How To Build A 10Gb/s Network/Server

this is the server or technically Nazz device that we have been using at eff stoppers for the last four years believe it or not this thing has about 80 terabytes of storage in it we also have an expansion unit which is totally full as well but as we hire more people and as we move to 4k video this thing is starting to slow down so the most logical upgrade was this this is our Newton as device or server by Synology but what makes this different aside from its incredible weight and size is that on the back are dual ten gigabit ethernet ports now in all honesty this server is probably overkill for you it may even be overkill for us but we needed more space and we wanted more speed and this thing is all about moving over to 10 gigabit we love Synology products because they are so simple to use they have their own operating system called the DiskStation manager that anyone can instantly figure out and if you simply want more storage this thing basically works right out of the box but with DSM you also have the ability to do so much more including snaps job replication automatic cloud backup and you can even host your own website from it believe it or not Synology makes a far more affordable unit that has all of these same features and still has 10 gigabit speed for a fraction of the price we're gonna talk about that a little bit later in this video anyway back to our build here the first thing that you're going to have to do when you get any sort of NAS device or network access storage device is you need to install hard drives in it and of course because the thing is going to be running all the time it's going to be accessed by computers potentially 24 hours a day you want special high-end enterprise level hard drives and Synology recommends that we use Seagate so we went with Seagate iron wolf pro drives Seagate has partnered with Synology to create the iron wolf health management application that runs on the nest itself this application can access proprietary sensors in these drives to warn you earlier if the drives happen to have an issue what's also cool about the pro drive specifically is that Seagate will give you a two year recovery plan with those drives if you happen to lose data for any reason so if one of the drives fails simply because it's getting old or it has a problem they will pay to get that data back or if you have something like fire damage or water damage they're going to pay to recover that data as well totally for free we decided to get some of the biggest drives currently on the market and we installed 12 10 terabyte hard drives which gave us technically a hundred and twenty terabytes of storage in this unit now to connect this server to all of the devices in our office we actually need to create a network where everything is connected together to do that we need to use a switch now we've had mini which is that we've used in the past with our last server but the issue is an average switch has only one gigabit speed being that this is a ten gigabit server we need a new 10 gigabit switch I went shopping for switches and was shocked to see how expensive they can be but luckily there is a relatively affordable Netgear version which we decided to buy now to connect everything together we need specialized ethernet cable you can't just use some old cat5 Ethernet cable and expect 10 gigabit transfer speeds so we ended up going online and buying 30 cat 7 cables now the final piece of the puzzle is getting 10 gigabit speed into your computer most laptops these days don't have Ethernet ports at all and although most desktop computers do I haven't seen any besides the new iMac Pro that actually has 10 gigabit ethernet natively installed so we had to buy specialized PCI Express 10 gigabit cards for all of our desktop computers in the office so that the computers could actually accept the much faster 10 gigabit speeds now before we permanently installed this entire system we decided to plug the nas directly into one of our computers turn it on for the first time and set it up and we realized right off the bat there is an issue that we never expected alright ok it's not as loud but this thing is still it's pretty loud so this thing sounds like a jet engine it was way louder than we ever expected but before we did the permanent install of this we decided to set it up and we decided to use raid 6 which would allow two drives to fail before any data would be lost now looking at the pictures of this thing online it doesn't look that big and that's because you can't see how far back it goes we just assumed that it was going to be about the same depth as our switches and we thought it would fit in our current small nice little rack well it doesn't come close to fitting in our current rack so we looked into buying something that actually could house this thing and they cost more than the unit itself so that was certainly off of the table for us at the beginning we just assumed ok we'll just stick it on the ground or kind of lean it up against the current rack that we have because we we don't need any sort of expansion ports for this at the moment but the noise was really a problem we don't have a door for the room that we wanted to keep this in so we had to come up with another option we ended up moving this thing into Patrick's home which is another structure from this building we ran cables to it to an area where Patrick keeps all of the security cameras and that has worked perfect for us not only is it a large enough room to keep it nice and cool but it also has a door that can closed so nobody can hear this thing humming away and it can make all the noise that it wants to so then we started running cat 7 cable all over our office and into Patrick's house and we thought everything was fine until we booted it all up and tried to log in with all of the different computers and we realized some of the computers are showing 10 gigabit speed and some were not I don't know if it's cheap cables I don't know if it's the length of the cables but it seems like the new cat 7 cables that we bought if they are 200 foot cables will not transfer 10 gigabit speed half the cables that we ran or 200 feet and they do not work so I'm going to have to return these cables we're gonna have to go up in the ceiling redo all of this so we went back online bought more cat seven cable and this time before we ran it into the ceiling we did a test directly from the switch into a computer to guarantee that we could actually get 10 gigabit speeds so the cool thing about this switch is we can just look at the colors and tell what speed it's at so when it's green we know it's 10 gigabit if it's orange it's just a single gigabit this one doesn't work cat 7 flat patch cord cable oh my gosh this is so crazy I purposefully ordered a ton of different brands on Amazon and I'm going to leave negative reviews for all the ones that can't actually do 10 gigabit because I don't think it's really cat 7 cable I think it's all fake the good thing we're testing this before we run the wires again now at this moment we only have 5 devices that actually need to get 10 gigabit speed and that is the 5 desktop computers that we installed the new ethernet cards into we have many other computers including laptops that may or may not have Ethernet we also have printers and all of these things do not require 10 gigabit speed so what we've done is we've used both of our switches our new 10 gigabit switch and our older single gigabit switch and what we've done is we've run fast cat 7 cables with 10 gigabit speed from the new switch to all of our important computers and then we've taken one ethernet cable and