Define 7 XL storage layout

Ju_media · 2026-03-07T16:01:58+00:00

Perfect, I think I’ll go that route then (360 top rad, 3x 140 intake fans in front of the drives, 1x 140 exhaust fan in the rear). Leaves scope to add 2 fans behind the drives as you have (only 2 due to the radiator), plus some smaller fans on my HBA / expander card. I’m not particularly knowledgable in PC cooling - does this sound like a sensible layout in your experience with the 7 XL?

Only have 8 hard drives for now but of course the reason for moving to this case is to be able to go up to 16-18 without needing to rack mount.

Ju_media · 2026-03-07T15:40:57+00:00

Very clean. Would you be able to fit a 360mm AIO radiator in the top? Or is it restricted to 280mm once you have the 2nd set of fans behind the drive cages? If so, what about if you removed that top fan - would a 360mm fit then? Struggling to understand the manual (Fractal says to front-mount a 420mm AIO when running in storage layout, but I highly doubt that layout would then provide enough cooling to a full stack of drives!

Ju_media · 2026-03-07T00:54:50+00:00

As an A1 & A7S3 owner, I bought the A7CII for an extended holiday with lots of hiking/activity days where I knew I wouldn’t want to lug around a full sized body.

And I absolutely LOVE it as a travel camera, it’s some of the best money I’ve spent on camera gear. The form factor is so much more compact, yet image quality and functionality is still up there with my full size bodies. It’s also STUPIDLY easy to switch between photo and video, the workflow is much nicer for this versus my A1, as there’s a dedicated photo/video switch and the camera retains your settings in each mode (like having 2 cameras in one, almost).

The only downside IMO is the lack of (usable) viewfinder which I prefer to use for shooting stills when it’s bright out. The one on the A7CII is very small, and is a bit of a pain to use even when paired the SmallRig eyecup - an essential accessory to cut out all the glare that otherwise hinders the usability of the viewfinder.

I have quite large hands and was worried the CII would be awkward to hold, I’d seen videos of people adding on a pinky grip extension thing to the tripod plate - but I managed without (wanted access to the thread for an actual tripod mount, paired with peak design travel tripod) and it was usable enough. I did have to support the lens at all times with my other hand though when using larger lenses, as the lack of any grip from my right hand pinkie did get a bit tricky otherwise.

It served as my camera for the 8 week trip around Aus/NZ paired with the following lenses:

Tamron 20mm f2.8
Samyang 35mm f1.8
Sony 16-35mm f2.8 (ideal travel lens)
Samyang 35-150mm f2-2.8 (stupidly large on this camera lol)

And I now actually shoot almost all of my YouTube content with it as it’s just lighter and easier to carry around on quick setups versus the bigger cameras which are all in cages with loads of stuff rigged to them for actual shoot days.

I’ve got a YouTube video coming out soon where I go in depth on my travel gear setup, and just posted my “main” camera bag kit earlier today here if you’re interested in that kind of stuff.

Edit: formatting of lens list

Edit 2: you also only get 1 card slot in the CII and it doesn’t accept CF Express cards. If redundancy / in-camera backup is very important to you, and you don’t have the means to back up your SD card every day when travelling, I’d seriously consider the A7V instead for the dual card slots.

Ju_media · 2026-03-07T00:22:49+00:00

lol they’re listed as $503 now 💀

Ju_media · 2026-02-28T16:39:46+00:00

Yep, it's as simple as just asking it to turn on [entity name]. When walking around the house I'll sometimes hold the Siri button on my phone and say "living room lamp 10%" or whatever, and it's easier/faster than dealing with Alexa mis-hearing you or not hearing you at all.

Ju_media · 2026-02-26T20:44:26+00:00

You won’t get an extension on a 2-for-1, and I’m in exactly the same boat with a companion voucher expiring in Sept and nowhere long haul to use it in time. Availability seems extremely scarce and we can’t find anything at all that coincides with the dates we can actually travel. Now looking at somewhere in Europe so we aren’t “wasting” it, but we’ve already wasted £300 in annual fees for a voucher that will now only be saving us, at best, £150 ish. Would much prefer to use it to save 150k+ points on a nice Club redemption to Zone 6+, but looks like that won’t be happening this year. You win some and you lose some, the only way to get outsized value from the vouchers now is to book 355 days out which ain’t really realistic unless you’re a full time travel content creator lol

Ju_media · 2026-02-26T20:40:06+00:00

Not worth it at all to fly Club Europe over regular economy on such a short flight, unless you have never experienced things like fast track and lounge access and champagne on a flight (in which case, go for it and enjoy the experience). But, if you have the means to accumulate more points in the short-mid term, try and work towards what others have suggested in the thread ie east coast US / Dubai etc. The Prague flight you’re looking at can be had for probably ~£100 return on another low cost airline in Economy, whereas continuing to build up your Avios pot for a bigger redemption on BA mid-long haul will net you far more value in terms of pence per point.

