Showing posts from storage category

Most storage servers use a single type of primary storage media, like HDDs or SSDs. All-HDD servers excel at inexpensively storing large amounts of data, and serve it back over your network at very

How do self-encrypting drives fit into an open source storage server? Well, before we dive into the premise of this blog, for those of you not familiar with SED drives, here’s a quick overview: Wha

Ransomware. It’s a word we’re being inundated with everywhere we turn. And rightfully so. Over the last few years, it has become more and more prevalent. And definitely a bigger concern for IT departments. Every week, it seems like we read another

High-performance storage is becoming more and more essential for many organizations. During the pandemic, we saw a trend where a diverse range of organizations began upgrading their data storage to

If you want the best performance and fast access storage, you’re looking for an all-flash storage server. And because the cost of SSDs has significantly dropped over the last few years, all-f

From customers to social channels, we’ve listened to your feedback to improve our server administration software, Houston. Today, we’re excited to share our new Houston updates and feat

Let’s talk about a perfect pair — Proxmox and Houston UI. You’ve most likely heard us talk about Proxmox before, especially recently — now that we officially offer and support Proxmox on our 45Drives servers. We’ve been using Proxmox as our open s

Virtualization is an exciting technology that offers many potential benefits to a massive range of applications. Virtualization as a concept is ancient – it has been around for years, and its current position in the storage world is well establish

Virtualization adds an abstraction layer between physical hardware and the systems and programs interacting with it. Having a virtual layer between your software and hardware provides huge benefits to many applications and potential future-proofin

The truth is, data storage issues can happen. One minute you can be heading to Thanksgiving supper, and the next, you’re getting a call from your organization telling you that there’s s

A single portal to easily and effectively manage digital evidence is incredibly beneficial for small to medium-sized law enforcement and legal professionals to help manage their digital evidence. T

Cameras are producing more and more data, especially with 4k transitioning into the new defacto-standard. With this explosion in data, there has been an increased need for large-scale data storage

We dropped a mini Storinator into the Reddit ocean and got a lot of ripples last week.  This teaser photo of the “Storinator Jr” generated many questions about what this mini Storinator is — so let’s dive in and tell you all about it. This li

This new tool 45Drives’ developed for deploying Ceph, creatively dubbed as Ceph Deploy, exists as a module within Houston that allows you to set up your cluster from within a graphical user i

We strive to develop the hardware you need and offer the services you require to do what you do best — keep everything running smoothly within your company. If you’re a system administrator, we get

Planning out your business continuity can take time, but it could be a significant cost-saver in the long run. Knowing the risks you face and how to deal with them is

Are you ready to get out of the command line? Because it’s official – all four new Houston/Cockpit modules are live! If you’ve been following our Tech Tips for the last month, you would have heard of the new updates in Houston. T

Change Management is Difficult for Many Organizations. Think of a time when you implemented a new piece of technology in your office or at home, whether it was software, hardware, or even something as simple as finally switching to the latest vers

Before 45Drives became its own company, its sister company, Protocase, began working with Backblaze, a cloud storage provider. Backblaze prototyped a large, wooden open design storage pod and engaged the services of Protocase to help bring th

We here at 45Drives are big fans of Ceph (as you may know). We even offer public and private Ceph webinars. Ceph is the premier open-source clustering software. It works by linking multip

Each Tuesday, we will be releasing a tech tip video that will give users information on various topics relating to our Storinator storage servers. This week, Mitch gives you a comparison of Linux v

This week, Mitch gives you an overview of what Ceph is at its core, including a look at the components that are needed to make up a Ceph storage cluster. Be sure to check out our GitHub: https

Each Tuesday, we will be releasing a tech tip video that will give users information on various topics relating to our Storinator storage servers. This week, we tackle a commonly asked question her

In this week’s tech tip, we’re debunking the ZFS 80% rule! Today lead engineer Brett Kelly is talking about ZFS writes and the “mystical” 80 percent rule.  Check it out below. Don’t forget, each Tuesday, we relea

Curious how you expand a Ceph Cluster? We can help! In today’s’ tech tip, lead engineer Brett Kelly explains everything you need to know when planning to expand your cluster. Don’

