45 Drives Storinator Q30 Review

tom here from lawrence systems and this is a storenator q30x45 drives full disclosure up front this unit was provided by 45 drives for me to review and they provided the drives as well now they did not give me enough to make an entire pyramid out of but hey maybe one day i'll get there nonetheless i will still set this drive down flat so it doesn't make people nervous while i do this video and swing my hands around wildly the stornator q30 the q standing for quiet holds 30 drives i also disassembled it because part of what i want to cover in this video is well the fact that it's easily disassembled and easily serviceable so we'll cover cover some of those little details there a few other things i want to talk about first is who is 45 drives and doesn't this look a lot like those storage pods used by backblaze and you'd be right they have the same company manufacturing the cases protocase is the parent company of 45 drives and who also makes the storage pods for back plays now i will leave a link to the video over on 45 drive's youtube channel where they talk about the history so you can hear it all in their own words the whole history of how that came to be it's a cool origin story of how they got started backblaze provides the storage services but 45 drives provides services direct to people that want to buy these servers and build them themselves and i say direct that's something important to me of what i'm dealing with companies if i can deal with them directly and not constantly have to be a reseller this is one of those little details that's really nice about 45 drives where you can go buy these direct you can go right on our website they have a partner program if you'd like to become a reseller but it is not required if you the individual watching this video would like to just go buy a bunch of these servers go on there and fill it out the form and you can get a price right online and figure out what you want to build now i will time index everything down below as i go through this review in case you want to jump to some of the just the hardware parts of this but a few other things about the 45 drives company and why i like them we've been actually going back and forth they sent me this shirt i think over a year ago i joke with them back and forth on twitter but i really like what they're doing if you check out their channel you'll see that they have a lot of videos on storage topics specifically a lot of high-end storage topics and this is something really neat about them as a company is their open source beliefs and really strong advocates of open source software means they're not videos just about the 45 drives unit matter of fact the software i'll be using on here their houston system which is based on cockpit all the extra tools they added are also posted on github so the zfs manager to what we're using to set this up later in the video is something you can get yourself and you can go through their install process they keep good documentation so they're really solid on providing a lot of good information not necessarily related at all to 45 drives but also helpful if you have any type of storage server at all but they probably would love it if you bought one of these nonetheless i think they've done a good job of educating the public which is something i like to do a lot of you know throwing a lot of videos talking about storage and they dive deep into a couple large topics on there all right now to get to the hardware right here and we will start with as i said we have 30 14 terabyte exo strides by seagate these are their enterprise drives now while they are not blazing fast we do have 30 of them so that does provide us with 420 terabytes of raw storage here with all the zfs and the design we're going to be using for this with a series of v-dubs that'll provide us enough resiliency to keep our data from going up in smoke now on to the other hardware specs now that we know what drives you're going in here this has a super micro x11 spl dash f board the xeon silver 4210 2.2 gigahertz 128 gigs of ddr4 memory two sas 9305-16i host bus adapters and i'll give a little bit closer look at some of the devices in here but one of the things you may have noticed that i rattled off parts that you can just buy yourself this is something about their design i really like they've created a server based on commodity hardware as in this is an atx motherboard this is not a unusual design this is a super micro essentially off the shelf board not proprietary not absolutely unique to 45 drives this is important for a lot of people because for server life cycles many times you'll buy a storage server and the board and everything is all integrated together and it's all one unit with very little flexibility on changing things so once the unit becomes well towards end of life you don't even have the option of hey we could extend the life of adding a faster processor or changing out the motherboard that's just very difficult or even impossible on some proprietary storage servers by using commodity hardware you're able to increase the lifecycle a matter of fact it may last quite a bit longer because you're like hey the storage has not run out i still find all the storage relevant we haven't filled it up the board could be a little faster we could use a little more performance on there for some software we're running you can swap that board out and then keep the storage that also gets me to the back plane these are direct wired backplanes these sas hbas in the back that you see here are wired to this back plane and it is wired in a way that is non-proprietary again now they did produce these type of pcb boards and this special holder that we have right here and this holder's really clever the way it holds everything together