 Tommy here from Warren Systems and this is a Stornator Q30x45 drives. Folder's closure 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 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 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 Backblaze. Now I will leave a link to the video over on 45 drives 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. It'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 don't throw in 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 exos drives 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 devs 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 are going in here. This has a super micro X 11 SPL dash F board as the on silver 42 10 2.2 gigahertz 128 gigs of VDR4 memory to SAS 9305 dash 16 I 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 life cycle. 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 backplane. These are direct wired backplains. These SAS HBAs in the back that you see here are wired to this backplane 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 is really clever the way it holds everything together so we don't have any sleds holding the drive. And matter of fact, it is really tight. And I like the way that these little I'm gonna 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 an 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 face plate 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 it in the drives allows you to easily hot swap them. Now the PCB board and the backplate, these are direct wired. They're not using any type of system that splits up. So you have one say the 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 q 30, 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 drive says start at once and a 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. If 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 320 millimeter fans in the front that pull all the air in across the rows of drives, the second row of 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 120 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 to generally a 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 console switch. It's not your usual tiny little momentary contacts, which 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 then 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, StruNAS, Ubuntu, Windows 10, Windows Server 2019 and Turner Server 2016. They also have a no operating system option. So you don't have to have a preload of 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 backend 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 backend 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 Iraq makes it a lot easier in case you have to manage it and don't have physical easy access to it. Or like me, there's more couples sit in my office doing this than going in the other room. So from here, I can reboot it, change configuration, change fan 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 a tie in for Active Directory, which seems a little excessive. But I guess in large corporate environments, it probably makes sense to have Active Directory tie into your backend 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 update a video on it because, well, I really like it. And at the time I 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 and I can do Z pool 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'll 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 when it's reading the hardware are specific to 45 drives. And now here is the layout for the system that we have 45 drives because they preloaded a bunch of on this preconfigured 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 go here, you can see it doesn't pause a second time. It repolls that information the first time you pull it up after it's been booted, because it wants to know what drive changes have been made. And if I force refresh this, it'll take a second, and it'll read, pull all the drive information. And what it's pulling is all the exacting 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 what 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 one dash four, 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 28 C for that one. If we go here, 29 C. So are the drives in the back a little bit warmer than the ones in the front? 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 so going on. The other really nice thing they've added is this, the 45 drives 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 HPA SAS 9305 161 and which slots are plugged into. Yes, it does know that and gives us that information. Then 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 were plugged in in the back as you've seen in the case. And these are the status ports that they are plugged into. It doesn't just tell me the state of port in a 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 and maybe you don't remember what's went 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. It tells me it's got the super micro motherboard in here. The only thing and they can do this it by default is not customize. 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 that 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 just using a Linux raid. ZFS is using Linux and ZFS. So let's go ahead and destroy the pool and show you what it looks like to create a pool. So we're going to head and destroy storage pool. And we're 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 it 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 one dash four. 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. Now go ahead and hit create. Now that we successfully created the 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 ZFS. But you can symmetrically add more VDEVs to an existing VDEV pool. So you have the pool, you have the VDEVs. 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, RAID Z2, vice alias. All right. And now we have all three of these set up. So we have three groups of 10, three VDEVs of 10 drives for this particular configuration. There's lots of debate that's probably going to 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, before 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, 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 believe 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 AD 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 call this one some NFS share. It was called some NFS. Good enough. NFS. Great. And now it's created that one there. Now let's go back over to the disk. 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 as shown in the beginning where, yes, it automatically can switch back and forth between these. So as you rebuild these, and if it was 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, but you kind of get the idea it will display all of this. And as I mentioned, if you load cockpit on something like, well, a Buntu 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 current 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 disk in it, so I can't really build on our ZFS. But I did add a couple of virtual disks to another one for one of my other learning experiences I would say I'm working on 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 out all the software. I do encourage checking out the Houston system, because I think it's pretty neat. And the cockpit system itself offers some cool options, including this one right here. But even though I'm logged in over here, let's go over to 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 multiple to the 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, new 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. If you're want to parse through some of the logs, it's actually rather clever how this works. 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 has actually moved forward a couple of 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. I did that on purpose. So one, it's just in reach. So I have 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 your 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 technical people, that is great when we don't have to talk to people, we can just get a price on something. 45 drives gets you covered on that as well. All right, leave questions, comments below and thanks. This thing weighs a lot. Maybe this was a mistake. The stakes may have been made. Hold on for almost on my side. Oh, look at this. I'm not even. What? No, no. Someone's probably going to be as they're 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. This is the studio rack. This has been professionally reassembled a bunch of times. But we'll get it better. But cool. Look at that. And they 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 Sharer project, head over to laurancesystems.com and click on the hires button right at the top. To help this channel out in other ways, there's a join button here for YouTube and a Patreon page where your support is greatly appreciated. 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