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.

Comments

WTF

[mrtroy]

I am not going to try and understand the next few paragraphs of a review that starts with
"with the all RAID fun and such."

What in the hell does that mean?

Re:WTF

[hahiss]

(Un)Surprisingly, the first sentence is completely incomprehensible:

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

What, precisely, was it that they heard while standing over one of these machines? ;)

Perhaps we shouldn't nit-pick, because the device is supposed to be used in an office ``environmemt"---one, presumably, that is bereft of a spell checker.

Do they pay the editors here? With real money?

Er?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Parse Error at line 1.

Core Dump...

Yellow Box

[Profane MuthaFucka]

Yellow Box love you LONG time!

Price

[Jupix]

The major issue is pricing; the 1 TB is about $1300.
Price is a concern, but a minor one.

So.. You think it's a cute looking box? I think so too. In my opinion, it's quite ugly. Very pretty, if I may say so.

This day shall live on in infamy.

[Mille Mots]

As the day that /. jumped the shark.

30 NOV 05: Not content with mere duplicate stories, Hemos started posting incoherent ramblings.

Now, for my review of the review!

[UncleRage]

Well, the review was super froody! Yeah, you know Linux was mentioned and that was neat. I read it on a pretty modern webbrowser, but I suppose that IE would've been great, too.

The reviewer spent some time talking about things, which was cool in my book. At one point, I actually considered looking into one of the technical things mentioned, but didn't as it would've broken the flavor of the review.

All in all, it was a pretty fun review -- I had some laughs and a couple of good cries. For the DIY crowd, you could google the info yourself -- which, you'll probably do anyhow. But for the Suits who want to spend some money and not learn much (much less than say... the spec sheet: http://www.anthologysolutions.com/products/P400T_D ataSheet.pdf -- or even the basic breakdown: http://www.anthologysolutions.com/products/index.h tm ) then, hey give this rather cute review a shot!

Thanks for the darling review. I feel much peppier now. =/

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?

Re:English comp was never my strong subject

[Quiet_Desperation]

What he meant to say was: "We office one of the Yellow Machine recently in the over had that's made heard by Anthology Solutions."

This hope I helps.

Re:Infrant

[rjstanford]

It's also nice to buy the machine with no drives and upgrade that when you can afford it.

Wouldn't it be smarter to wait until you could afford both the machine and, oh, at least one drive?

Wow.

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

It was just so bad, I had to sig it.

I also reviewed this machine

[Jim Buzbee]

I also reviewed this machine in an article on TomsNetworking. My review included fun things like pulling the power from one of the RAID drives while streaming a movie, comparative performance graphs, etc.

Here's my review.

Re:I also reviewed this machine

[BushCheney08]

Thank you for what appears to be a more thorough review. And extra special thanks for a lead-off sentence that actually makes sense!

Re:MY GOD HEMOS

[Anonymous Coward]

Hemos is your God?

Re:Bonus feature: terrabytes right out of the box.

[Snarfangel]

It would sound better if you sang "Yellow RAID Machine."

Tom's Networking:

[ltwally]

There is perhaps a better review at Tom's Networking.

Here is a quote of their conclusion:

The Yellow Machine's RAID features can bring a greater degree of confidence in the safety of your data than you might find in an inexpensive consumer NAS device. In addition, the flexibility of its built-in switch and router bring extra capabilities to the table in a compact form-factor.

But the Yellow Machine misses the mark on a number of points, especially its primary value-proposition of being an all-in-one box for small-office users. If all you want is a basic NAT firewall, the Yellow Machine will probably suit you. But its use of a proxy that is limited only to email and web protection (and buggy at that) will give you fits if you want to limit what users can do on the Internet. Frankly, you'd be a lot better served buying a $40 router and just setting the Yellow Machine to Storage mode.

But even as a NAS, the Yellow Machine fails to match up to RAID competion like Buffalo's TeraStation and Infrant's ReadyNAS due to its missing print server, inability to connect to USB-based storage devices and missing support of user file access via FTP and HTTP.

The bottom line is that the Yellow Machine's relatively high cost, merely modest performance, and problematic proxy behaviors should cause prospective purchasers to think twice before buying.

For my money, looks like I'll be investigating other products, first.

Re:What the hell has this place become?

[Master of Transhuman]

You forgot obviously commercial advertisements masquerading as reviews by Chinese PR agents who can't speak (or write) English.

Re:RAID

[InvalidError]

Right now, RAID6 is starting to gain popularity in high-availability environments.

With basic RAID5, the array can handle a single drive failure and can only detect odd errors with no possibility of correcting them. With RAID5+1, a hot-spare is available to start unattended rebuild when a failure occurs but costs and extra drive while still leaving the array vulnerable to a second failure during the rebuild process. With RAID6, error-correcting codes are generated for the N extra (non-data) drives to provide N/2 bits error correction, multi-bits error detection and recovery of up to N erasures/failures.

RAID6 is more computationnally expensive than RAID5 but it can be made arbitrarily resilient to subtle soft errors typical RAID5 would never detect. An external box 6xSATA/NCQ RAID6 with SATA-3G-uplink storage controller would be a nice companion for anybody who takes data integrity seriously but does not want to do TB-scale backups. (Of course, this still leaves data vulnerable to infection-induced or otherwise accidental trashing.)