so we don't have any sleds holding the drive in matter of fact it is really tight and i like the way that these little i'm going to call them fingers but their metal springs are both just bolted in here as in that little nuts on them holding them in they're flexible but if you did something horrible and somehow trashed it in some way or wore one out or bent one because you let a amateur play with it but they're pretty durable i don't think they're easy to break but they are replaceable and that goes to a lot of the design that they have here the entire system is screwed together not pop over together between the faceplate and everything else and when we dive a little bit deeper with the overhead in a second here you'll see when you're looking at it this is a really well-made case the way they put it all together and then put everything together with screws there's only eight screws holding this in holds it in really tight but once these screws are in it's solid you don't need any type of bracketing or screws to put in the drives allows you to easily hot swap them now the pcb board and the backplane these are direct wired they're not using any type of system that splits up so you have one sata cable going between several drives it's all direct wire they also have staggered start options in here and this is one of the advantages you get with your own custom pcb i'll leave a link to where they do a video diving a little bit deeper on that topic but it allows them to stagger the startup of the drives this is really important because when you take this q30 which is 30 drives but then they also make some of the even larger systems with you know up to 60 hard drives i believe is the largest one they have available as of march 2021 that's a lot of drives to start at once and the power supply can get quite stressed by that so staggering up the startup because the drives use a lot of power to first spin up but then to maintain the rpms is a lot less juice so staggering startup allows for a more even flow of power as opposed to any surges which are well generally not great for power supplies or power systems in general so that's one of the advantage they have and this pcb not riveted in either just a series of screws holding it in tight so very serviceable somehow once again someone were to do something like just jam a drive in there so hard that they've managed to break it you can completely just pop that out and replace it so it's a very serviceable unit all the way around now let's talk about airflow we have three 120 millimeter fans in the front that pull all the air in across the rows of drives the second road drives that's normally here and i've already taken the screws out of this and i wanted to show these set on little dowel pins to make even this part easily removable and sets in place to line it back up but these are three more hundred and twenty millimeter san ace 120 fans the same as the ones in the front this allows us to have a solid airflow that goes all the way across and then all the fins on all the subsequent hardware back here is also in the same position so all the air can come in from the front and go completely out the back there are no side vents and once the lid is put on this it's tight this is a typical storage server or rack mount server configuration so all of the air fresh air comes in the front and warm air blows out the back now the power supply yes this is only a single power supply unit but you can get these with a hot swap option now looking at the back of it you notice that yes it has a standard back plate so that can be swapped out if you're putting in a different motherboard so you can find one to match the general motherboard should come with the power button which maybe i'm too excited about but boy that's a satisfying click you get out of this it is an industrial control switch it's not your usual tiny little momentary contact switch they actually put a really nice one here and it's got a little blue light that comes on when it's plugged in now the other thing of note the back of this is not part of just a pressed steel the back actually comes off as you can see you have little nuts holding this on so you can actually if you wanted to unscrew parts of this and let it come apart further sliding it down a little bit here is that standard pattern for a standard atx power supply now if you get the hot swap model they come looking differently but on this one like i said it's standardized i would say this system lives up to the queue in its name on being quiet this server is below 60 decibels which means it's easy for me to talk over it but the noise cancellation in my system probably means you're not really noticing the fan noise nonetheless we're going to dive into the software on this device now also for those wondering as it's configured right now idling it uses about 330 watts a little bit more on startup but once those drives are up and running like i said idling around that many watts now let's dive into the software because there's a lot to talk about here and there's a lot of options you can have with these systems being that well they run whatever software you want to put on them now we're going to start here at the 45 drives site where you order their systems right under here where you can choose your custom logo and i love that feature it is really cool you also get to customize or choose what software you want to put on here they offer centos debian freenas trunas ubuntu windows 10 windows server 2019 and turn server 2016. they also have a no operating system option so you don't have to have it preloaded with anything if you plan just to do it all yourself now going over to the motherboard itself before we get into the houston software it is a standard super micro with their ipmi back end management