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.

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...

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 in the early days, locking...

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...

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 B-Tree, a data construct employed...

What is RAID 60? Double-parity and More Speed

RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) is the combining of multiple disks to mimic a single hardware storage device. Depending on the type, or "level", RAID increases performance, capacity,...

Latest posts

Neatly stacked shipping containers

Securing Kuburnetes with StackRox

StackRox integrates with Kubernetes to secure clusters of containers by scanning container images during the creation, deployment, and runtime phases. Real-time alerting, dashboards, and...
QNAP NAS in the initial physical setup process

How to Delete a Folder From File Station on a QNAP NAS

You may occasionally want to do some housekeeping on your QNAP NAS, and deleting folders may be a big part of it. Here's how...
World map with pins and strings connecting cities

ExpressVPN Review: How Does It Perform (and How to Install) on Ubuntu?

ExpressVPN is considered one of the top-tier VPN products. We install it on Ubuntu 21.04 and use it from the command-line and from within...
Diskashur M22

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

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...
Seagate IronWolf 510

Seagate IronWolf 510 Review: A Long-lived NVMe Caching SSD Specifically for NAS

Seagate's IronWolf 510 NVMe SSD is a fast reader with an excellent endurance rating, but it's a very slow, albeit hyper-steady writer. When I...