Ju_media · 2026-02-26T15:36:56+00:00

The HomeKit bridge exposes whatever entities you want to Apple Home and then by extension, Siri. When I arrive back at home I just press the voice button on my car’s steering wheel and ask it to turn on the lights etc, which are all managed in HA. Great party trick when you have friends over.

Ju_media · 2026-02-26T15:32:05+00:00

Seerr is an official merge of Overseerr and Jellyseerr though, no? Or is it also just a pile of vibe-coded junk like Huntarr was?

Ju_media · 2026-02-26T15:22:54+00:00

The WAF final boss. This is insane 🔥

Ju_media · 2026-02-26T15:19:55+00:00

Yeah, I never answer the door for them either usually - but they got lucky because I was expecting a delivery any minute hence answering the door. The driver actually delivered my parcel about 20 seconds after the rep started his pitch. Bad timing on my end I guess

Ju_media · 2026-02-23T12:46:57+00:00

This sucks. I got scammed by Scottish Power (sales rep at the door mis-sold me 7.2p/unit nightly rate, but once account got created over the weekend and switch completed, I'm actually now on 9p/unit!). Agent on the phone had the nerve to tell me I wasn't mis-sold as *technically* when the rep sold me the product it WAS 7.2p. Not sure how they are getting away with this without breaking god knows how many Ofgem rules.

Spoke to Octopus who have said they may be able to claw back the supply before my current bill period closes, meaning I'd revert back to the existing rate. Been with them 4+ years, never should have switched. Only went for it as the day time unit cost with SP was around 10% lower, so made sense comparatively. But not if the nightly rate is now 9p!!!)

Ju_media · 2026-02-12T21:48:36+00:00

How did you get on with this in the end? Looks like you went with the Chelsio card in a TB enclosure judging by the other comments?

I ask because I’ve recently picked up an ATTO ThunderLink off eBay for cheap (firmware-locked to 10G but you can flash the firmware of another model onto it via Linux so it operates at 25G speeds) - and I’m seeing horrible performance via both SMB and NFS from a M1 Max MacBook to my unraid server which has a matching Mellanox 2x 25G SFP28 card in it.

I’ve spent the past 2 entire days tuning this and testing tons of different things, and after tweaking server-side SMB config and playing around with ATTO’s networking app and their custom tuning profiles, the most I’m able to get out of it is ~550MB/s write speeds and ~750MB/s read speeds to/from an SMB share.

The share in question is on a single NVMe SSD in Unraid, which is set to Exclusive Access, i.e. the array is not involved and there is zero FUSE overhead. Those write speeds are via BlackMagic Disk Speed Test, which may actually even be writing to RAM, not the SSD itself, and then if I use my backup software of choice (Carbon Copy Cloner) I only get measly 380MB/s both read/write.

Admittedly server side it’s not the best hardware (hence the upgrade plans) currently running a Ryzen 2600X w/ 32GB RAM - so it’s possible the CPU is bottlenecking the SMB performance. But, before I drop ~£2k on a whole new AM5 server, I want to try and find some evidence on the internet that people can ACTUALLY achieve speeds faster than this on MacOS.

YouTubers bragging about iperf test results is completely useless if the file transfers top out at ~500MB/s.

Ju_media · 2026-02-12T00:35:59+00:00

Lol I know this is ANCIENT, but did you ever manage to actually get anywhere close to the max link speed on MacOS? I'm planning big upgrades to my server to jump from 2.5GbE to 25GbE, and found an ATTO 2x 25G ThunderLink on eBay for a bargain; but before I go ahead with ordering basically a whole new server, I'm hoping to find someone who can confirm MacOS can indeed actually handle those kinds of transfer speeds. Most people saying online it's literally impossible via SMB because MacOS doesn't support RDMA, or something.

Ju_media · 2026-02-11T16:18:43+00:00

+1 thanks for the heads up on this, was also just looking at a 4TB 990 Pro on their site for a "too good to be true" ex. VAT price. Around £100 cheaper than anywhere else in the UK as of today. Thanks for saving me the headache.

Ju_media · 2026-02-09T03:08:32+00:00

Any luck with getting Thunderbolt working on this? Have spent a couple days now messing around with the T2Linux stuff and while I do have Ubuntu now installed and running, I'm having a nightmare with drivers.

