THIS $130 TAPE CAN HOLD 30TB!

last year we built Margaret a server wise beyond her years that win new cost more than 30 thousand US dollars sadly her former employer rejected her threw her to the wayside in favor of someone newer and faster and sexier but fear not because we here at snazzy labs saved her from the annals of eBay purchasing the entire server for less than $3,000 once she arrived at the office we took her and courier to the brim with 24 big disks note the s at a magnum size total capacity of 336 terabytes and ever since then things have been basically perfect we used her as our live edit server and so all of our machines here are connected by a 10 gig Ethernet and what this allows us to do is edit all of our videos directly off the server nothing is stored on these machines this is excellent for a number of reasons which I'm not really going to get into I've explained that in the prior video but we store all of our video projects on the server we store all of our assets we store an entire archive of all the videos I've ever made as well as most of the videos that Apple has ever made at more than 500 gigabytes of total storage it's been about eight months and Margaret is now 15 percent full that's not that much our total unformatted capacity or 4matic capacity is 177 heavy bytes we've used 30 1.2 40 bytes which is about 35 terabytes the problem is that Margaret and this is no fault of hers has a bit of an issue this server is not it's not a backup it is redundant it uses ZFS which is a very cool file system that allows us to if I open this up and show you right here zpool status you can see we have three what are known as V devs they're basically a cluster of 8 hard drives in each V death and in each of these V devs which there are 3 8 16 and 24 total disks we can lose two disks at any given time and then we can still insert those disks back into the server and repopulate and not lose any data the problem is that if we were to lose three of these disks or if the server itself were to have a bit of a conniption we would be in trouble we would lose basically everything the entire pool and why have a cool server like this and save everything that we do if it means we're maybe going to lose it in the future yeah there are reasons and a lot of people have asked well why do you save all of your raw footage because well we we reuse a lot of her footage we've reused video in this video from a video we shot a year ago and the advantage to shooting in RAW is is that as our talents improve we can fix the color correction and identify and utilize Clips that we didn't use the first time around just makes things a lot easier as mentioned we don't want to lose this stuff and eventually we are going to run out of room if our current rate of video production continues we're gonna be out of space in about a year and a half so what do we do just start deleting old stuff no I have a solution this video is sponsored by rates at O Legends a turn-based RPG that means aside it's 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cloud for a couple of reasons number one we just don't have the bandwidth this is a business location and business Internet is a freaking ripoff we pay several hundred dollars per month for Xfinity business which is 50 megabits per second down and 20 megabits per second up sucks this would mean with the 500 gigs to one terabyte of data that we have to upload per month we're looking at basically our internet connection at all times hardly ideal now you might suggest well just go with fiber we have looked into fiber installations but to install the equipment we're looking at a minimum installation cost of $2000 and then we'd have to sign a three-year contract with our fiber line costing about $600 per month that is not economically viable let's pretend that the internet isn't really an issue and we can just start uploading data to the cloud cloud storage really isn't as cheap as a lot of people think if we were to use something like Amazon s3 which allows us to quickly upload our data and then retrieve it in the future if we need it pretty easily you're looking at about two and a half cents per gigabyte to store that data per month what this means is that with our current storage needs we'd be spending about eight hundred twenty-five dollars per month and it's only going to get more expensive as our data increases now you can use something like Amazon glacier which is really intended for long term catastrophic storage it's a lot cheaper to store per month we could upload everything for about a hundred and twenty-five dollars per month and that would only swell to a couple hundred dollars at most but it's very slow and if and when you need to retrieve data it is extremely expensive and still slow it's mostly used as a data insurance rather than a viable data backup so we've decided to do this introducing Edith you might be thinking that's just a that's just a Mac Mini what's special about that well this is only half of Edith the other half it's right here this is an LTO drive Linear Tape open is what it stands for and before we get into actually installing this I want to talk to you about what it does how it works and why we're going with it tape why would you oh yes we are shooting this on a different day thank you for noticing tape why would you want to use that over something like an SSD or a hard drive well there's a number of reasons but the primary motivator is cost if you're using the latest generation 8 of LTO tapes these things can store 12 terabytes uncompressed and 30 terabytes compressed if you're working with a lot of text and images these run for about a hundred and thirty dollars now things get even cheaper if you jump back a generation with LTO 7 now these only store half as much at 6 terabytes but you can pick these up for about $40 new that's a lot cheaper than say a 12 terabyte hard drive which runs about 450 to 500 dollars for one that's reliable long-term now there are other advantages to using tape one of them is that they are a completely different storage medium than hard drives and so if you follow the three backups on two different formats in one different location then using LTO as opposed to storing everything on a hard drive is a good way to go furthermore they're magnetic and so they last forever hard drives are not really suited for long-term storage these things you can leave in a closet for fifteen to thirty years without any issues whatsoever and then the last reason is their speed these things can transfer data at about 300 megabytes per second very very fast as opposed to something like well a hard drive that caps out about 125 now there are some downsides and that is