 One of the phrases I really like is there are lies, damn lies, and then there's benchmarks. And I say that because benchmarks can be an artificial experience to what you may actually be using it for. So we can see certain performance things from benchmarks and they do provide some value, but they're not always definitive and they may not represent your use case in the same way that you think they would. So you can say, hey, the benchmarks said it would do this, but when I actually used it, I ran into this problem. So let's talk about real world use of the Free NAS Mini XL Plus and in video editing. That's something that came up because I thought it was interesting. I like Linus's video on the Jellyfish Friar All SSD server. And by the way, if you haven't been to serve the home, great website, excellent enterprise reviews on there. So I thought it was cool that they had the serve the home people on there. Also, they did use Free NAS, spotted on there right away. Now, I would love to build a 28,000, I think that was what he said the price was $28,000 all flash Free NAS system for video editing. And as you get into YouTube, you realize there is a definite need to have a way to store all the data you create. But for many of us that aren't at the level that Linus is at, we can't, or he has KBHD in here, we can't afford $28,000 devices for that. You know, hoping to get there one day, but that's not my today situation. So let's talk about the Free NAS Mini XL Plus configured with, and someone's gonna cringe a little, but these are really reasonably priced. These are 5,400 RPM Western Digital Reds. So this is not a real expensive drive. It's not a really fast drive. It is a solid, reliable NAS drive. I've had a lot of these installed. We've got a lot of systems that are storing data for our clients built with these. And they've been really, really reliable. They're low heat, low energy. They're great NAS drives. The whole Western Digital Reds series has proven to be quite reliable overall. They're not high performance though at 5,400 RPM. I will throw that out there. But when you configure them in a Free NAS system, and we'll go ahead and look at how we have this configured, go to pool, status, we have a RAID Z2 config. So with a RAID Z2 with eight drives, there's redundancy and we're going to get some performance out of it because we're sharing the load across the drives. So editing video is not gonna be tragically bad. That's important. So this is going to be an affordable for those of us that can't afford the $28,000 high end servers. Way to edit and store and archive our video. There's a lot of people getting YouTube and there's all the struggles of figuring out what camera and gear and what you're gonna do on YouTube. But then the storage people kind of put off to the side. And even some of the bigger YouTube channels line has gone through some of them. And yeah, they admit to all having lost data because saving it just on your computer can be a problem and a risk when you have a single drive for doing this. This is just hard drives fail. That's a statistic. Having a RAID rate is for a reason. And even with this, you should be backing it up somewhere else. I do have my own two free NAS set up. So I have one free NAS replicating to another one. So I'm at least that level. But at the minimum, having at least a RAID or RAID to dump all your data to and edit from is ideal. And the free Max Mini XL Plus having a 10 gig and I have a 10 gig switch does help that. Now there is a way to do this and maybe I'll do this in a future video where you can put a 10 gig card in your computer and then directly connect it to the free NAS Mini so you don't have to have a switch but you'd have to do some IP assignments and make that work without a switch. They will direct connect, but that's for a later video. This is at least assuming that you have the free NAS Mini XL Plus, a 10 gig switch. I'm using the Unify one and a 10 gig card in your computer. And my computer has the ASUS 10 gig card in it. Specifically this one right here, the ASUS XG C100C 10 gig adapter. It's, someone has commented that they get a little warm. I hasn't really been a problem. It seems to work perfectly fine and doesn't have a problem transferring at 10 gig. Hasn't really been an issue. All right, back to the box here. So with this configured and I got the dashboard pull up here we can see we're at 197 and I have this right here. We've got net data opened up at 197 and now we can show you, here is this. You can see this is a SMB share 3.197 video editing test. And I actually, I'm a Linux guy so I do edit in Kden Live. So here's what it looks like when you're just scrubbing around through data. And this is only shot at 1080. This is not stressing it out in any measure. So this is probably, I can edit fine, I can jump ahead, jump and preview things, play the video, that's not gonna be a problem. That's not where you're gonna be more interested. So let's go and look at some 4K video. So let's grab something off my GoPro and see how quickly I can open it. And this is a single 4K video. I don't even know which one this is. All right, me goofing off on my motorcycle. Add a car cruise. It's seeking ahead, it's really immediate here. I see no pausing, no problem. Let's jump to another video. Play that one fine, randomly grab another one here. Me goofing off at the office. All right, and we'll go back over here. There's all that stress it did on there. Cause someone said, oh, they add on CPUs. Yeah, they're not gonna have a problem handling, moving the data around like that. You do see a spike here in some of the traffic sent. So now let's go step further and let's say, let's get a bunch of videos. So I think I can open them like this, this, this. And we'll open all four at once. Now the computer may choke on it cause it's gonna open all these 4K videos at once. But they're all playing. So how many is that? My computer's choking, but let's see what the free NAS is doing. Sending me all the data, completely not stressing out. We're still sitting in all of a couple percent of CPU and no problems. The disc read spread across, not a problem. And we're 170, 180, 185, it's still going up with 4K video, playing them all at once. Here's our network traffic. My computer's hesitating. This is just, mine's an older i7 computer here. So, but yeah, oh, here's our CPU actually getting a little bit of usage. We've hit the 3%, 3.6% mark. So if you're wondering if the atom in real world use can handle it, obviously that's not the problem people seem to think it is. And like I said, the 4K, I know chokes on my arm, but it's obviously not a problem. So real world, can I edit all of these videos? Sure, they're all playing perfectly fine. And I don't know why, like this is burnouts and things like that, welcome to, you know, we have a big car culture here in Detroit and people like spinning their wheels and that all that black you see is that, so that's just funny. But you see, other than my computer pausing a little bit playing those, that's not pausing because it's waiting on hard drive. The hard drive isn't even pinned out to its max potential here on