We Finally Did it Properly - "Linux" Whonnock Upgrade
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This video documents a major infrastructure upgrade where the team moves away from Windows for their main video editing server, Whonnock, and adopts TrueNAS with OpenZFS. It starts with a candid admission of months of performance issues and blue screens, and the realization that Windows on the production server was a bad decision. The hosts outline the constraints of not being able to shut down the production server to perform a clean reinstall, since doing so would disrupt ongoing projects and storage. They decide to use a home NAS as a test bed before migrating to the new Whonnock, with plans to eventually relocate the system to a home environment, depending on hardware preferences and drive performance. Early on they contrast Linux options with FreeBSD–based TrueNAS, settling on TrueNAS for its OpenZFS 2.0 support, modern Samba, and a user-friendly web interface despite initial reservations about reliability. The video then dives into the actual upgrade details, including CPU, RAM, and NIC upgrades, as well as why certain components like the 1050 Ti were replaced with a high-speed Mellanox network card to sustain high transfer throughput. They also discuss boot drive strategy, BIOS/RAID decisions, and the practicalities of configuring pool, datasets, compression, and SMB settings to reach high transfer speeds. The later segments focus on benchmarking, showing read and write speeds across multiple threads to assess bottlenecks, compare CPU versus storage performance, and validate that the new setup meets or exceeds their expected throughput. The hosts reflect on the tradeoffs of TrueNAS versus a Linux-based setup, acknowledge ongoing tinkering with caching and Zetta-FS, and celebrate achieving a significantly improved workflow for ingest, editing, and collaboration. The video closes with a nod to sponsorship, a recap of the improvements, and an optimistic note about continuing to refine the setup for stability and performance.
Topics · technology · hardware · data-storage · open-source
Questions answered
- What storage solution did the Linus Tech Tips team ultimately use for the Whonnock upgrade, and why?
- They chose TrueNAS (based on FreeBSD) with OpenZFS 2.0 and a recent Samba stack to provide robust storage management, modern features, and a user-friendly web interface, addressing issues with Linux-based setups and Windows-only configurations for their editing workflow.
- What were the key hardware upgrades implemented during the upgrade, and what problem did they aim to solve?
- They upgraded CPU and RAM to reduce bottlenecks and to better utilize Gen 4 NVMe drives, added a Mellanox ConnectX-6 100Gb NIC for higher transfer throughput, and adjusted boot drives and pools to improve reliability and performance under heavy editing workloads.
- Why did they debate between Linux and TrueNAS for the upgrade, and which was favored?
- They weighed kernel version, OpenZFS support, and Samba compatibility. TrueNAS offered OpenZFS 2.0 and a modern Samba stack with a convenient web interface, which addressed their needs more readily than Debian/Ubuntu options that were slower to support the required features.
- How did they test performance and what results did they observe?
- They performed multi-threaded benchmarks across drives, testing read and write throughput with various thread counts. They observed sustained throughput above 100 GB/s in certain configurations, with 18 GB/s read tests at higher thread counts and overall improvements that confirmed the upgrade delivered substantial speedups over the previous setup.