initial investment while the medium itself is relatively inexpensive the drives are not this is one made by M logic which was very graciously provided to us for this video they make the M tape which is a desktop unit and the M rack which we're going to be installing into Margaret these things run several thousand dollars you're looking at anywhere from four to six thousand dollars and that's for any brand out there one of the reasons why I think M logic does a very good job of this is a this is an attractive looking unit and then B it interfaces over thunderbolt which is awesome because a thunderbolt is fast but B Thunderbolt is more Mac OS friendly yo yata which is the software that is very frequently utilized to deal with LTO tapes because it is an open standard so you can use whatever app you want but you gotta is one of the most popular options out there it's a Mac OS only app and so we figure well if I'm going to use a Mac OS app and use a Mac why not use a device with Thunderbolt that is designed to work friendly with a Mac and so M logic makes awesome solutions for this and it's definitely worth checking out if you're interested in LTO long term but there are downsides to LTO one is that it's linear tape open tapes are not like hard drives where you can go to a specific sector disk this is a very very long tape and so if you're retrieving data you can't really like randomly click and see stuff it's it's meant to be read linearly so you have to write to it in a linear fashion and then you have to read from it in a linear fashion this is fine for video because video is very large files they're not that many in number but something like tons of tiny text documents you might need to be going back and forth back and forth and back and forth on this tape which is very loud the tapes do have an estimated life you can't just run these for years and years you'll only write full tape rights they recommend about 150 to 200 times which is a lot but not enough to just kind of go back and fetch stuff when you want you kind of write these to tape and then the software will remember on what position on what tape it's on and then on what position in the tape your file is located and then you can retrieve it and so it's really designed to be like an oh crap we accidentally deleted something or we lost our stuff let's write back most of the tapes contents to disk rather than finding one specific little tiny file although technically you can't do that it's just not as fast as something like a hard drive even though the total transfer rate is higher are you bored yet now while desktop units are cool we already have an existing server rack so I figured well let's just take an LTO eight tape drive and throw it into a rack this is M logics M rack it's about five hundred dollars more than their desktop unit but what it allows us to do is mount it directly alongside Margaret and we're going to use the Mac Mini as the host computer to run yo yadda the problem is is that well this isn't really designed to fit in a server well at least not without this bring my knife so hang on all right here we go let's pokin this thing up this is a very expensive and overpriced box from SONET now solid partners with Apple to make a lot of kind of Mak specific stuff and this is their accessory that allows you to mount two Mac minis inside of a single 1u depth server the problem is is that I've heard build quality is quite a bit mul and it is not cheap at two hundred dollars for one of these things I was able to get it on Amazon for a little bit less money than retail but not by much there it is it's just a stupid metal box it is redesigned though for this year's 2018 Mac minis these these are i7s we have an i7 and this thing gets really hot we bought this used the specs on this are pretty weird it's an i7 with 32 gigs of memory 10 gig LAN which is very important because we need to connect to Margaret with this thing but it only has a 128 gig internal SSD that's not that big of a deal because we don't really need to store anything internally but what it does mean is that I bought this used on eBay for a pretty good deal because no one on earth other than me wants to buy this and no one on earth other than me will want to buy it when I try and sell it in a few years so this is ours forever yeah yay okay let's fit the Mac Mini whoa let's fit the Mac Mini inside this thing okay this is pretty hilarious because you've got your Mac Mini here we just insert this into the little box which is pretty easy and there's a little bit of foam at the back to keep it in place from sliding back out and then you've got these kind of USB extensions that you can plug in since we're only using one Mac Mini I figure Yolo let's use both of them even though you're supposed to rackmount - and then this is where things get very goofy the power button is at the back of Mac Mini back here that's hardly easy to reach but you want to be able to toggle power from the front of the server should you need to so they have this button on the front that runs down this very long rod and then the rod pokes this little plastic piece and that is the worst feeling button I've ever felt and look at that it's it's it's not unprecedent it's stuck little shoddy that button oh man that could not be less satisfying I hope it doesn't hold it down but then it actually works I can't tell I guess we'll find out when we plug it in screw this thing back together okay moment of truth we'll plug the power in back here wow that that could not be a worse feeling button oh oh did it work yeah Wow two hundred dollars well spent you know else cost two hundred dollars an addiction to rage hat on this server rack which was a little more is actually two hundred forty dollars but I picked it up on Facebook marketplace you might be wondering don't charity have a server rack yeah kind of Margaret server rack is a nineteen you rack standard half size rack is twenty four you and this is a full-size rack at forty two you what the heck is a you yeah I wondered the same thing it's basically this it's about two inches probably and it's the measurement by which standard equipment in servers is measured so Margaret is a to you our new LTO drive is a 1u and our disk shelf where all the hard drives are is a for you so we just need more space and that's why I ended up getting one of these racks it's an old actually dell enterprise rack new these are several thousand dollars and we got ours for again two hundred forty bucks so not a bad deal but this allows for future expansion and then it also has something very important that Margaret's current system doesn't have and that's these cage nuts cage nuts kind of are the norm in in