 Tom here from Orange Systems. It's October of 2022 and about a year and a half ago, I got a 45 Drives Q30 that I took apart and did a review on. That video is linked down below. This is a follow-up video to how's it working and how is that 45 Drive solution going for you. And since then, you may have seen people like Techno Tim who've well put a few too many LEDs on there for my taste or then again, can you put too many LEDs? Maybe it's just I'm jealous. Anyways, check out Techno Tim and Craft Computing. Both of them have talked about their sorenators and of course, Lions Tech Tips has talked about them as well. And you're probably wondering, are these things really that good? And one of the things I want to disclose right away is one, this isn't sponsored. Two, I'm very biased. The reason I'm biased is because we are a 45 Drives reseller. We help provide solutions to our clients using the 45 Drives. So I'll take that for what it's worth that I definitely like these devices. We have sold a lot of them. I even have another link down below to the petabyte project we did, which I did a follow-up video on as well. And we plan on selling that particular client some more storage servers. That's all in the works. So more of those are coming because the solution has worked out so well. So at least I've disclosed those biases up front that we are definitely affiliated with them. But let's talk about my use case, how I'm using my sorenator and just some details about the software running on it and what we use it for. Now I did originally try out the Houston OS. I really like it. And I keep checking back on the project and I've done some more testing with it. But it was just easier to set the system up with TrueNAS Core specifically right now in October of 2022. I'm using TrueNAS Core 13 U2. And many you have asked me about scale and I've done some recent videos on it. I still haven't found that scale has the same performance. And I don't really need application support. I let all the memory be used that it has for ZFS cache. We'll talk about that more in a moment. Now this does have a good processor and it's Intel Silver 4210 CPU at 2.2 gigahertz. I've had no problems with performance on this system. And that caching really helps. More specifically, let's dive into that caching. Now I have a whole video where I dive into how the caching works inside of ZFS. I'll leave that link down below. But one of the things that people ask a lot is how do we get better performance out of my server? Throw more memory at it. People say, what about faster drives or faster caching drives? And those can have some advantages. And of course, if you go in all flash array, if you can afford it, that's going to be really peak performance. But when you need a volume of storage here in 2022, spinning rust still is where it's at in terms of your best price ratios. And if you put in plenty of RAM, you can see that the hit ratio has a mean average of 99.3%, max of 99%. And you know, men here, if we span it out a little bit, it goes down to what about 82% here. So for the most part, other than under certain circumstances where you're loading different things that may not be cached, it really does have a lot of hits. Now what are those hits on and what am I using it for? Well, we go over here and look at my Zen orchestra system. And we'll zoom in a little bit so you can see that we have 42 VMs here, 25 virtual machines here. Also, all the backups to these virtual machines that are kind of on a rolling backup and rolling snapshots that may get sent over the Delta backups essentially sent over to the TrueNAS. All of this keeps landing back on that system. And it has no problem handling it from a performance perspective. It also doesn't have a problem serving these VMs back up as a storage target. Because when we're building out our labs, there's going to be a frequent constant request of the same files, what they couldn't once Windows boots once, well, it kind of wants to read the disk and read some of the same things again. So that's why these cache ratios are so important, where you get a really high ratio of hits, because well, it's requesting the same data again, it doesn't have to reach out back to the spinning rush drives to pull it. So that's why I always say add lots of memory. Now I do have this set up in a RAID Z2 format, and I've set up three VDevs in here. Now there's only nine drives in each VDev and a reason for that and a reason there's 27 drives and not 30. There was a drive that was bad when we were setting it up and while we were waiting for RMA, we said, well, we'll just have these other ones as spares, because you want to make the deep VDev symmetrical kind of video on that link down below. But the array never got rebuilt when the new drive came in. So we just left it like this. So we have spares in the pool in case any of them go bad that we're just not using at the moment, hasn't really been too much of an issue. But you know, it works pretty well with the 27 drives that are in it and having a couple spares is not a bad thing. That way if any of them go bad, I have easy access to swap one out because you don't want to leave one bad for too long. RAID Z2 is resilient, so each VDev can survive up to two drives loss, but you don't really want to replace it then. You want to replace it when there's a single drive loss and have your data integrity is back to 100% as fast as possible. Now in a year and a half that we've had it, it's lived up to its name of being the Q30 or quiet model. The fans all are working fine. We keep the dust out of them. I've only had to blow it out probably every six months. It's been a middle amount of dust, but we keep our area very, very clean and we try to keep it as dust free as possible. So it's not gathering in the system. But you know, you get a little out of the fans and none of them have given me any problems. Now the power supply is not a modular slide out or dual redundant power supply. That helps it be quiet because the smaller power supplies has smaller fans. You get the redundancy. For that I've mitigated because people asked why I didn't go with redundant power supplies and well, we're a computer place and I have those laying around extra ones on the shelf and a group of people that work there that know how to replace it in case it went bad. Also this is on a UPS system so the power is well conditioned before getting to the system and the fact that we don't ever worry too much about heat or dust in it. I don't worry a lot about the power supply, but I have one in case something goes wrong. Now as far as 45 drives working with them to get one of these devices, one of the things I've liked, you go on their website, you can price these out, you can understand the pricing and how to get one or you can contact a reseller like us to do it. But my overall feelings are really positive. As I mentioned in the beginning, I'm a little biased, but my bias comes from us providing these solutions and seeing the smiles on clients faces. I wouldn't be a reseller and I wouldn't keep selling them the solution if they didn't work because well, that would make my life difficult and I wouldn't be using one for myself. So if you're looking for an opinion of 45 drives, I say buy one. I think they're a great solution. If you're looking for some hardware like that, I did this follow up just to kind of talk about ours, all the things we have stored on it, all our virtual machines, all my videos, all the backups which are actually a lot more coming because we switched backup services for my business and we're now duplicating from the cloud where these are backed up an extra copy locally to allow us to restore faster. And so having all that data and having a large place to store all that data is quite handy when it comes to these particular servers. So yes, I'm happy with it for those wondering and look for some future videos where we'll see what we can cover on some of the other projects where we have clients that are buying them. One unfortunate thing that comes from this is people may watch these videos and want to hire me, but frequently I cannot film in their data centers where these are going and these storage units are being placed. But nonetheless, you can assure that when they have a chance to stop through my office, I'll at least have a few photos of them, even if I have to blur the names because one of the cool things is putting those face plates on there for your client. They're pretty happy when they see that roll in with their logos on it, which is why if you watched my petabyte project, we had to put tape over it because we can't reveal the name of the client. But nonetheless, links down below to the other videos I mentioned. Let me know your thoughts, comments and concerns and questions you might have about it that maybe I skipped over or didn't answer for you. Thanks. And thank you for making it all the way to the end of this video. If you've enjoyed the content, please give us a thumbs up. If you would like to see more content from this channel, hit the subscribe button and the bell icon. 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