brandishwar

Not as far as I'm aware. Do you recall where you encountered that?

Oldest ones right now are a pair of 6TB WD Red 5700RPM drives. I think I bought them in 2017. They'll be the first to go with the next drive upgrade.

Yeah those are definitely re-encoded. Ripped straight from a disc, a 1080p movie will be about 10GB per hour of video, and 4K is about 40GB to 50GB per hour. So if a full movie is only 2GB in size... that's a significant downgrade in potential quality. The long-standing recommendation for ZFS is 1GB for each TB of raw storage plus RAM for the underlying operating system. And one of the main reasons for that recommendation is caching. And other software RAID configurations are very similar. Especially if you're using using a RAID configuration other than mirrored pairs - such as the OP - since the parity calculations happen in RAM before everything gets written out to disk. With what you're trying to stream, 8GB may be enough, since you're talking about heavily downgraded 720p and 1080p videos. But for what I'm trying to stream, which are full-quality 1080p and 4K BD rips, along with everything else that's hitting my NAS, it won't cut it. My NAS is a consumer X99 mainboard maxed out with 64 GB of RAM.

An alternative to the LACK table is the BESTA cabinet. I have a small cabinet with a couple switches and patch panels using that. Just add the same rails you bought plus 2x2s, using 1/4" lag bolts to hold the rails to the wood. Looks a hell of a lot better than the LACK table as well. And this is how I built it.

Sounds like everything was re-encoded to save space. My movie and TV collection wouldn't even fit on 10TB since nothing is re-encoded to save space. My NAS reports that I'm using over 22TiB currently across movies and TV. It's still a good idea to max out the memory on the mainboard, especially if video transcoding is going to be involved. Look for an HBA card. I personally use an LSI 9400-16i in my NAS, which will allow you to use an NVMe drive in a U.2 enclosure plugged into that card, so you can have all your storage on one card and not really have to worry about PCI-E lane requirements (the card is x8) while also giving better performance on the HDDs - which will be important with scrubs. Speaking of HDDs, consider spending a little more for the 7200 RPM drives. And, as mentioned, you'll eventually want to max out the RAM if you can. Not sure you need the dedicated GPU since - and correct me if I'm wrong - the i7-6700k has onboard graphics and it should be good enough for any transcoding you may want to do as well.

With dual CPU, you have the NUMA node barrier. And the PCI slots on multi-CPU boards are split between CPUs as well. So you might have quad-SLI, and it looks like quad-SLI to the NVIDIA driver, but it's more like dual-SLI due to how the PCI-E slots are actually wired up. That NUMA node barrier also means that any data going across to the other graphics cards needs to go across to the other CPU to the GPUs in question across the second CPU's PCI-E lanes. That's.... painfully slow. I'm actually surprised Windows was actually allowing it to happen, to be honest. Having a single CPU with triple or quad-SLI would've been better to avoid the NUMA node limitation, but then you likely still would've been CPU limited simply because the CPU likely couldn't keep up with trying to coordinate 4 GPUs in SLI. ETA: Okay scrap the above since that doesn't apply since those old CPUs didn't have the PCI-Express lanes handled by the CPU directly. It's handled by the chipset, which is obviously slower. The Intel 5520 chipset supports only PCI-E 2.0, and the GTX 900 series is where 2.0 vs 3.0 really started to matter, along with lane counts. And the chipset provided a max of 32 lanes and the mainboard uses an NF200 bridge chip (similar to a PLX) to spread that out.

THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU for not just the content warning about the flickering colors and text with the Wireshark demo, but also the audio chime for when it was safe to look at the video again. Definitely keep doing that in the future! It's something I wish more content creators took into account.

Oh dear God, this had to have been one of the only LTT videos where I was yelling at my screen... Why didn't you go to a hardware store and find plumbing fittings that would've properly fit the inlets and outlets on that radiator? Using a tire inner-tube and zip ties?!? Really?!? I mean you had to order in the radiator, so why didn't you take additional time to find all the proper parts that would've allowed you to do this somewhat properly? And then you had the output on the pump going to the GPU block rather than just straight up to the radiator? That would've eliminated most of the flow resistance since gravity would've given you flow pressure on its own given the mass of the fluid you would've had in that. Or, better yet, NOT having the radiator ABOVE the entire system! This had so much potential that was just.... wasted.

Are hard drives still worth it? I don't even need to watch the video to say this: YES! Price per TB for HDDs is still unbeatable and will remain such for the foreseeable future. And combining them into a RAID setup (whether in your case or via an external enclosure) will still net pretty decent performance as well as capacity, making them a great choice for a large game or media library or on-site backups.

And I'm guessing the takedown notices and "cease and desist" letters are already on the way to everyone involved...

That's been my thought watching this "adventure". I use optical fiber for 10GbE in my home. (With exception of 1 short DAC that goes from a MikroTik CSS610 to my CRS317). I used to have them hanging on the walls and just yesterday ran two through my attic to get between a hallway closet (networking equipment) and the rack (NAS, virtualization server). And I certainly wasn't "gentle" in doing that. You don't need to baby the fiber cables the way they were trying to hook up the ingest stations.

This is one of those topics for which history is a necessary part of the discussion. Since in doing this experiment, you basically ignored the advances in PCB design that allow for better ESD protection, along with published standards for minimizing ESD risk. This is about on par with the whole "cable management doesn't matter" video you made in which you used a modern chassis with several 120mm fans for airflow, completely ignoring the history of the concept and recommendations. There are several things that protect against ESD, all of which are likely integrated into those DDR2 RAM sticks, and all of which you basically had to overwhelm to kill them. This includes a ground plane along with other components as part of an overall grounding strategy that aims to minimize the risk of ESD to sensitive components. There are published guidelines and standards for ESD protection and grounding. A simple Google search would've provided that information, which would've informed you on WHY you had to go to some extreme lengths to kill the RAM sticks, and why your initial attempts weren't working as well as you thought. This doesn't mean you should be careless in handling PC components, but it does mean you don't need to be paranoid. But there was a time where paranoia of ESD was necessary, but it's been quite a long while since that was the case.

Computers aren't the only thing that are water cooled. I recall seeing a project years ago where these small radiators were used in RC vehicles.

"Software as a service" I know gets a bad rap in the industries where it's become prominent, but it's also allowed for a lot of leeway when it comes to software pricing. For example, Microsoft Office had a hefty price tag to it before Office 365 came along at $100 per year for 5 machines (with different tiers as well). And that Office 365 license provides everything that was part of Office Professional. And Microsoft has also largely moved toward the "Software as a service" model for their other professional suites like Visual Studio - though with VS they also have the community editions available which have enough functionality for most developers who aren't working on enterprise-level software. And from Microsoft's perspective, it's likely much better for their bottom line to have customers paying for a monthly or annual subscription than paying one price up front every however many years, especially if it brings more customers onboard. And that subscription also includes technical support, whereas that support would expire after a short time with the "buy once" model. So there are trade-offs either way. Adobe's software suite is similar in that regard. I pay $10 for Lr CC with 1TB online storage. I've considered including Ps in that as well, but I don't mind exporting to 16-bit TIFF to use GIMP for the few places where I do need it. It's what I used to do with Nikon's software before I bit the bullet and went with Lr, as it was much easier to learn Lr than learn how to do the same in GIMP.

You can also find used options through mpb.com and KEH. I've ordered through the former a couple times and also sold to them, and I've heard a lot of good about the latter, and both have good reputations.