Welcome back to Smarter Every Day.

There's a lot of stuff that goes

into making this YouTube channel

and some of it's more complicated than others

and there's a lot of behind the scenes stuff

that you don't see.

This is one of those types of things.

I wanted to learn some stuff and I called in an expert

and he happens to be a personality here on YouTube.

His name is Linus Sebastian from Linus Tech Tips.

So the thing you might not realize about Smarter Every Day

is I have a problem and it's because

of this thing right here.

So as you know this is the V2511 high speed camera.

This is the workhorse of how I do slow motion video

on the channel.

But the problem is you got two types of memory

on this camera.

You have volatile memory on the camera.

Think of it like RAM on your computer

so if you shoot something you got a certain amount

of RAM that can save on this local camera

and if you ever lose power, you're done.

There's non-volatile memory on top

and this persists if you lose power, right.

So this is 512 gigabytes of memory

but the problem is after every shoot

I have to do something with this,

so I have a problem.

Let me show you what I did to try to fix this problem.

So about, I don't know,

a year ago,

no, six months ago I sent this particular, come on.

Come on, come on over here.

About six months ago I sent this tweet out

to a guy named Linus Sebastian.

He does this thing where he puts,

I don't know,

servers in people's houses and I called him here.

So Linus, I need your help, buddy.

This is pretty serious.

- I'm here.

All right, yeah this is really serious.

This is bad.

- First let me show you my hard drives.

Can I show you this?

- Yeah, okay. - Okay, let me get the

hard drives and show it to you.

- I don't know if I can handle this.

(Sebastian laughing)

- I'm sure you've seen people with more than this, right?

- No, I think this is even more than Justine had.

- Okay, so this is not all of it, there's more.

Do you want me to just stick with this?

- No, I wanna see,

bring on the carnage.

- Okay, let me go get the old stuff.

- So let's start doing some inventory here, I guess.

434 gig, so we're at two and a half terabytes.

That's a one terabyte.

Three and a half.

- So this is the old stuff.

I call this the deep vault.

- Five and a half.

This is an eight terabyte drive.

- Yeah, it is. - And it's

literally ducked taped to two other drives.

- That's how I roll, man.

It's pretty serious.

And so, I literally go to the spreadsheet,

look at this.

So I have an entire spreadsheet.

- Go have a look at this.

- So what I do is I just come in here,

I Control + F and I'll say,

like, Mars rover,

and so if I go to

hard drive A27,

so go find A27.

(Sebastian laughing)

This is how it works, man.

- [Sebastian] Oh, God.

- [Destin] So A26.

21, okay so somebody's moved A27.

(Sebastian laughing)

- [Sebastian] So we're finding a flaw

in the system already here.

- We're hosed, we're looking for A27.

So A27 is not where it's supposed to be.

So you see my problem, right.

So these aren't even

indexed yet. - We all see

your problem.

- [Destin] These are--

- [Sebastian] (screaming) You just dropped it.

- [Destin] Yeah, I did.

But it was on carpet so we're good.

So it was my understanding

you shipped a 45 Drive server here.

- Yeah. - And we're gonna

install it and it's gonna make this problem go away.

- It might not be enough.

- Seriously?

- Have you added up the capacity of this?

- I have not, no.

- 'Cause I'm at like 25 terabytes here already.

- Yeah. - I shipped

you a 160 terabytes server.

So here's the thing,

you could make the argument that our data hoarding

really doesn't make a ton of sense

because we could just grab the necessary footage

from a YouTube upload,

splice it into our new video when we wanna refer

back to it and bippity boppity,

off to the races.

Now, with Destin,

his case was a really interesting one for me

because he actually does not have the luxury

of being able to go back to the previous video

and grab it without making any very significant compromises,

because this kind of high speed footage

the data rates are so incredible and the amount

of runtime for what could be a very,

very short clip wouldn't make sense

to upload in the YouTube video at all.

So he's gotta pick and choose his battles.

So he's throwing out a ton of frames

whenever he's showing you,

whether it's a hummingbird's wings in realtime,

he's throwing out a ton of data in the actual video

that you guys watch,

except for the small segments that he decides to show you.