run it into the old switch and then from that switch we have run out to all of our other devices by using both of these switches together we can plug everything in that we need but we didn't have to spend as much money buying a much larger and more expensive 10 gigabit switch now for what everybody has been waiting for let's do some speed tests here but before we get into it let me tell you the difference between a bit and a byte if you transfer something to your computer or copy something from one folder to another or download something from the internet your computer is probably going to measure that in megabytes per second or 1000 bytes per second 25 megabytes per second is 25,000 bytes per second some things though like network speeds are measured in bits rather than bytes and there are eight bits and a byte that would be a lot easier if there were 10 but there's eight this means that a standard ethernet cable that is capable of transferring speeds of one gigabit per second is capable of transferring data at 125 five megabytes per second luckily for us in our initial test of the speeds of our old server we were getting right around that speed 100 to 125 megabytes per second the new server blew our minds when it was able to download at over 400 megabytes per second that is unbelievable to us because the internal SSD inside of our computers was actually maxing out those speed limitations are actually set by the motherboard and the SATA cable that is connected to the SSD itself so we were super excited when we saw these speeds because we thought oh my gosh we are maxing out with computer is able to pull what we have to do now is pull from multiple computers at the same time and see if the server can keep up with these crazy speeds so for the next test we decided to pull the exact same file from five computers at the exact same time we started with the old server and just like we expected instead of downloading at 125 megabytes per computer all of that was split by five so we were averaging right around 20 to 25 megabytes per computer so as you can see with five or more people connected to the server all at once pulling data you're really starting to share that bandwidth and that's when things are going to start to slow down now the new server should have lots of bandwidth to spare so we did the exact same test and we were shocked with what we found all right we now have five of our desktop computers hooked up with 10 gigabit we're going to drag over a 28 gigabyte folder that's on the new rack server over to our desktops all at the exact same time and let's see what speeds we get are you guys ready here we go so we all started downloading the same file and at the beginning it seemed to be a bit slower on my computer it was only downloading around 100 megabytes per second but after just a few seconds the speed started to skyrocket now as I went from computer to computer we didn't have consistent speeds over 400 megabytes per second but I would definitely say the average speed for each of these computers was around 200 to 400 megabytes per second per computer absolutely amazing now we've been using the system for about month now and one of the biggest time savers that we have found is the ability to upload almost unlimited memory cards at the exact same time without any sort of slowdown now with our old server if we transferred two cards at the same time the speeds would be cut in half and if we transferred four they would be cut down to 25% so what this means for us if we're out shooting a project we come back and we have 10 memory cards to upload we can actually upload them 10 times faster than we could with the old Nazz server now this server running raid 6 gives us approximately 90 terabytes worth of storage and we're estimating that that's going to last us around two years before we need to upgrade luckily with Synology in this particular unit and many of their other much smaller units when you run out of space you don't have to buy a complete new Nazz system you can simply buy an expansion unit so when this unit does finally fill up we're not going to have to take it offline we're simply going to add to it now you may be watching this and saying hey 10 gigabit makes sense for F stoppers you guys have a lot of people accessing a server all at once you need those super speeds but what does this have to do with me if you're the average type of photographer who's just taking pictures casually and editing a few pictures at a time you're probably right and you won't see any sort of speed difference whatsoever but if you start working permanently off of your NAS device like we do if you start editing videos off of it or you start uploading and downloading and editing weddings off of it you will see a significant change in the speed because you will be getting internal SSD speeds while working on an external device and you may be asking well why would I want to work on an external device well there's two main reasons one you'll have almost unlimited storage when you work on an external device and two you'll have the peace of mind that everything is being backed up and it is redundant when it's on the nez if you're working on a standard desktop computer although you may have internal raid most people do not and you could have a drive failure in the middle of working on a project and you could lose everything so you're probably wondering how in the world can I get 10 gigabit speeds for a reasonable price well luckily for you Synology just came out with a new much smaller Nazz device which only holds eight drives it's actually the exact same size as our older unit that we used to use and this thing only costs eight hundred and seventy dollars and it has dual ten gigabit ports on the back you're not gonna have to deal with any of the space issues that we dealt with you're not gonna have to deal with any of the noise this little unit is made for home or small office use and you're gonna be blown away by the speeds that you can get out of this little thing you probably also don't need as much storage as we do so instead of buying the 10 terabyte Seagate iron wolf pro drives you may just want to get the standard iron wolf drives and maybe you want six terabyte drives you're going to save a lot of money that way as well if you only have one computer that needs 10 gigabit speed you may not actually need to buy a new 10 gigabit switch at all you could run an Ethernet cable directly from the Nunez right into the new Ethernet port on the back of your desktop computer and get 10 gigabit speeds without spending that extra money so now with a fraction of the price of our insane server build that we have here at F Stoppers you're going to be able to get comparable speeds in your home office and I guarantee you it's going to completely change the way that you work if you're already in the market for an as storage device like this I highly suggest going ahead spinning the extra couple hundred bucks and moving to 10 gigabit single gigabit speed is on the way out you want a future proof yourself and you want a device that you're going to be able to use for years to come if you'd like more free content like this you can always head over to F stoppers comm and if you'd like to check out our full-length professional photography tutorials head over to F stoppers comm slash store [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Fstoppers

Views: 1,030,921

Keywords: lee morris, patrick hall, fstoppers, synology, server, nas, RS18017xs+, DiskStation DS1817, 10Gb/s, 10Gbps, cat 7, how to create home network

Id: RGVPeB98zWI

Length: 15min 29sec (929 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 23 2017