic' by comparison at all.
Everything over 720p is just meaningless bull$hit, unless it is a case where U R trying 2 get around 'fake resolution nonsense' like joo toob where the 1080p only has about the real res of a dual layer (7GB or so) DVD, & the 4K is about the same as 1080p Blu-ray. All this 'video stuff' is very relevant because the whole reason this & other channels by this guy have such 'fancy equipment' is 2 try & jack their numbers, all of which R ignored by JooToob when they crush the krap out of their videos = pointless =)) What would make sense (maybe) is upsample the 720p to 4K when uploading, then delete it from local storage, as it would just B a way 2 try & get them 2 down-sample better 2 720p. iNotice jootoob videos where 4K versions R available look better than ones where the max available is 1080p, but no matter what the res on this site, it's always a couple steps lower in quality than it says it is =))
Another thing that helps is make sure there is plenty of light so not a lot of 'shadow gradients', as those tend 2 get a lot of 'banding', & also 2 avoid moving the camera around a lot, especially in complex environments like a forest scene full of branches of many complex patterns = takes more 'codec room' 2 store, so less left 4 the person doing the 'action', etc. Their idiotic 'tech quickie' stuff with a blank background is super lame though = should put nice scenery behind, like still or gently slow scenes like a tropical beach or whatever =) Also, have people wear real clothes instead of sweats & T-Shirts = fux sake. & make them do proper grooming, not greasy hair & stubble LOL
Honestly, LTT could EASILY make a series about getting cheap tech from work-from-home transitions. I doubt there aren't many other companies who would give tech for free, if it meant a chance to have their name mentioned in an LTT video, or to have their logo in the video, even if only for a few seconds randomly.
good idea
If you're looking for a good ergo chair, there's probably a used office furniture store near you that has used Herman Miller and Steelcase chairs for dirt cheap.
Like FireFly Software just did. The issue with selling corporate assets like that you need to make sure they are really clean of data and settings that are related to your network. You know the things that are unlikely to change when you move stuff to somebody else's drives.
@@RowanHawkins True. But, with LTT, who are professionals in this field, you can at least know that they will make sure to scrub everything leftover, if you forgot any of it.
@@Default78334 Unfortunately the reverse also became true too, I was in the market for a new ergo chair to replace my aging "gaming" chair that was giving me back problems, and suddenly everything was crazy expensive because everyone was buying new chairs for their work-at-home offices.
Granted, the price hikes were for new stuff, just might still be a bit rough finding used ones that haven't been grabbed up by others with the same idea.
Seeing Linus back in the wild, after all the CEO stuff, warms my heart...
Loved this "Linus getting out of office" vibe of this episode, feels really refreshing and less scripted.
It really is more than just about the connection when it comes to NAS vs SAN. Because of the fundamental idea that a SAN is a distributed block level storage solution, it can be configured in ways that a NAS cannot. For instance, you can have multiple storage cabinets distributed across multiple physical sites (let's say in all of LMG's offices/labs and Linus' house). You could theoretically create a single block level device that uses physical storage located in all of those different physical locations. The SAN controller will present that as a single device to the connected guest. You can't do anything like that with NAS unless you have other underlying software doing that work before the NAS is presented with the storage. This is why a SAN is a Storage Area Network. It's a network made entirely for storage. Contrast to a NAS, a Network Attached Storage, which is a storage device (or devices) that are attached to an existing data network.
The similarity between NAS and SAN in terms of lettering is probably best avoided for educational purposes. Better to compare SAN with LAN/WAN/etc. A local area network, a wide area network and a storage area network. The acronyms are more related, as are the concepts.
@@dschwartz783 I agree. A SAN is definitely more synonymous with LAN or WAN than a NAS.
eh. I can think of NAS systems that can be distributed over multiple sites and machines "transparently" to the user.
gluster, for example.
CEPH probably can too, but I've never read any of it's docs.
It's been a while, but I think with effort you can do it with Isilon.
NFSv4, using pNFS extensions, can have your metadata separated from file data across multiple servers. Not necessarily supported by all NFS servers though.
Bell Lab's Plan9 9P protocol was able to do distributed filesystems back in the mid 80s. 9P is basically a distributed object store, with very little tying it to disk, iirc.