so it has a separate dedicated network port for this and this allows you to manage this without having to hook a kvm directly to it i can read sensor readings temperature get a back end control of it and of course we have the remote control and a remote control console is completely html5 i love that the older ones were always that weird java implementations that were a little bit more difficult but nonetheless having full remote access without having to hook up a kvm when you're putting a bunch of these in a rack makes it a lot easier in case you have to manage it and don't have physical easy access to it or like me it's more couple sit in my office doing this than going in the other room so from here i can reboot it change configuration change fam modes etc go through all the different options they have in here including if i wanted to have more than one user it does have the tie-in for active directory which seems a little excessive but i guess in large corporate environments it probably makes sense to uh have active directory tie into your back-end management to be able to have people logging in when they need to get into this all right now let's dive into the cockpit of this the houston command center now i'm not confusing the two houston command center is essentially a skin put on top of cockpit they are actively developing a lot of functionality into this and i did a video a couple years ago on the cockpit system it's a really cool system i might do an updated video on it because well i really like it and at the time we did it there weren't many plugins 45 drives and a few other people have started really developing this and as i said you can find us on our github and they've really built some extensive plugins and by extensive i mean they've got the entire zfs manager here now we can still manage the entire system from the command line so we can actually just go here or ssh in i can do zpool status and get an idea of the status on the pools in here now if you were watching my live stream i did the other day you'll see we made a youtube live pool and we'll go ahead and recreate that again in here so i don't have any data on this and show you how it's done and before we get to that i want to show you this because these are some of the other customizations that are still available on github but of course these ones right here one is reading the hardware are specific to 45 drives and now here is the layout for the system that we have and 45 drives because they pre-loaded a bunch of ones pre-configured this to do a read for the drives that are in there now the first time i open it it pauses to do that read so we'll go back here to networking and go here you can see it doesn't pause a second time it re-pulls that information the first time you pull it up after it's been booted because it wants to know what drive changes haven't made and if i force refresh this it'll take a second and it'll re-pull all the drive information and what it's pulling is all the exact information about the drives as it's known at the time of this refresh this is really handy because it's even give me information about which zfs pool this is tied to but not only do i know which drive belongs to what part of which pool it will also give me those finer grain details like some of the smart status settings and exactly what bay each drive is in when i click on it so i can look at this drive that's in bay 1-4 i can see it's part of the youtube live pool which actually all of them are that pool we built was using all the drives i can see the temperature of that drive matter of fact if you're curious about the temperature difference so this is 28c for that one and we go here 29c so are the drives in the back a little bit warmer than the ones in the front yeah about one degree and this has been running for a couple hours i've left it on for some time to let it build up a little heat because i know that question will come up and that just kind of makes sense with the fans here it's going to push a little bit more cool air here and the air warms up et cetera to get to the back of the drives but they're really within one degree of each other so plenty of cooling still going on the other really nice thing they've added is this the 45 dries motherboard i really like how it's going to go through read the motherboard settings and now we have this remember i said these were hba sas 9305 161 and which slots are plugged into yes it does know that and gives us that information and the memory is right here includes the brand and manufacturer of the memory memory temperature gives me the processor processor temperature and then down here are where those two drives are the two boot drives are plugged in in the back as you seen in the case and these are the status ports that they are plugged into it doesn't just tell me this data port and the drive it also gives me the file system layout on there these are just some niceties when you are dealing with especially a large rack filled with servers or maybe you don't remember which one each one being able to go into this houston ui and be able to go hey let's see what's in this particular board i think this is just a really cool feature that they put in here like this you also just have a general overview which is this one right here 45 drive system and gives you some other overview stats kind of like a more brief snapshot the chassis the model the serial numbers in here pretty straightforward tells me it's got the super micro motherboard in here the only thing and they can do this it by default is not customized it just has the standard logo but you know i imagine they could swap it out for a different graphic or you could do this yourself just change out the graphics now you can control inside of the houston ui this networking functionality