45 Drives Adds Linux-Powered Mini PCs, Workstations To Growing Compute Lineup

Tobias Mann reports via The Register: Canadian systems builder 45 Drives is perhaps best known for the dense multi-drive storage systems employed by the likes of Backblaze and others, but over the last year the biz has expanded its line-up to virtualization kit, and now low-power clients and workstations aimed at enterprises and home enthusiasts alike. 45 Drives' Home Client marks a departure from the relatively large rack-mount chassis it normally builds. Founder Doug Milburn told The Register the mini PC is something of a passion project that was born out of a desire to build a better home theater PC.

Housed within a custom passively cooled chassis built in-house by 45 Drive's parent company Protocase, is a quad-core, non-hyperthreaded Intel Alder Lake-generation N97 processor capable of boosting to 3.6GHz, your choice of either 8GB or 16GB of memory, and 250GB of flash storage. The decision to go with a 12-gen N-series was motivated in part by 45 Drives' internal workloads, Milburn explains, adding that to run PowerPoint or Salesforce just doesn't require that much horsepower. However, 45 Drives doesn't just see this as a low-power PC. Despite its name, the box will be sold under both its enterprise and home brands. In home lab environments, these small form factor x86 and Arm PCs have become incredibly popular for everything from lightweight virtualization and container hosts to firewalls and routers.

In terms of software, 45 Drives says it will offer a number of operating system images for customers to choose from at the time of purchase, and Linux will be a first-class citizen on these devices. It's safe to say that Milburn isn't a big fan of Microsoft these days. 'We run many hundreds of Microsoft workstations here, but we're kind of moving away from it,' he said. 'With Microsoft, it's a control thing; it's forced updates; it's a way of life with them.' Milburn also isn't a fan of Microsoft's registration requirements and online telemetry. 'We want control over what all our computers do. We want no traffic on our network that's out of here,' he said. As a result, Milburn says 45 Drives is increasingly relying on Linux, and that not only applies to its internal machines but its products as well. Having said that, we're told that 45 Drives recognizes that Linux may not be appropriate for everyone and will offer Windows licenses at an additional cost. And, these both being x86 machines, there's nothing stopping you from loading your preferred distro or operating system on them after they've shipped. These workstations aren't exactly cheap. They start at $1,099 without the dedicated GPU. 'The HL15 will set you back $799-$910 for the bare chassis if you opted for the PSU or not,' adds The Register. 'Meanwhile, a pre-configured system would run you $1,999 before factoring in drives.'

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