The Andrew File System, as part of the Andrew Project, started in 1982. (AFS heavily influenced 9P, then later CIFS and NFS, as I understand it)
The truth is, a lot of computing technology is little more than abstraction and virtualisation of simpler predecessors. Bare metal, partitioning, multi-tasking, containers, and VMs are all the same thing, with added manageability and complexity. Same thing with storage.
@@RichardBetel The real problem with comparing a NAS to a SAN, is the fact that the terms are describing unlike things. A NAS is a type of device, a device which can be used for any number of other things. What you call a NAS today, may be called a media server tomorrow (or perhaps something else), depending on its primary purpose. A SAN on the other hand, is a form of network. While it's often used to describe devices devoted to being a part of said network, it doesn't technically describe the device per se. Indeed, any device could be a part of a SAN, perhaps even a NAS.
@@RichardBetel I agree. There are NAS technologies that can be distributed but there's a bit of a difference between distributing a NAS solution and building a storage solution on top of a distributed block level network. The issue is that most of the distributable technologies used in a NAS can be considered parts of layers 5 - 7 (7 being SMB, NFS, etc). SAN lives much lower, between layers 1 - 4.
A good example of how that might translate to a 'real-world' example is a SAN RAID configuration. Imagine you have 4 disks. Each disk is located in a different geographic location and a file server in another location. With SAN, you can configure a RAID 0 volume using all 4 of those disks as members of the RAID. Then you can present that RAID volume as a "physical" device to the file server and then share it using whatever layer 7 protocols you want. This is all possible because a SAN is capable of using networks to connect low level physical devices to a controller that converts them into a volume for use by a filesystem. It's like connecting a bunch of SATA drives to a computer but instead of using SATA cables you use the LAN in your house because each drive is located in a different room and the computer that they are connected to is in the living room.
This is a stark difference to a distributed NAS. In the case of a NAS, you would have to create NAS clusters (comprised of drives and NAS software) in each geographic location and use software to virtually combine those clusters into 1 logical unit (or however many units you want). You don't have access to the lower level devices and they can't be presented to the filesystem as a lower level device.
The use cases of each depends on the needs of the implementation, of course.
In the school district I work in, we just replaced our 7 year old SAN that was comprised of 5-10u storage cabinets, one at each building, depending on the size.
Now, the new SAN is almost double the capacity and more centralized. We have a 4u storage cabinet and a 2u controller on our main campus and an identical setup at our furthest away building as a back up. This has and will make our maintenance so much easier and straight forward whenever something goes wrong.
I've been working with NetApp FAS for over 15 years, this i s a pretty old cluster, but still fun to play with... Their new stuff is all flash and just as dense as anything else out there.
12:30 - Almost. The system doesn't have a RAID card; the system itself is a giant and very smart RAID card. And yes, it has the RAM of an x86 system on battery backup, which is awesome.
Oh, also 17:15 - NetApp's ONTAP arrays are actually NAS first, and SAN functionality is running on top of that.
The inaccuracies in the video were a little hard to watch but, overall, he did a decent job of trying to target an audience of home lab geeks that have no knowledge of Enterprise class storage systems. I enjoyed it.
WAFL for the win - very good software RAID, volume management and filesystem, so good that Netapp sued Sun for ZFS when it came out. Confidential settlement, apparently one of the myriad of reasons why it would be so difficult to get ZFS GPL licensed.
@@KristopherLinville There were hardly any glaring inaccuracies overall. It's easy to make that comment after the fact but they're trying to explain the operation of that rack setup after seeing it for like 5 minutes, and they're trying to rush themselves in someone else's office.
if you have a licence 😞
I think using the term HBA for the controller card would have been more accurate but to the majority of the people who watch this channel, they probably wouldn't know the difference.
i love this sort of video! I know on WAN show Linus mentioned enjoying this kind of "used facebook marketplace" shenanigans (smthing about getting a pc for the price of a 4060), and while i know this is far from the same as scarpyard wars, the chaotic energy, especially during the beginning of the video was super fun to watch!
They really should do a new season of scrapyard wars after Linus steps down as the CEO and has more time for these kinds of things again.
I have worked with these NetApp appliances for years in my previous job, enjoyed them a lot. You got a very, VERY good bargain. Yes the shelves are old but the controller seems a more recent replacement, maybe half the age of those disk shelves. If so you can upgrade the OS from 7-mode ONTAP into the newer Cluster Data ONTAP and then you could mix storage tiers (SSD + SAS + SATA) and controllers as you wanted. The card with battery is probably the Flash Cache, everything was written there after the controllers' RAM and then dumped to disk in background.