computer mounting hardware now and really all it is is a nut placed with bent stainless steel now why would you use something like this as opposed to a threaded screw hole like there is our Margaret's rack well there's a number of advantages if you need a higher density or higher gauge screw a thicker screw for heavier loads you can add one of those if you accidentally strip one you can just throw the nut away and put a new one in it cost twenty cents and you're good to go Margaret doesn't have that and most computer hardware is designed for that so I had to kind of jerry-rigged it about a year ago to get it to work and then when I started to pull it apart I was like you know what this is gonna to get all this new equipment in and we're gonna run out of space anyway I saw this on Facebook marketplace it was $240 and I figured let's just send it and get a full-size server rack so here it is will be the perfect phone for both Margaret and Edith okay so we took Margaret out of her old server rack we put her and Edith into the new server rack and it all went according to plan everything worked out great right no it didn't we did hit some roadblocks along the way but nothing too big of a problem our door for example uh it's not attached to the server we need a different mounting hardware and we still need a keyboard and mouse along with a monitor that will either get from an e recycler or from a surplus kind of location so that we don't send another piece of tech to the landfill so that we can use this as an ingest station in the meantime I'm using my 16 inch MacBook Pro to remote in to the Mac Mini speaking of Mac Mini it's located right here in our server rack and above it is the M logic M rack LT o8 Drive and so we can insert that these two devices are connected over Thunderbolt three and then we have our card readers right here located and connected over USB three-point to Gen 2 these C fast cards are well it's in the name quite fast they're about the same speed as a SATA SSD at about 400 issue megabytes read and write per second this is important in cameras that shoot camera or really high resolution video like what we shoot and these this is all kind of one contained system promise we need to connect to Margaret the server and so we do that with this this is a 10 gig Ethernet switch it is an enterprise switch and so all 48 ports on here are all 10 gig rj45 cable which is pretty cool so the Mac Mini 10 gig connection is coming into this switch and then it communicates with Margaret over not a 10 gig but a 40 gig connection this is called a cue sfp+ connector and Margaret is so fast and can write so much data back and forth per second that she can actually support multiple 10 gig connections simultaneously and so if Margaret the server has a 10 gig connection to the rest of the network well no one connect to it faster than 10-gig and so we have multiple 10 good connections connected to a single 40 gig connection pretty cool okay let me show you how this yo-yo de software works this is very complex software and it does a lot of really powerful stuff but in short you select your source media so when you plug in your your camera card you'll see that it's right protected so that we can't accidentally erase anything and then you can actually go in here and see the individual files that you'd like to import as well as affiliated metadata and the app will even generate thumbnails which is cool should you wish and then you can even generate your own metadata so we're gonna start tagging stuff because there's a lot of footage like a sponsor spots for example that are recurring sponsors that we're always like how what video was that on and and where did we have it and now we can start tagging our own media so well in the future just come to yo yatta and type out a query and then it will tell us where those files are located on our network which is pretty cool in the middle it gives you a job summary so we're going to import 10 files from our canon c fast card but we need to select a destination and you can do multiple destinations which is what we're going to do so we're gonna say choose either and then we're going to import it into this actual project folder so this is the video you're watching right now we're importing footage we shot earlier and then we are also going to import it onto the actual LTO tape so we're two copies deep and then we just click import so how fast is it you might ask pretty freakin fast you are limited in terms of speed based on your source media so since we're writing from C fast that's about three hundred three hundred fifty megabytes per second but we are importing basically as fast as the card can handle it so about 300 megabytes per second to the server even though the server again can do multiple gigs back and forth per second but more interestingly we're writing to the tape at three hundred two megabytes per second which is really fast mechanical spinning hard drive for reference is about a hundred twenty-five megabytes per second per drive so tape is a lot faster than that so long as you're doing kind of big uncompressed sequential data like video so for us this is going to be an awesome solution it's something that will end up costing less money over the long term than buying a bunch of hard drives and it's something that gives us true redundancies so that if we lose our server or if there's a fire or whatever we can have an off-site backup in a manageable format that doesn't take up too much space and isn't too picky about how long you sort or where you put it pretty cool okay so magnetic tape might be a really old technology but it's still used because it works the sheer volume you can store on a tape and for the cost is it's really cool and I'm excited to use LTO here at snazzy labs to have multiple backups in multiple locations well folks that's all for me if you enjoyed this video please give it a like if you didn't now that other button seems to work okay to get subscribe for more awesome tech videos like this one but most importantly and as always of course stays Natalie

Channel: Snazzy Labs

Views: 489,145

Rating: 4.8285184 out of 5

Keywords: snazzy labs, quinn nelson, snazzyq, lto, tape, tape drive, 30tb, magnetic tape, storage, backup, cloud backup, gigabit, 10 gbe, 10 gigabit, networking, server, freenas, redundancy, recycled, e-waste, mac mini, apple, editing, editing workflow, data hoarder, thunderbolt, 10gbe, raw, canon, red, alexa, arri, camera, cinema camera, data, hard drives, ssd, nvme ssd, nvme, cache, caching, data center, diy, cheap projects, fun, entertainment, tech

Id: 4wRiJBFYn3A

Length: 20min 16sec (1216 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 12 2020