the storage devices all these functions can be controlled in here now the two boot devices are set up in a raid so it does have the option to control the raid which is separate than the zfs because this is used using the linux raid zfs is using linux and cfs so let's go ahead and destroy the pool and show you what it looks like to create a pool so we'll go ahead and destroy storage pool and we'll just restart the samba service and everything you don't have to we're also going to clear the label because i actually want to make sure we unmount this and wipe it and that way we're importing these clean go ahead and like this all right the drive has been successfully cleared so we're going to go over here and we'll hit create storage pool and we'll call this another demo we can call actually whatever we want but you can give it the name here i'm not going to be permanently keeping this one so let's call it another demo so i know it's demo data on here and we're going to change the option for how it sees the drives to device alias now when you set it to all these different options like block device disk hardware path or device alias device alias means it will give it the name 1-4 so each one of these correspond to the location that they are inside of the 45 drives unit i like that it has this as an option for setting these up so we'll go and let's build in raid z2 10 drives at a time three sets of them giving us the total of 30 drives so we're going to go ahead and click this 10 times so now we only have to create the first set so we did the first set device alias called it another demo and i'll go ahead and hit create now that we've successfully created a storage pool we need to expand it and this is where i've brought this up before and it's a function of zfs no you can't just randomly add drives to cfs but you can symmetrically add more v devs to an existing v dev pool so you have the pool you have the v dubs and i want to add another 10 drives and then another 10 drives the way you do that is we're going to go here we can start from either status and see what we have in terms of all these drives and we want to click on the three dots for this pool we want to add a virtual device to this pool and we have to choose raid z2 again and we're going to choose device alias again to keep with consistency we check the next 10. don't click 11 or you get an error and now one more time to add the last piece of it add virtual device rate z2 spice alias all right and now we have all three of these set up so we have three groups of ten three v devs of ten drives for this particular configuration there's lots of debate that's probably gonna go on in the comments there's many ways to set up zfs that are for optimal for storage or optimal for speed we're not going to get into that discussion right now so someone will be upset that i set it up as 10 wide anyways we get off topic on that now you can see the total amount of storage i have available on here and now we can start creating more data sets underneath it and that is facilitated here so we can say all right we want to create another one it has the options uh some data set then we have all the little options down here is it going to be an nfs share so we have that option or is it going to be a samba share we can enable as a samba share and then mount things to it now i will leave some links they have some videos where they break down how to tie this not only to do a samba share but to go a step further and tie this even into active directory because if you're setting this up to serve as an active directory server this allows you to easily tie this into your ad system build a data set or a couple data sets as a samba share and then from there on all the permissions are going to be handled just like any normal windows 80 system and they have a whole video already on that topic so i'll spare you going through me slowly going through this because i get how to do it but i have not done it much but i've been doing some more testing with this like i said in the future i'll do some more videos on how this works but it's pretty straightforward creating things like some data set for samba we'll do one more great file system we'll just call this one some nfs share that was called some nfs good enough nfs 3 and now it's created that one there now let's go back over to the dis and let's go ahead and refresh this one more time and now you can see we've got another demo in there so the system once you refresh now realizes that these belong to a different z-pool and this is kind of a show in the beginning where yes it automatically can switch back and forth between these so as you rebuild these and if there's multiple pools it would still let you know which pool this is just really handy to have especially if you you know with 30 drives it's a lot in figuring out which drive has a problem it gets that much more of a problem when you buy one of their larger 60 drive systems which is why this is really important that way anytime you have a drive that needs to be serviced you'll know which bay which one you'll be able to go there whether this is at a data center or in your rack pull it out know exactly which bay needs to be replaced and then go ahead and swap it and all these drives of course are hot swappable with that backplane so you're able just to you know shut it down replace it re-silver it and zfs will do the magic for the rest on there and they do have these options inside of here as well you can take a disk you can clear disk errors offline a disk or replace a disk if you have another one available there's not currently one available in here because well we used them all for this particular setup you kind of get the idea it will display all this and as i mentioned if you load cockpit on something like well