We’re back with another Tech Tip and this week we’re answering a question from one of our users. In this tech tip video, our Lead Engineer Brett Kelly goes more in-depth to answer a que

This week Mitch is telling us all about ZFS Snapshots in under 5 minutes! Did you know ZFS Snapshots can be mounted read-only to allow for the recovery of files or to roll-back an entire file system to the last time a snapshot was created? If

We use the term Ceph a lot, but have you ever wondered what it actually stands for? Our lead engineer Brett Kelly, gives a great explanation in this week’s tech tip! He also talks about CephFS and why he thinks it’s the best-distr

How do you choose the right RAID configuration? Our 45Drives engineers are here to help answer that question! Check out this week’s Tuesday Tech Tip to find out the 5 main aspects to con

Did you know your Storinator has the power to be both, a local storage target and a high-performance server that can manage your video recording software?  Even if you may already have an exis

We’re back this week with another tech tip! Did you know you can back your Storinator up to the cloud? Chris tells us all we need to know in this weeks 45Drives tech tip. Having a d

How to Protect Your Data Using ZFS A question often asked in the server industry is, ‘what’s better – software RAID or hardware RAID?’ If you research this topic, a lot of the information about RAID suggests that a hardware RAID card is pref

In this blog and the series of blogs to follow I will focus solely on Ceph Clustering. Many people are intimidated by Ceph because they find it complex – but when you understand it, that’s not the

We build some pretty awesome storage servers or at least that’s what our customers and fans say about us! We like to think it’s because our Storinators solve their storage issues by holding huge am

How to build a Petabyte cluster using GlusterFS with ZFS running on Storinator massive storage servers  If you checked out our recent video on clustering, you may have seen me keep a high-speed file transfer going, while I did just about

Hard Disk Drives (HDD’s) are one of the most impressive and important electromechanical devices ever created. When I think about it, it is really amazing that these things actually work,

At 45 Drives, we make really large capacity storage servers. When we first started out, our machines were relatively slow, and focused on cold-to-lukewarm storage applications; but our users p

Thomas Kay founded Tom’s Computer Support in 2001 with the goal of providing the type of professional IT support larger companies enjoy to small businesses in P

Thomas Kay founded Tom’s Computer Support in 2001 with the goal of providing the type of professional IT support larger companies enjoy to small businesses in Pennsylvania.  Applying his

A common question we get asked here at 45 Drives is, “What RAID should I use with my Storinator?” Our answer: “What are you trying to do?” Choosing which RAID level is right for your applicati

As a NAS operating system, FreeNAS has been out there for a decade. Working on the beautiful marriage of FreeBSD and ZFS, it’s been tried and tested by many users within the storage community, to great success. But if you’re one of tho

My last post, How to Achieve 20 Gb & 30 Gb Bandwidth through Network Bonding, was our most popular blog entry yet. There was a LOT of discussion and comments about the results of my testin

We’re adding another new voice to the blog – Rob MacQueen is an engineer in our R&D department. In his first blog post, he shares his experiments with setting up network bonding in order to ach

Introducing a new voice to the 45 Drives blog, Darrell Cormier. Darrell is part of our R&D team! At 45 Drives, we’re continuously striving to improve the quality of our systems. Our goal

In previous posts, I showed measurements of the power draw of Consumer (C-class) HDDs, in both standard and staggered start-up. In this post, I’m showing the same power dr

You’ve seen him in our 45 Drives videos, now Product Manager Stephen MacNeil lends his voice to the 45 Drives blog to discuss our latest news – we’re now offering enterprise-

In Part 1 of the series, I discussed the Power Draw of a Storinator on Startup and other conditions. Results showed that our Storinator’s Power Supply Unit (PSU) is well suited for the task at

There is a lot going on inside your Storinator. CPUs are a cyclin’, fans are turnin’, data is movin’, and most importantly, 45 drives are spinnin’! A steady and reliable power source is essential to make all of this ha

Over the last couple of months, everyone at 45 Drives has been totally immersed in work related to “launching” the new Storinator models that just went up on our site last Friday. I put q

Cameron MacDonald here for 45 Drives, and on behalf of the entire team, I’d like to welcome you to the new 45 Drives Blog!  We’ll be using this space to give you an inside look into what’s happening at 45 Drives. Here&#