Creators Summit

The 45Drives Creators Summit unites some of YouTube’s most influential tech creators for a vibrant exchange of ideas and innovation. Through engaging discussions and live streams, the event fosters new product development while deepening our understanding of the tech community and how we can better serve it. Over the past two years, renowned creators like Wendell from Level1Techs, Tom Lawrence, Jeff Geerling, Jeff from Craft Computing, Techno Tim, Raid Owl, and Jay from LearnLinuxTV have been pivotal contributors. We have also welcomed industry partners like CIQ (Rocky Linux) and HDStor.

Last year, we hosted the inaugural Creators Summit at 45HQ, inviting several of our YouTube partners for an open discussion on data storage and homelabbing.

In addition to engaging in tech conversations, Jeff from Craft Computing hosted a special live episode of Talking Heads from 45HQ, where the crew enjoyed craft beers while discussing all things tech. To top it off, Jeff, Brett, and Mitch joined the others to wrap up the event with a livestream from a sailboat, highlighting the key takeaways of the summit.

This year, 45Drives collaborated with an exceptional group of creators, partners, and our customer Patrick Emerson from New Spring Church, to tackle the challenges posed by proprietary enterprise technologies through 'Demicrosoftification'.

Together, we explored how open-source solutions can offer greater control, flexibility, and efficiency, ultimately enhancing both the customer experience and our daily operations.

While the creators were at 45HQ, we played a game of "Cluster Jenga," inspired by the original game where you remove wooden blocks from a stacked tower. However, in our version, the "tower" was a Ceph Cluster, and the "blocks" were drives, network cables, and other components that we pulled from the cluster. Watch the video here to see how long the cluster held up before it failed!

The event concluded with a live stream from the historic Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site in Baddeck, Nova Scotia, where creators and industry partners recapped the week’s activities and delved deeper into the event’s key topics.