ubuntu server that we have here in our lab and i log into it i loaded the zfs module on here from 45 drives they have that coil instruction how to do it and all the same options pop right up i can still create these mirrors do the same things and i really like this because this is not anything proprietary to 45 drives this is open source that they're contributing back to that allows you to use this elsewhere without any 45 drive server this is just a virtual machine we have in our lab it doesn't have any discs in it so i can't really build on our zfs uh but i did had a couple of add a couple virtual just to another one for one of my other learning experiences i would say i'm working on uh to show that yes this works perfectly fine even when it's not on a 45 drive system just you know in case people are wondering about how that works or you just want to try all the software i do encourage checking out the houston system because i think it's pretty neat and the cockpit system itself offers it's some cool options including this one right here even though i'm logged in over here let's go over this system and log in and be able to do this you can tie together systems like this so we'll close this extra windows we have open and switch between them so you can use cockpit not just on one system and not just on 45 drive systems but multitudes of systems that are all running the cockpit system i think it's kind of neat the way this works and it does give you some cool things like dashboards or cpu memory network io and then be able to switch between them very quickly so go over to a different dashboard and take a look at the system health view details etc on each one of these systems now one other thing worth mentioning is the fact that they have the logs in here as well so if you're want to parse through some of the logs it's actually rather clever how this works so you can say only these only critical and above only warnings and above so you can go through log history and that goes for both of these systems here so any of the logs i want to go through i just jump right in there and say all right only emergency logs or critical and above logs same process like i said it's the same software on either side all right so we have the 45 drives unit installed in our rack studio here 45 drives did provide rails with this unit as well and they are absolutely buttery smooth for sliding this unit in and out now my studio rack is actually moved forward a couple feet it's on wheels as well and i was impressed with the fact that yes it's running right now and i'm not trying to talk over it uh i did that on purpose so one it's just in reach so i'd like to get out of my chair to slide it out like this and to show you that it's very accessible even though the drives you know come in from the top down popping the lid off and reaching the drives and then sliding them back in there with the lid back on no problem and even with the lid off it's still relatively quiet so it does live up to its name of the q model and that's standing for quiet now if you'd like to learn more about 45 drives head over to their youtube channel they have a ton of great information not just on their products but overall on storage servers and linux and a lot of great topics they dive into especially some of the really large enterprise stuff and i've certainly spent some time binge watching your content they also if you want to purchase their units as i said it's a direct sales model they offer where you can go right to their website customize their system without even having to talk to a person i know for a lot of us uh technical people that is great when we don't have to talk to people we can just get a price on something 45 drives get you covered on that as well all right leave questions comments below and thanks this thing weighs a lot maybe this was a mistake mistakes may have been made hold on we're almost on my side oh look at this no i didn't even what no no someone's probably going you guys are doing it wrong probably you're good you're good stop stop and then we can use this to hide what's going on back here because i know the wiring is bad someone's going to comment um this is the studio rack this is uh been professionally reassembled a bunch of times but uh we'll get it better but cool look at that and they uh they did provide all the rails and everything so that's just that glides really nice except for it's running into all the wires but it actually still glides really nice all right we're good and thank you for making it to the end of this video if you enjoyed this content please give it a thumbs up if you'd like to see more content from this channel hit the subscribe button and the bell icon to hire a shared project head over to lawrences.com and click on the hires button right at the top to help this channel out in other ways there is a join button here for youtube and a patreon page where your support is greatly appreciated for deals discounts and offers check out our affiliate links in the descriptions of all of our videos including a link to our shirt store where we have a wide variety of shirts and new designs come out well randomly so check back frequently and finally our forums forums.laurensystems.com is where you can have a more in-depth discussion about this video and other tech topics covered on this channel thank you again and we look forward to hearing from you in the meantime check out some of our other videos you

Channel: Lawrence Systems

Views: 41,185

Keywords: lawrencesystems, 45 Drives Storinator Review, 45drives storinator, 45 drives review, 45 drives, storage server, hard drive, server storage, video production, video production storage, 45 drives q30

Id: 3OpwUnuL6Zk

Length: 28min 41sec (1721 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 26 2021