Can we all appreciate how patient the sellers were with the LTT team? Not only did they get low balled on the equipment, but they also had to wait patiently while Linus made fun of their jank stuff and film the entire video explaining everything.
True
Watch towards the end. They got high balled to the extreme
apparently the servers werent supposed to be listed at 5000, but rather 500 (watch the end of video)
@@00zero557A Sad that a lot of people comment quickly without watching the video, even if it's short. I suppose they want to have a better chance at getting likes, but I don't get why they wouldn't at least edit them out to correct mistakes after finishing the vid.
lol they got highballed if anything. It was meant to be listed for $500, not $5000
As someone who's basically done this, that was fun. Thanks! Bring back Scrapyard wars. Or at the very least make a video where you guys go around showing your audience how to get good deals off of used sites. I know Gamers Nexus did a video about *how* to buy used (in that case it was GPU's) but actually having real purchasing experiences from messages and bartering through to pickup. That would be cool. Plus - environmentally savy video - because buying used keeps e-waste out of landfills. Maybe I should just make a video like that...
Linus has basically said he thinks scrapyard wars is making a return after he had to shop online for graphics cards for some project.
I got the pleasure of getting the old IBM SAN at a place I worked, but one of the first things I discovered is how proprietary everything is. While the enclosures did work as jbod, the drives themselves had some block size thing like mentioned in the video. Simply putting the drive in another PC and taking it out would mean it didn't work in the SAN anymore. There was no way to add bigger drives either. I used the SAN for a little while for extra backups and eventually took it out of my rack as the NAS I built was smaller and way bigger in disk space. At some point I might repurpose the enclosures for something totally different that's not even disk storage. They are built like tanks.
I loved this format, really scrapyard wars-y. Linus's energy is unmatched too!
the sellers seemed like really cool people for letting linus and jack, essentially hang out and make a video with them
Having Linus break into businesses and critique their networking and try to walk away with decor and vending machines would be a series I would lose sleep over in excitement.
ive been working in cloud computing server testing for about a year now and its so fascinating seeing linus and the team do these kinda vids, cause i actually know whats going on now!!
17:36 What a legend xD
honestly given the age of the hardware it would be too slow for most of the media stuff you do, but also ample enough for a lot of other use cases as well. I'm a fan of re-purposing older hardware that still has a use case, no matter how obscure. i'm sure it'd be more than enough for the lab for example as a place to dump raw data from testing and archiving, also as just a backup location in another building tbh.
I’ve always really enjoyed the weekend internal videos that y’all make like this.
That is an awesome rack! Also, props to the company for letting them film and all that help. They seem like really nice people
This is really cool seeing these racks in the wild. I know it might be boring for normal folk but I work in the factory manufacturing these racks and have done for the last 20 years. I remember this rack as we had to individually put cage nuts behind the mounting rails which left my fingers in pieces.
Love all your stuff, but this format is still always my favourite. Linus and the team being nerds.
Loved the storage wars reference at the end there too!
1:27 truely some of the best camera work david has done
Loved this video. Out of regular monotony you guys have pulled up something very interesting. Hopefully, we'll see more stuff like this.
I haven’t been on Facebook in years, maybe I should check in just for the Marketplace.
Expect people not to reply back to you when you're trying to buy and keep an eye out for scams. If it seems to good to be true, it probably is.
Nooo, never man, i just got scammed
marketplace is great. i put a table up i found on the side of the road for 80 bucks and someone bought it same day. i had like 5 people want it lol
It's chaos with sometimes gold mine deals.
facebook marketplace is the single useful feature on that site
Speaking from experience, depending on licensing level, that kit probably was closer to $500k-$1m brand new. Also while they are using "raid 10" netapp has an overlay file system called WAFL (write anywhere file layout) which is very write optomised. When the netapp has something to write to disk, it will write it wherver the heads currently are, and then sort out optimising later.
Agreed. Especially 70TB was worth big bucks. Might've spent $2m easy on it since 2012...
2:10 The DS4243 and DS4246 support sata or sas drives. If you want to mix and match sata/sas in the same disk shelf you need use the interposers. 2.5 sata ssds also work, you can use Dell 3.5 to 2.5 caddie converters instead of the expensive netapp ones.
Ohhh!! The end with calculating how much it's worth "to the right buyer" made me think of LTT "Storage Wars" edition - this would be so cool - go to random businesses that close operations, and try to flip their equipment? I don't think it's going to be very economical for an organisation of your size, but maybe once a year type of series, like secret shopper?
