We've Amber heard a NASty rumour: Marvell man touts private cloud box A Marvell co-founder's cloud edge firm appears to have thrown its hat in the personal NAS ring with its Wi-Fi-connected Amber product. Latticeworks_Amber_device_drawing Latticework was founded in 2014 by Dr Pantas Sutardja, a co-founder of Marvell and an ex-CTO of that company. Co-incidentally Western Digital’s MyCloud …
2TB is a lot of space for storing the really important stuff.
For the average home user... not bad.
For the guy who does photography or video... wants a NAS to do double duty as a media server that can stream to multiple machines at the same time? Maybe going the custom route makes more sense. But then, you're spending $$$ for SSD/NVME, and a better CPU and upgraded networking. (How many people run 10GbE or higher at home? )
The WD mycloud Home is afaik Android line contrary to the general Linux based mycloud line.
It has a mobile app, and lacks nearly everything else. (no access to the cmdline, no real administrative website, only android/ios apps with hardly any functionality other than a "backup" option without much configuration) Additional shares? forget about it etc.
So everything is "auto", which means that some braindead case is prepared, and you get no way to configure or even monitor it.
Example mounting an HDD on the external USB3 port. (to copy the contents of the previous filer). The only way to know if something was mounted, is getting an alert in the app. No usual partition map or selection option. Just mounts the first partition (which is often an OEM one).
Useless product.
I'm dumping a fairly new Synology for about the same reasons - and it wasn't cheap. If you are a fit to the brain-dead anticipated use-case, it's fine, even really good. Else, you're bascially hosed re configurability, even if, lile myself, you're pretty good with linux for the last couple decades.
I tried open media vault and it's almost as bad. Haven't gotten around to trying FreeNAS, a very graybeard friend who used to sysadmin Unix likes it, but even his own RCS scripts wouldn't run on it.
Being off grid on solar, I don't have much in the way of always-on computing and need to think very hard about what those one or two can do for me....
I've wound up with a HardKernel HC2 (actually, several of them) which I set up using an Odroid xu4 since that has a video output etc, making it easy - running plain old linux, all the usual suspects, I can run my own code, run VNC, webmin, mysql, nginx, cron jobs, and whatever else you could do with linux. Draws 3 watts spun down, and beating the crap out of a 4tb nas drive draws 12w while saturating a GbE link.
Too bad you have to build that yourself...
WD isn't alone. There are reasons, I won't say great ones, but they exist. It's well known that the more knobs you put on a thing, the more people wil misadjust them and then complain and eat your support resources...
But this goes back to good software design principles from the old days. Make it easy for new users to make it work at all - reasonable defaults - but don't prevent the experienced users from getting what they want. That's a little harder, so in todays "ship it now and don't fix it later" world...we don't do that anymore.
It's well known that the more knobs you put on a thing, the more people wil misadjust them and then complain and eat your support resources...
Off topic anecdote:
My boss at the radio station I used to work at ordered a new on-air desk with as few frills as possible. If he could have got away with it, each channel would have had a "start" button and nothing else. In the end we ended up with gain, talkback (if appropriate), pre-fade, start and a fader.
An older desk was not specified like this (was there before his time). Jocks would regularly complain "CD2 sounds odd" or "my mike isn't working properly" or "the telephone caller can't hear me", having fiddled with the phase, or the parametric EQ or the phantom power or the pan/balance or an aux send, so he took all the little daughterboards under each channels strip and turned them around so the controls were facing inwards. The knobs were glued back on to the strip. Sometimes the circuitry was simply bypassed, leaving the controls in place but ineffective. Nobody seemed to notice :-)
This kind of attitude is a bit Apple-like, but there are circumstances where it works well and others where it doesn't.
A possibly better solution I have with my new digital desk is the ability to recall settings. If someone's mucked it up, recall "general purpose" and I'm back to a known state.
M.
Too right, you do!
