The Yellow Machine in Review

We recently had in the office one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions. The Yellow Machine, in a nutshell, is a pretty looking machine roughly the size of a decent UPS box that's got either 1 TB or 1.6 TB of storage space, with the all RAID fun and such. We ran with it here for about a month or so. My impressions are below.

So, the machine itself is, well, uh, cute. Bright yellow, good clear display lights so that you can see traffic on the different drives. The drives themselves are IDE drives, so yeah, you don't get the speed of SCSI, but frankly, if you are looking for 1.6 TB of SCSI, you probably need to look at jbods or the like. But since the unit is really designed to be an office storage environment, that's probably just fine.

Feature-wise, the unit has almost everything that you want. What is interesting to me, that I haven't seen in many NAS units is that it's got a double firewall. The interface for handling network isn't quite as nice, as say, a wireless unit, but it's decent. You can have the machine sit as your connection to your WAN (it handles DHCP, static IP) do port-forwarding and all those other fun things. The primary problem that I had was actually the config of first getting it setup, but that didn't take much time once I actually read the manual. *grin* It will also do web-access controls for users, monitor e-mails sent, a whole slew of other stuff.

The network support is robust. It does SMB/NFS, and supports Windows and Mac as desktop clients, and does indeed work under Linux as well based on my testing. All of the interface work is done via HTTP so as long as you've got a somewhat recent flavor of web browser, you'll be dandy although it's optimized for IE6. The unit is surprisingly quiet - many times, while I was at my desk (it sat under there) I forgot it was there and kicked it over. It still works fine after that, BTW.

In terms of speed and performance, nothing hugely different then normal network file transfers, but that's more a function of network traffic/speed then anything else. The device handled multiple people using (it has permissions built-in) easily, and did uploads & downloads of big VOB files, MP3 directories, normal files - it shrugged it off. The major issue is pricing; the 1 TB is about $1300. Now, for the DIY crowd, yes, using Linux you could very easily put together a RAID 5, 1 TB machine for not that much more -- and you are probably going to do it anyway. But for the target market, especially situations in which the IT resources are limited, it's a great machine for the ease of setting it up. And since it supports doing automated back-ups as well as has the serial port to work with a UPS system, you don't have to worry about the whole crapping out and losing all of your data. All in all, a great unit. Price is a concern, but a minor one.

What about authentication

[plebeian]

Nowhere on their site does is list any support for remote authentication. If I need a cheep solution I will set up an old desktop running Linux and get a SATA RAID card.

Price a problem?

[WarwickRyan]

$1300 isn't exactly expensive for an 1tb NAS device.

Code, please!

[ettlz]

If I understand correctly, the user manual states that the appliance uses the Linux kernel... if this is so, has anyone found a link on their web-site to any GPL'd code included with the software updates?

The definition of editor?

[Evro]

We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.

The device handled multiple people using (it has permissions built-in) eaisly, and do uploads & downloads of big VOB files, MP3 directories, normal files - it shrugged it off.

These "sentences" are embarrassing. What happened to proofreading? Seriously, you guys beg for test hardware to play with, and then you write a review that's barely English? Come on. We all have deadlines, but is it too much to ask that the editor proofread his own work to make sure it's coherent?

Price major or minor concern?

[dennism]

The major issue is pricing; the 1 TB is about $1300.

Price is a concern, but a minor one.

So, which is it?

Second Language

[Nephroth]

In addition to being nearly incomprehensible, this review is also fairly useless. You told us that a NAS device attaches to the network and stores things.

I don't really think anyone in the slashdot crowd expected it to not do that.

Generally, a hardware review contains at least some sort of benchmarks or some gauge of performance. The closest you came to this was "I kicked it and it didn't break" and "It was kind of easy to use."

If you're going to review hardware, why don't you look up some other reviews for related hardware and try to structure yours in a similar manner. That way, you might actually offer some useful information.

$1:GB is Cheap

[Doc Ruby]

1.3TB for $1300 is cheap. Just the cheapest 300GB EIDE drives (x4, max on cheap IDE) cost $104, at least $516 - for 1.2TB, 100GB less than the Yellow. The HW for the rest of the machine is probably at least another $500, for $950. If you can put one of these boxes together and install the OS and SW (assuming yours will be as good) in under 3 hours, you probably can charge at least $100:h at work. And there's tech/customer support. This box seems like a good deal, without hassle, with little markup.

Try Infrant instead

[sys49152]

First off, who wrote this review? Sounds to me like an Anthology Solutions employee trying to be all slashdotty.

I just looked at the specs for this and am not that impressed. Like many other NAS devices, they claim OS/X support, but support is not via AFP. Though their docs make no mention of it, the YellowMachine is almost certainly running SAMBA only, and OS/X support is also through SAMBA. The problem with this is primarily long filenames. Try backing up your music collection to a SMB/CIFS box, and you'll see what I mean. IMHO, if you don't have AFP support, then you don't support Macs.

Similarly, there's no support for rsync or (given what Tom's Networking has to say [tomsnetworking.com]) file access via FTP or HTTP. And this may be just me, but who wants a router, DHCP server, a firewall, and a proxy server embedded in a NAS box? And $1300? That's cheap?

I recently purchased a RAID enabled SOHO NAS appliance. I spent a long time figuring out exactly what was needed in a mixed OS/X, Windows, Linux environment. I picked the Infrant ReadyNAS [infrant.com] box. You can see my blog entry [wanderingbarque.com] on this subject for details as to why. In short: support for SMB/CIFS, AFP, NFS, rsync, webdav, and FTP. Support for UPS devices. Support for Gigabit Ethernet. Very good documentation and an even better (employee active) user forum. And I got a TB of storage (650MB after RAID 5 formatting) for $1,000.

Not quite there...

[jedidiah]

Mebbe if it had a gigabit ethernet port.

Otherwise, it's kinda not quite there.

Firewire and gigE are both pretty cheap these days. There's no good reason that a box like this can't have that kind of thruput. NAS doesn't have to mean slow as a snail. They could dump the 8-port switch or just have different model options.

This could be really sweet as a MythTV repository otherise.

YACOTS (Yet Another Critique Of This Story)

[cypherz]

"Worst /. Story of 2005"

This story is currently nominated for "Worst Slashdot Story of 2005" and unless a Katrina-scale woofer of a story comes along in the next month, this little slice of junior-high blather will easily take the prize. I wonder if Hemos actually _read_ this story before posting it? (Hemos: did you write this? Or just post it?) As many others have pointed out, the first sentence doesn't even parse in English! I might be wrong, but I'm assuming that Hemos' native language is English because most of the not-english-as-first-language-having folks I've met can express themselves MUCH better than Americans who grew up with English. Not meaning to flame Americans (I'm from Mississippi after all...) but the state of written communication in the USA seems to be declining proportionally to the rise in blogging.