So everything else here could be necessary

if you ever wanted to go back and look at something

in more detail.

So

we gotta get this server rolled out.

- You're genuinely worried, aren't you?

- Yeah.

- My tweet said you would fix my problem, dude.

- Wait, your tweet--

- Help me Linus that you're my

only hope. - Your tweet

says I'll fix the problem so now

it's my liability if it doesn't,

is that right?

So you put words in my mouth.

- You never actually replied to this.

- No, I didn't.

- You don't even care.

You don't even watch Smarter Every Day.

Let's just fix my problem,

I don't care.

- [Sebastian] All right, so let's come over here.

So Destin was--

- [Destin] Yeah, we installed it.

- [Sebastian] Yeah.

- [Destin] Any more light always is good.

The nice yellow light.

- Oh God, he just tripped over

the drives. - Sorry.

It was only like 20 terabytes or whatever.

- So this is great.

We actually had this server shipped down here.

It must've been like--

- [Destin] It's a while back.

- Two months ago or something like that.

It took me a long time to get down here.

I'm sorry, because clearly the problem is,

I would've gotten on the next plane--

- [Sebastian] It's a big deal,

dude. - If I'd known it was

this bad. - Yeah.

- Now, have you installed the drives in here yet?

- [Destin] No, I haven't.

- And that's why this drill is here.

- [Destin] Yeah, we're gonna take this out.

- Undo them out, got it.

(machine drilling)

- [Destin] Cool.

- Look at that.

(cover banging)

(Destin laughing)

- [Destin] Yeah.

- I love this video so far.

- [Destin] Are you being sarcastic?

- The shenanigans are real.

No, I love it.

This is great.

So Seagate actually shipped you 12 terabyte

instead of 10 terabyte drives,

which is what I thought they had sent you.

- Okay.

- So that's another 30 terabytes of raw capacity.

- You just rip them open like that?

- This is good. Yeah, yeah.

You just kind of shuck them.

- Like corn?

- Yeah. Yeah, yeah, basically.

- I think you think I'm joking

but I actually don't know all this stuff.

- So this is just a friction mount here on the side.

- It's a spring?

- [Sebastian] But give it a little more pressure

than you're comfortable with.

There you go.

- That's it? - That's all there is to it.

- So this is easy.

- This is easy.

So the way that RAID works is it's writing the true data

and it's also writing what are known as parity bits.

So if I had,

let's focus on these four drives right here.

I'm running this in,

let's say, a RAID 5.

- Okay.

- That means that for every three pieces of real data,

and this is a oversimplification for the sake

of it being easier to understand,

I'm writing a parity bit that is,

think of it as kind of like an algebraic expression

where this parity bit is on the other side

of the equal sign of these three.

- Got it.

- So if I were to lose any one of these four things

I can rebuild the other one.

- By resolving the equation.

- It's a way of rebuilding what you had lost, right.

- [Destin] Right.

- But we are not running parity

in a conventional sense here.

So we're using a software called Unraid

that rather than striping the parity bits

so that they exist across multiple drives

it actually uses an entire single drive,

or two drives if you prefer to be able

to lose two drives to write all of the parity bits to.

So that comes with some advantages and disadvantages.

The disadvantage is that it's meant mostly

for archival storage.

It's not as fast to write to.

- Okay.

- But the advantage is that in the event

that you set it up with a single parity drive

and you lose three drives,

let's say your house floods or something

and it floods up to here,

all this data is still good.

- Okay.

- Whereas if you had the parity bits striped,

if you lose more than your threshold,

all the data is gone.

- I see.

So let's say just for sake of easy numbers,

let's say they were 100 terabytes here,

which there's more than that,

but let's say there were a 100 terabytes worth

of hard drive space,

that's not how much server space I'm gonna have?

- Nope.

- How much will I have?

- You would have anywhere from 80 to 90,

depending on what you prefer.

- And so that other part is just for the parity bits?

- That's right.

- This is a big deal for me man, I mean.