What'll you be telling us next, grandad, that you use passwords rather facial recognition on a Facebook login to access everything?
You probably even have a front door with a regular key instead of NFC, because of some nonsense about how you're worried you won't be able to open your door if your phone gets lost/stolen (just call the lock OEM's tech support and they'll open it for you remotely, duh!).
How about contraception? Use that do you? I bet you do - 'cause you haven't got on the GOOP avocado diet to reduce your sperm count the modern way.
What a dinosaur!
@Alistair
Fair enough.
I should really have used a troll icon, shouldn't I? I'm just so used to the commentardiat consisting of intelligent folks that I don't always remember to cater for the developmentally arrested by including a laughter track. Next time I'll be sure to link out to one at appropriate moments - I'm sure everyone will just love that ; )
"...
"The product is said to perform better if it is installed in front of a home router, rather than behind it.".."
How would you put it "in front" of a home router given that most people use the shite their ISP give to them which will include some kind of xDSL / PPPoE connectivity, does this thing act as a xDSL router in its own right?
... for naive users who want to spend a lot for proprietary technologies which may disappear sooner than they expect, hoping they will be easier to setup and use.
Why would I need their proprietary apps when there are existing standard protocols to deliver the same functionalities? It's OK if they are just optional utilities built on top of standards for the less experienced users - but does it uses, for example, standard VPN and remote access technologies so you can use other tools if you wish?
What's the problem if it's behind a router - and it doesn't look to be able to support direct connections to a cable/xDSL/fibre input? The idea all the internet traffic goes through such kind of device, without knowing its real security, it's really not pleasant to me. Very little details about what the external part of the "hybrid" cloud does.
One of my first homebrew NASs was a pi, and with a cheap 2 tb laptopt spinner on a USB<>SATA cable, not too bad - even ran PHPBB for home use (groceries, sysadmin tips, backup software as attachements, it's a sweet setup).
But going to the bigger faster stuff too now - but also homebrew using a bit more potent SBC like the hardkernel HC2 with drives originally bought for a Synology NAS I'm dumping as being too inflexible, and with horrible "you're holding it wrong, won't-fix" support, I may as well just roll my own anyway.
Why dump the Synology? When I updated my existing QNAP NAS to a newer i5 model the old one was flashed with Debian as it was out of support and now provides the on site hardware backup. I use webmin and OMV on it as I'm not after anything special. Just needs to sit there and pull data across. It's now over 10 years old so I've had my money's worth out of it. Just a new power supply needed a couple of years back. What these systems do provide is the low power draw small enclosures with hot-swappable disk bays.
I find a Raspberry too slow and with too little memory for my NAS needs, nor I like too much going through USB for disk I/O. I usually recycle my older motherboard in a decent case with good cooling - including disks, running a NAS-specific OS. Still, the DIY approach is not for everybody, for most users a ready-made solution is far easier to setup and manage.
For that price you can get a 4-bay Synology DS418 and have money left over to buy a 2TB HDD. Of course, you'll need to buy three other HDDs of the same size to really get it to work.
And you can make it work in RAID 5, not just RAID 1.
Being able to contact it by phone is not an argument for me.
Thanks for your comment, exciting to see the thread. Just for clarification, Amber has a built-in AC2600 4X4 router. Your data is still protected by the built-in firewall within the router itself. It can sit behind another router but we've designed it for optimal performance when it's only on it's own router.
Cheers!
LatticeWork Team
But which WAN technology does it support? If it's "outside" port is just an Ethernet one, you'll still need a router (even if configured as a bridge - if possible, not all consumer ones allow it easily) in front of it to convert from fibre/cable/xDSL.
Moreover, today many ISP routers implement VoIP as well, and replace older POTS lines. Putting another router/fw in front of them could become an issue - it may depends on how good and configurable the router/fw is, and the user knowledge about it.
Still, from a security perspective, I wouldn't feel at ease with storage and the firewall on the same system, directly connected to the outside world.
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