Month: May 2020

Enlarge / No, you can't actually buy Ironwolf disks with an OpenZFS logo on them—but since they're guaranteed SMR-free, they are a solid choice. (credit: Jim Salter)

As we all enter month three of the COVID-19 pandemic and look for new projects to keep us engaged (read: sane), can we interest you in learning the fundamentals of computer storage? Quietly this spring, we've already gone over some necessary basics like how to test the speed of your disks and what the heck RAID is. In the second of those stories, we even promised a follow-up exploring the performance of various multiple-disk topologies in ZFS, the next-gen filesystem you have heard about because of its appearances everywhere from Apple to Ubuntu.

Well, today is the day to explore, ZFS-curious readers. Just know up front that in the understated words of OpenZFS developer Matt Ahrens, "it's really complicated."

But before we get to the numbers—and they are coming, I promise!—for all the ways you can shape eight disks' worth of ZFS, we need to talk about how ZFS stores your data on-disk in the first place.

Enlarge / A Falcon 9 rocket launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base. (credit: SpaceX)

Welcome to Edition 2.43 of the Rocket Report! This is probably the longest report we've published, and it's due to the surfeit of news in the world of launch. So much is happening, especially on the small side of things, and we're doing our best to stay on top of it all.

As always, we welcome reader submissions for these updates—in fact we'd struggle to put out each issue without this help. We especially encourage international tips. And if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe to this weekly report as an email newsletter.

Virgin Orbit targeting first launch this month? Virgin Orbit could attempt its first orbital test launch later this month over the Pacific Ocean southwest of Los Angeles, Spaceflight Now reports. This launch would cap a development program for an air-launched small-satellite carrier that began in earnest eight years ago. A dedicated mission on LauncherOne costs $12 million.