Edit: nvm - the scrapyard wars seems to have similar vibes, totally forgot about it (although my suggestion is still a bit different)
Love how the employees just standing there waiting for you to finally leave.
Last time I moved a SAN setup, we took out and individually packed each drive in anti-static sleeves and stored in a box with foam inserts to protect them in transit. Also, for road use, people would use Pelican cases with drive cutout foam. Makes it a lot easier and safer to move, plus the rack units are a lot lighter without the drives inside of them.
Modern hard drives aka anythingfro this century part the heads off platter. You can move them just like they are being shipped to you. They will be shipped full of drives anyway.
You did that because the data on them still mattered to you or the company. They don't care about the data or the drives.
Jake is right, you need to put a car stacker in your garage. While you're doing that, you can also start up the LTT car channel. You gotta give the people what they want!
I work at NetApp and really liked the video. Sometimes it’s hard to remember their are consumer IT people and enterprise IT people. Seeing how a respected consumer IT RUclipsr looks at something that is industry standard in my world was really enlightening. Nice find!
More used deals please.
Just have some of the off camera LMG form two teams, and see how they can do with a scrapyard wars buying spree. Then Linus vs Luke use what the teams bought
Dude it's a Netapp storage array!
When you visited monolith games back in the day, a drive array like this was probably lurking behind the doors. (I set up the Netapp there)
I really wonder what licenses are on this. He may have stumbled upon something far more powerful than he thinks.
@@krennic4438 the licensing will cost as much as the array, especially if the hardware is near end of life
I have decommissioned the old servers and drives in my company just a few months ago, and have learned a lot about SAS drives and servers + controllers. Seeing this again helps me immensely to repeat what I had learned and I can also understand much more what it's all about. Our hardware was pretty much identical, lots of 300/600gb SSD's and countless 1-8TB HDD's, I counted about 180TB.
I kept a few hundredTB of DDR3 and DDR4 RAM and some Intel Xenon 6/12 core processors as souvenirs as we disposed of everything.
The PSUs on the netapps are interesting, they actually double as cooling fans even if only 1 psu is powered by mains.
Also take a look at the 5V rail, these PSUs are monsters for HDD.
Depending on the AFF/FAS controller or the Disk Shelves. YES. Some Disk shelves fans and PSU are separate.
Backups are never within the same device, those are copies! To be a backup it needs to leave the device so you can rebuild from scratch. In the case of that device, the filesystem is just pure magic to make those copies.
That’s a good looking hat that gentlemen has on.😎
11:55 Linus getting exited about the redundant power supplies and I getting exited about the Cinema Displays at the background, I've been searching for a good one for quite a while
One correction: Assuming the shelves in the picture are the actual shelves you got, those are single path only, so no redundant links to all drives (the shelves are still cabled in a ring topology, so still kind of redundant, but not really).
Each of the shelves has 2 IOM3 modules as its a 4U unit. It is multipath.
Each path is connected in a daisy chain. Node 1 e0a -> shelf 1 IOM3(a) port 1 -> .... -> Node 2 e0c or d. Then, it is similar path on Node 2.
We have been using iSCSI SANs for a while. The follow video where they will try to get it to work will be fun. iSCSI and multipathing can be confusing at first. Replacing the hard drives with something larger could also be a problem since these systems are often locked down and can be used with certain vendor specific hard drives.
I actually really appreciated this being shot on an iPhone, specifically because it's a wonderful showcase of the iPhone's camera quality compared to professional camera equipment. Being so used to the nice cameras you use, it's a great comparison.
Hey linus, those things on the side of the server (15:06) are handles that fold out and you can hold the servers without having to struggle.
I wish DS460C had those. I hate the metal clip-on handles.
jep, you can see the handles clearly in so many shots - still everyone ignored them
I donno if it's a coincidence but this video is posted on Jun 11 2023 (exactly 12 years from the date that Jake mentions @5:28)
Yeah!
just wanted to say this had possibly the best quick explanation of NAS vs SAN... well done all
NetAPPs are great servers. Awesome for NFS file shares. The NetApp heads can be used as write through NFS caches. A long time ago, I had two render farms that were 500 miles apart, and they had local NetApp heads to cache the data over the long pipe between the two. I have always loved their products. This is a great find for Linus. I just hope their GUIs have improved in the last decade or so.