the FreeNAS and neither is the processor. So when it comes to doing some of the editing, this is a video I'll be editing, this video will be uploaded before. This is showing how a non-surf works inside of there. Not a problem. But let's just, obviously I'm not gonna save it like this, but let's throw a 4K video file in. It's only reading the sound, which takes a second, but it's available immediately. Here's that video, not a problem. Here's another one, not a problem. Now granted, when you get to something like Linus or KBHD and you're shooting in not 4K, but 8K you've now quadrupled the amount of data. So yeah, there's probably gonna be some slowdowns if you're shooting in 8K, but if you're using an Epic Red Dragon at 8K, a $100,000 camera, I think that's what those cost roughly in that range with the accessories and lenses and mount kits. Yeah, you can probably afford something more than a FreeNAS Mini XL Plus. You can go to one of the enterprise TrueNAS all flash arrays. There are categories that will scale with you. But I just wanted to demonstrate that the FreeNAS Mini XL has new problems with 10 gig and this is our peak with all those videos running that we did for the processor. Just nothing running 4K video stream to my computer, even with my older i7, which someone's gonna ask, so I'll pull it up. This is an i7 4770K at three and a half gigahertz with 16 gigs of ram in it. So I do not have a killer fast machine that is doing all this. My plan is to build a Ryzen for those that are asking when am I gonna build it soon? When people pay some bills I have outstanding, I will definitely be building a new Ryzen machine. The performance is really nice. I'm excited about that for a video editing station. But for now, this i7 does get the job done. It renders things reasonably fast. And it's really not much stress on these two. We'll pull up the reports as well. It's not, here's where we peak some data in here, but we are not at the limits of this system, so to speak. Let me look at the CPU here. Yeah, we're far from the limits of this system in terms of CPU and performance. We're mostly idling this thing, even pulling all that video. So for video editing system, the FreeNAS Mini XPEL is pretty affordable. The Western Digital RED 5400 RPMs, what is it going for right now? Yeah, it looks like they're about, still about the 115 each. So let's see, you know, and this comes down to planning. You can go all the way up to the 10 TBs, 12 TB, all the way up to the 12, kind of depends on where your price point is. But it's still an affordable way to build a system that we'll edit in 4K without having to break the bank. Cause I mean, yes, you can go pro if you need something faster and say, let's go up to the larger cache, 7, 200 PM class, and the 4 TBs at the pro start at 160. So not too much more. So it kind of depends on where your budget lies for storage planning. And someone will point out that it was only a little more for the 7, 200 PM. I see, but you got to multiply would have that little bit more is times eight. Storage planning can be challenging. Storage planning is challenging because if you say, I think I need this much storage, you probably need more. And ideally you should have at least one other machine that doesn't have to be as fast that you also are backing the data up to again because even though you're have array array which protects to some extent, there's still more data or back it up in a cloud. You know, I've done a video on this, you can take free NAS and say, hey, send it overall, send it all the back plays. That way you have one more backup of all of your data. So keeping redundancy is important, especially when you have offsite redundancy in case anything tragic happens to the environment that you're in. But I want to show that I currently edit not on the mini XL plus. Unfortunately, I can send this one back. This is sent to us courtesy of the folks at IX systems and free NAS. But I've showed the videos on the systems we have, the custom built free NAS boxes we're using with 10 gig in them. That's what I'm running on right now for my normal video editing and it works wonderfully. I don't have any problem using free NAS for video editing. Obviously, if you're using Adobe or something like that and you want the fancy plugins of the jellyfish, just kind of cool. I never use a product, but I watch a lot of videos and I think it's kind of a neat product. But overall, I just want to make sure to let everyone know, yes, you can edit on a 5,400 RPM, rate array, real world usage, opening up all these videos. And this video, well, not these ones gotta delete this. Unless anyone wants to watch my cruise video and if there's a demand for it, I'll put it on my other YouTube channel. It's not really content there, but no problem editing videos. I've been playing around with the last couple of days. I edited a couple of the, this video is gonna go on there and I have a couple others that I made before I have to send this back will be edited using the free NAS when you XL Plus. And of course, as I shown in the other video, it does have the SSD you can add internally. So if you wanted to add a write cache or a read cache to it to speed it up a little more, you can, but this video was done without those enabled. Purposely to show, you know, people who are budget conscious going, I don't have all the budget for all that. I just wanna be able to do it. And if you're wondering if you can edit at one gig, yes, you can, I did test that. It is slower, of course. It's one-tenth the speed. So I highly recommend when you get into video editing, if you're doing anything in 4K and you're dealing with putting together a lot of multiple video files, the 10 gig one is a nice option. And even if you're not using a 10 gig the same day you buy it, being able to upgrade later is great versus trying to buy another one later that has 10 gigs is gonna be a little more expensive. All right, this video will be edited on it and you'll actually see this video before this and it's actively being edited right now. This one will be uploaded first, the Parrot one, which will be edited on the MiniXL Plus and the MiniXL Plus video about the MiniXL Plus will be edited on that too. All right, thanks, and I'll leave links to the previous review if you didn't see it. Thanks for watching. If you liked this video, give it a thumbs up. If you wanna subscribe to this channel to see more content, hit that subscribe button and the bell icon and maybe YouTube will send you a notice when we post. If you wanna hire us for a project that you've seen or discussed in this video, head over to laurancesystems.com where we offer both business IT services and consulting services and are excited to help you with whatever project you wanna throw at us. Also, if you wanna carry on the discussion further, head over to forums.laurancesystems.com where we can keep the conversation going. And if you wanna help the channel out in other ways, we offer affiliate links below which offer discounts for you and a small cut for us that does help fund this channel. And once again, thanks again for watching this video and see you next time.