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The Yellow Machine in Review
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.
Nice unit, but I'd prefer a green machine!
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
Is that a word???
Basically the point of which is to remove a single point of failure (a single massive hard drive) from the server environment by allowing the data to be stored the same way in multiple places. There are 5 RAID levels, and the technology for RAID 5 (which is the highest level that I remember, anyway) has been out there and stable for a while.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Does it come with the cute, meditating babe?
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
This once glorious site went from news posts and and the opinions of readers that I actually respected, to AC's weak trolling attempts, self righteous grammar and spelling cops, crapflooding, and crybabies who spend the day trying for FPs only to point out that the last story was a dupe.
Consider me retired.
And I hope that those who mod me offtopic/troll/whatever will see the irony in the way they are spending their mod points
...both interiorlly, and exteriorlly.
I'm highly amused in that your review of the review was utterly lacking in content other than the two links, yet you're running at +5 Informative. Somehow, I think your satire was missed. Maybe the people who write these reviews modded you up due to professional courtesy?
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.