I made the Petabyte Raspberry Pi even faster!

Sometimes you have to go slow to go fast—with 60 hard drives on 1 Raspberry Pi, I found a way to make it run in RAID!

It's not the fastest storage server in town, but it's good for about 70 MB/sec write speeds and sucks down about 500 Watts of power.

Many questions viewers have about the PetaPi are answered in this video.

Special thanks to 45Drives for sending the Storinator and hard drives used in the production of this video!

#PetabytePi #PetaPi #RaspberryPi

Contents:

00:00 - The sound of a spaceship landing
00:43 - HBA firmware woes
01:42 - Firmware updates
03:02 - Btrfs RAID 0 - more stable
03:26 - Forcing PCIe Gen 1
03:55 - What's the Gen 2 breaking point?
04:58 - Overclocking for speeeeed
05:28 - Power to the Pi
06:14 - Price? Weight? Hardware RAID?
07:12 - Multiple Pis? 10 Gigabit?
08:16 - What's the name?
08:35 - Deploying the Petabyte

[Jimmy_Jones]

I feel like you are helping the community by testing the niche cases and thus help the main cases along the way.

[axdsc]

Coming out of warp speed when those drives spin down. What a fantastic sound.

[marcogenovesi]

Yeah using old versions of broadcom/LSI tools to flash firmware images because they don't check signatures or card type is a somewhat well-known thing in the crossflashing community (turning old crappy RAID cards in HBAs). Good to see that this time-honored tradition is still alive and well with more modern cards

[horndude]

My mother-in-law went to the pet store to get what's essentially a dremel for dog/cat nails. It was called pedi-paws or something like that. Instead she asked the worker for a pedi-file. Good call on the name you picked.

[MarcoGPUtuber]

0:24. The Seagate Sound....On steroids!

[andyrechenberg]

I ran a 60 SCSI disk Linux software RAID array in 2005. I was up to /dev/sdbc or something. 🤣 I had to backport kernel SW RAID code because the older kernel only had 4KB of memory to store the dev names. When I’d start the array the kernel would panic because the RAID info overwrote the buffer in memory to keep track of the array info. Fun times. Great video.

[JPToto]

Right now there's a bunch of sound engineers at Industrial Light & Magic facepalming that they could have gotten the best space ship power down sound just by turning off a bunch of hard drives 🤣

[OliverBurkill]

Oh the joy of juggling different storcli versions and notes on which one works with what for unknown reasons - I know that game.

[martijnvds]

What does it sound like when you turn off 60 disks?

The THX noise, apparently.

[kyleallred]

Although the process of debugging and ground breaking is stressful, just how much fun was this.
It looks like, to me, that this project was a blast.

[dinckelman]

The fact that this is possible at all blows my mind

[frederichardy]

Very nice! I'd like to see the test with the SAS extender and only one HBA: the system PCI should be more stable (no PCI switch, Gen2 speed) so better local speed (for array rebuild...)

[roblatour]

sadly at this time it's easier to buy 1.2 petabytes than it is 1 pi

[TheOleHermit]

Congrats Jeff! I knew you could do it. OMG, the hoops you've jumped through to get there is mind boggling.
Is 'Winner Jeff" another one of your characters? The "thrill of victory' is a pleasure to behold. Even better to feel, especially after those "agonies of defeat", eh Jeff?
Just goes to prove that it's all relative. We rarely appreciate the good times, until we've had to struggle for it. 😎
Great job, Jeff. Thanks for sharing.

[IamYuto]

Always wholesome to see Jeff shouting out smaller YouTube Channels like LinusTechTips.

[DigitalSpaceport]

Firmware flashing HBA's is the gift that keeps giving. The gift is frustration.

[johngermain]

I love watching Wendall when we're talking storage, RAID, ZFS, Linux, etc. good call

[igfoobar]

What you really want is multiple Pi hosts with smaller groups of drives running as a Ceph cluster. (Oh man, as soon as I started typing that, I got to the part where you say that you're doing exactly that. Good job!)

[hoxorious]

7:20 I’ve been waiting for this Ceph video for so long. I’m pretty sure it’s gonna be awesome 🥳😛😍

[mianderson]

Awesome project! I'm very surprised how well you got this to run! Can't wait for Wendell guest episode.