Jon L. Jacobi

Born in southern California to a Marine Corps family, Jon had traveled through much of the U.S. by the time he was eight years-old. A twenty year residence in Stamford, CT with four years commuting to Juilliard in NYC, was followed by a move to San Francisco, where he still resides. His involvement with computers started with a family friend's punch card entry job, an IMSAI 8080, then every personal computer made by Atari, Commodore, Apple, and IBM. Since joining PCWorld's (then PC World) freelance writing team in 1995, his writings have been published too many times to count in that worthy journal, as well as CNET, Computer Currents, Forbes, Wired, and many others.

Diskashur M2 Secure SSD Review: IP68, FIPS 140-2 Level 3 (soon) and a Good Performer

iStorage's Diskashur M2 is stylish, stealthy and a pretty decent bargain as far as secure flash drives are concerned. More importantly, it's a good performer, and ticks all the...

What is ZFS? The File System other File Systems Aspire to

File systems are what make organized data storage possible, and quite a few have appeared over the years: FAT32, exFAT, NTFS, Ext2/3/4, Btrfs, HFS, APFS, etc. However, there's one...

SSD vs. HDD: What’s the Difference?

If I were to be cavalier about the question posed and answered by this article, I'd simply tell you that Solid-State Drives (SSDs) are very fast, and Hard Disk...

What is Ext4? Linux’s Fast Native File System

Before we answer the question posed by this article, a bit of background will be required. Ext4 is only the latest, albeit not particularly new, iteration of the venerable...

Engenius ECS2512 Managed Switch Review: Cloud Management, Multi-gig, and PoE

If you're looking to step up from gigabit performance across a small network or node, you'd be hard-pressed to find a better solution than Engenius's managed 10/2.5GbE ECS2512 switch....

Latest posts

Small business owner reviewing security checklist.

A Practical Guide to Small Business Network Security in 2025

This article provides a clear roadmap for implementing crucial cybersecurity measures to safeguard your company's digital assets.
What is BTRFS file system linux kernal

What is Btrfs? The Better (than most) File System

Btrfs may be a "better" file system next to everything except ZFS, but what Btr actually stands for is not "better", or "butter", but...
Mac floppy disks

A Brief History of the Floppy Disk

Ah, the floppy disk. How I miss thee. How I don't. There was a certain tactile pleasure to inserting you into your drive, and...
hard drive showing platter and read write headread-write-head

How to Install ZFS and Create a ZFS Pool on Ubuntu

ZFS is a stable, robust, and fault-tolerant file system with built-in RAID-like properties and drive pools. We show you how to create a ZFS...
UnRAID array with parity and caching drives

What is UnRAID? Outstanding Capacity with Parity

There are a number of NAS operating systems out there, including several based on the BSD (Berkeley System Development) operating system. Most are proprietary...