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 amounts of data, they’re incredibly fast and …wait for it… they are affordable! So, after hearing some feedback from our fans it was only a matter…
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 everything I could think of that would give a system administrator nightmares. I was pulling out drives, yanking out network cables…
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, let alone work so well! These disks must quickly and precisely position heads slightly above very narrow tracks on rapidly spinning platters. If there is an error in the angular position…
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 pushed us to achieve more performance and reliability. This drove the evolution of our direct-wired architecture, which delivers enterprise level speed (read/write in excess of 3 Gigabytes/second) and reliability, without losing the simplicity…
At 45 Drives, the FreeNAS network attached storage operating system is a popular choice to run our high performance massive storage pods. It combines the advantages of the modern ZFS copy on write file system, with the simplicity of a purpose-built GUI driven NAS appliance shell. Until today, whenever a customer received a Storinator running FreeNAS it would be configured with a…
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 experience working in marketing, sales, as well as IT at many local companies, Thomas quickly built a reputation as being a knowledgeable and trustworthy IT industry expert. He shares his expertise…
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 experience working in marketing, sales, as well as IT at many local companies, Thomas quickly built a reputation as being a knowledgeable and trustworthy IT industry expert. He shares his expertise…
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 application requires some thought into what is most important for your storage solution. Is it performance, redundancy or storage efficiency? In other words, do you need…
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 those people who is more into Linux and Btrfs, you may be yearning for an alternative. Over the…
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 testing, as well as network bonding in general (including here) – which was awesome to see. It's great when people care about what you write! One prevalent comment…