With ever-expanding music, movie and photo collections, hard drives are filling up fast. The Yellow Machine, a storage device that holds nearly a terabyte — that's 1,000 gigabytes — is here to take the load off.
The Yellow Machine is a dedicated file-storage device with four 250-gigabyte hard drives that can be configured so that, to a computer, they look like one big terabyte-size drive. Built-in automatic backup software ensures that memories and downloaded files will not be lost in a system crash.
Aimed at home and business users, the Yellow Machine also acts as a virtual private network, or V.P.N., storage device, allowing access to data on your Yellow Machine from any computer on any network.
The Yellow Machine costs $999 for the one-terabyte model and is available online at www.yellowmachine.com.
The box, which weighs about 14 pounds, has eight LAN Ethernet ports and one WAN port for connecting a cable modem or digital subscriber line. Inside a home network, the Yellow Machine appears as a networked disk drive and can stream video and music to networked devices like the Xbox 360 or TiVo. Now the question is how long it will take to fill up one terabyte.