Gotta love outdoors linus where he doesnt read of a teleprompter
I love videos like this one because not only am I learning more about tech it's also a reminder that there's always a bigger fish in this case Linus is a bigger tech nerd than I am and while a bit disappointing it just goes to show that I still have a lot to learn
I love how Linus explains the parts while he’s taking it apart to take lol
gives me documentary vibes
David did a good job with the camera, i forgot it was an iphone camera for half the video.
And Linus, i noticed 2 things:
New backpack? Is that with a leather exterior? Looks cool.
And what about porche, new car?
Its been a while since your last car update and a car video on ltt
The leather backpack is a prototype sample, it's been mentioned on WAN show (or maybe an FP exclusive something, I forget) once or twice. I believe his Porsche showed up wrapped in a DBrand skin material (something super shiny and weird) in some other videos previously.
I remember in the video about how they get so many videos done in a week that the editors talked about how they hate working with vlog content but omfg I love these off the cuff vlog videos so much, a bit more than the heavily scripted stuff honestly
The real issue these days with an old netapp filer is size, electricity, cooling (not that you really need it - mostly), and performance (of course). Those guys you purchased it from were so patient while you jawed on.
For a video filmed on an iPhone, it sure looked pretty damn up to spec! Great work David and the editing team making cameraphone footage look so good!
Also shows just how capable cameras are in modern smartphones
You can clearly see a change in video quality at 4:15
I know quite few or understand of everything technical they said but still enjoy all the bit of it. It's like seeing children being amaze and having fun. It's special to see that technology is over 10 years old, I assumed now it's soo much faster and better but at the same time very expensive since that setup was 100K$ 10 years ago!
Incredible how Linus managed to not let anything fall.
Almost.
they just cut it in the post probably .... )))
Incredible how he didn't drive in to anything.
Except the one PDU. 20:18
@@silv12 you stole what I was about to say 😂
Despite him literally dropping a PDU towards the end of the video! XD
Keep up the great tech reviews and doing these challenges
Seeing Linus just ad libbing it with no obvious script and giving technical explanations off the cuff was amazing to witness!!
SAN is pretty common in medical context. Like pretty much everything Linus explained is perfect for storing and archiving medical data. Great to see him explain that :)
Maybe they were just trying to get rid of that server rack.
Yeah most likely as Linus said at the end they wanted to sell it for 500$ initially so they probably wanted to get rid off stuff that was useless to them.
@@basilworshipper yeah pretty much.
WOW, I haven't seen a SAN server since I was in highschool, and I was the one to build it.
I used a raspberry pi, 7 flashdrives with a powered USB 3.0 hub, and a lot of trust from 2 highschools to setup the storage system across the internet. Custom startup commands to start processes after a power outage/lockup.
It hosted a Linux VM as a command line desktop system to run whatever tasks a raspberry pi could do. It was donated to my 2nd school as a study resource of a different server setup.
I like how consistently they ignored the handles on the chassis for lifting the equipment out of the racks :)
The compare and contrast between this video and the Asustor, "I should stop building computers" video from the day prior is kind of amazing - similar effective storage and access, but one does so in a much smaller space (if you can afford 4tb-8tb sabrents or whatever.) Tech has come a long way in 10 years, even if it's not so obvious to the average consumer.
Sort of. These shelves are kinda commodity hardware, you can connect one to your PC if you want (with a card and a cable) and fill it with 20TB drives (for 480TB of space), or have some flash in there as well.
The shelf controllers are probably only 6Gbps though so you'll only get SATA level flash speeds, but it's still pretty quick.
@12:52 i used to do datacenter support for servers that ran this type of raid controllers, i still remember the tickets, array controller battery replacement.... still cool to see alive in 2023,
19:50 These drives use 520 byte sectors. Regular 512 bytes + checksum. You can take a 512 byte sector drive and low level format it to 520 and vice versa. I usually use openbsd to do it. It takes a long time for large drives, but hey if you need it, you need it.
I had one of these in my homelab, with 4TB drives. I just wrote a script to do it, pass in the device IDs, voila next morning a shelf full of usable storage.
@@morosis82 i had a bunch of FC drives that were 520b formatted that i wanted to use in a sun v880.
Just launched a bunch of ll formats in parallel and went to bed. Some drives failed, wash, rince repeat a few times and voila 😁
This should be a new series as Linus will have so much more time with his new job title for LMG !