photo: lake mist
Backblaze is a cloud backup service that needs cheap storage. Lots of it. They say a petabyte worth of raw drives runs under $100,000, but buying that much storage in products from major vendors easily costs over $1,000,000. So they built their own.
The result is a 4U rack-mounted Linux-based server that contains 67 terabytes at [...]
I’ve been a fan of Drobo since I got mine over a year ago. The little(-ish, and sweet looking, for stack of disks) device packs as many as four drives and automatically manages them to ensure the reliability of your data and easy expandability of the storage. However, Thomas Tomchak just pointed out one major [...]
Joerg Moellenkamp’s post explaining CacheFS has me excited:
Long ago, admins didn’t want to manage dozens of operating system installations. Instead of this they wanted to store all this data on a central fileserver (you know, the network is the computer). Thus netbooting Solaris and SunOS was invented. But there was a problem: All the users [...]
I’m not sure who Robin Harris is, but he’s mighty sure home RAID won’t fly. He’s just so certain that consumers are stupider than him and that vendors’ imaginations are as limited as his. And if Harris was right, we’d probably still be using 8088 microprocessors and getting by on less than a megabyte of [...]
Sure, we can get a MacBook Air with 64GB solid state disk (SSD), but what about upgrading a MacBook Pro? Ryan Block put one in his MBP and got a 20 second startup. Ridata released a 128GB 2.5“ SATA SSD in January that looks compatible with my MacBook Pro. Newegg has it for under $500. [...]
Apple’s Time Capsule is great. Seriously. When has backup been easier? But I need more.
The MacBook Air’s small storage highlights a problem I’ve been suffering for some time: there’s never enough storage. The slower processor and limited RAM expansion are sufferable, but storage isn’t. The 120GB drive in my MacBook Pro now is stuffed with [...]