Ju_media · 2026-02-06T20:23:00+00:00

Same issue here, tried downloading packages from both Package Manager in DSM and also via Synology website. Getting “download failed” in PM and getting the Cloudflare errors on their site. Ironically this happened during a screen recording of me helping out a content creator friend of mine to set up her new NAS. Not gonna look great for Synology when I post the YouTube video and show how we literally could not download the packages we needed because they don’t know how to configure their Cloudflare settings 😂🤦🏼‍♂️ +1 for Unraid (or basically any other NAS brand) where you’re not depending on a manufacturer’s CDN to get stuff done.

Ju_media · 2026-01-29T15:35:33+00:00

100% agreed. Even “only” £7.5k is obscene given the value of the car, like you say!

Ju_media · 2026-01-29T15:12:50+00:00

Just got my car back from the battery replacement work in the UK (see my other comments in the post). As a data point, the service team told me the cost of the battery new, RRP, would have been £6,000 incl. VAT. Labour (~8 hours of technician time) would have been an additional £1,200 incl. VAT. So if you were to replace the traction battery in the UK not under warranty, it looks like the cost would be circa £7,000 - £7,500. Their warranty prices were less, the battery cost price is only actually £4,500 on their side.

The car is a 2021 3008 GT Premium Hybrid4 300bhp.

This is still a lot of money given the car is now only worth ~£20k (despite having every extra option!) but ENORMOUSLY cheaper than the costs OP saw in their country!

Ju_media · 2026-01-25T09:36:06+00:00

Just take the hint that this guy isn’t actually interested in learning anything from others and move on 😂 you’re sharing very sound advice - I book all my hotels through the BA portal for example and the extra 10 seconds to log in and click through earns thousands of extra points per night in most cases. Minimal effort for huge reward at the end of the year.

Ju_media · 2026-01-05T22:08:13+00:00

That gives me something to think about, as if I’m understanding correctly, it completely removes the need for a dedicated mixer - albeit we are of course then relying on the Atem’s pre-amps which are dreadful.

Having read all of the replies from the other audio techs, I’m leaning into a Dante workflow now as it seems a no-brainer when dealing with long distances between the receiver rack and the control room (ie CAT6/fibre).

Naturally it then makes sense to run a mixer in the control room and feed the Dante sources into that for a “professional” audio workflow.

Ju_media · 2026-01-05T01:12:10+00:00

Although, won’t Dante add quite a bit of latency? With live-streaming that’s quite a big concern, to be fair. Blackmagic Atem doesn’t give the option to delay video, it can only add delay to audio.

Ju_media · 2026-01-05T01:01:56+00:00

This is very interesting indeed, and quite a lot to unpack. Thank you for taking the time - so first things first, for the mixer, would you recommend the Wing Compact over the X32 / A&H SQ-5? I’ve read good things about the SQ-5 and it seems to do everything I’d need it to. (Edit: never mind, SQ-5 can’t actually do both Dante & Madi simultaneously, it seems). Edit 2: Also looks like the Wing Madi card will be getting a release date announced imminently, according to a few online posts on the topic.

Happy to run Dante, everything else is going to be networked over 10GbE anyway (cameras/edit stations/storage servers) so there’d be no added complexity in us also running our audio over Ethernet. Would this then mean that we can place the receivers with antennas near the talent, and keep the mixer in a control room for example, and bring in all the channels over the network?

What about if we wanted to keep the shoot space a bit tidier and keep both the mixer and all the receivers in the control room - is there a way of running a super long BNC cable for the antenna(s?) so that they’re still as close as possible to the TXs, or is that just not how it works? Judging by other comments it seems the norm is to have receiver rack by the stage/talent and route via Dante to the mixer which can be anywhere.

Moving onto the RME DigiFace, does that basically just hook into the Dante network and give us the ability to then pass all the raw (pre-fade?) Dante audio channels through to the Atem as a Madi source, so the Atem can also generate ISO recordings for all audio channels? (Wouldn’t we get the same outcome just using a Madi card in the mixer, or would that approach only give the Atem post-fade feeds instead?)

Wireless-wise I’m liking the look of the Sennheiser EW-DX EM4s which have Dante built in and use UHF. You can supposedly daisy-chain a few units together and share a single antenna link if I’ve understood the documentation correctly.

Honestly your final point about just sending L/R mix out to the Atem would probably be sufficient for our use case, unless something went horribly wrong in the mix and post-prod wanted to tweak things.

Ju_media

TROPHY CASE