I Built a 1 Petabyte Server from Scratch [video]
youtube.com81 points by zdw 5 days ago
81 points by zdw 5 days ago
Any suggestions for UK alternatives for cutting and bending the steel sheets needed for the chassis to the suggested US company in the video? I’ve reached out to a couple for quotes a couple of days back but haven’t heard back yet.
What would a typical household/homelab use such a storage for? (“Games & Stuff”)
Data hoarders. I'm in a plex group on fb and there's people there with libraries that they could never personally watch all of. It sometimes seems like it's more a game of collecting all the things than it is about actually enjoying the collection.
Another part of it is the ability to play with enterprise hardware. That level of hardware has so many features which is cool for the technically inclined, but useless for a normal home user. When enthusiasm hits resources and the desire to acquire knowledge, this happens sometimes.
I have seen a couple of guys who acquired older generation storage "racks" which they "play with" in the weekends. Do they have the cooling? No. Does it affect their electricity bill? Very. But they want to learn that thing and want to play with it, which is understandable, as long as it's kept checked.
Not different from audiophiles who lose their way, actually.
I was a wannabe data-hoarder by accident, but I understood why I'm doing and decided to slim down drastically. I'm merging, deduplicating and deleting data step by step, because many of it is my own files from the days of yore, and I want to preserve some of them. To be frank, at this very moment I'm verifying that I have copied a bunch of files without corruption, so I can start working on them (sha256deep is an underappreciated tool).
Some of the datahoarders give me weird looks when I say, I'd rather have a single NUC with a couple of spinning drives for backing up what I care rather than having them all in a cabinet full of RAID arrays, but I already have them at work. I don't want another server at home (not because that I don't enjoy it, but I want to have some time touching actual grass).
Fwiw you don’t _need_ to leave the enterprise stuff on 24/7, or have a huge hdd capacity (vs say $n enterprise drives of very limited capacity). It’s still gonna be expensive, but not silly expensive (and the ROI when you get promoted probably makes it worth it)
In the post I have seen, where the guys got a single full rack and played with it on the weekends, running it for a day added a significant amount to their bills, so yes, newer systems are more efficient (generally due to compute efficiencies), but disks are disks. Spindles are not way more efficient than before.
On the ROI part, this is a case by case issue. I for one can do the "play" part at work, too. Also, I don't want to spare space for a 1U or 2U full-depth server at home. I'm not even adding disk boxes to this. I neither have the space, nor the desire.
This is correct, I personally aim to have all the highest quality versions of all movies, ie original Blu-ray. I have plenty of people that make use of it, it’s a hobby.
how much does it cost in term of electricity per month?
From "negligible" to "I have another house inside my house" levels, depending on your hardware.
A close friend of mine runs a single beefy server at home, which is currently ~35% of his monthly bill if I'm not making mental-math mistakes.
If you run all the drives 24/7 I would guess you are looking at somewhere around 400W assuming a power sipping minipc as the host. This can be extremely optimized if you intelligently spin down disks when idle, probably down to >50W average.
Cost will depend on your electricity contract, but will propbably not be a thing that would stop you if you want to do this.
Knowledge archive. Everything I need to know to practice my job and life, I have an offline copy of. Wikipedia, SO, mediawikis, devdocs, git repos of dependencies etc.
If google decides to shove AI generated results up our throats, that's the reasonable alternative.
Currently I am building zimdex, as an alternative to the zim tools.
Also if that's your thing, check out the kiwix.org project. It's really nice.
I know a person that just "collects" games. They don't play them, they don't distribute them, it's just dowloaded and (poorly) cataloged like a Pokemon collection, unironically trying to catch them all.
Store the Sentinel 2 imagery for a year - about 500TB.
Now I just have to find a way to avoid the $50k egress cost from AWS.
Memes
That's no meme- it's a fully operational crazy custom build. A remarkable video that doesn't end in "like and mash subscribe".
"Linux ISOs"
The funny thing is, I keep a set of historical Linux ISOs to be able to work with older servers in my fleet.
Needing Debian 8 because that Lights Out connection requires JVM-something for the Java Web Start based console of the system.
Moreover, funnily, some newer servers work wonkier with more modern ipmitools and browser versions while connecting remotely. Intricacies of older embedded systems.
[flagged]
Note that here DIY means designing the chassis, the drive loader mechanism, PCBs for backplate, power distribution (including crimping dozens of power cables), modding PCIe cards to fit.
It's not a boring "I bought a Chia mining server and inserted lots of hard drives" build.
You should watch the video before commenting; in the first 10 seconds it’s explained that everything is built from scratch, including chassis.
Everything?
Well not everything of course, but at least the chassis and PCB boards.
I don’t think the most upvoted comment on this thread should be dismissing this as “not impressive”, not even having watched the video.