Latticeworks claims to have reinvented personal NAS with its WiFi-connected Amber product.
The company was founded in 2014 by Dr Pantas Sutarjdada, a co-founder of Marvell and an ex-CTO of that company. Co-incidentally Western Digital’s MyCloud product has used Marvell controllers.
Amber is about the size of a smallish home speaker – think Sonos One – and contains (tech specs) an Intel Core Duo Gemini Lake CPU (1.1GHz – 2.6 GHz), a built-in AC2600 Wi-Fi Router, and a pair of 1TB disk drives in a mirrored (RAID 1) configuration. Maximum capacity is 4TB.
It has a WAN and HDMI ports, a pair of LAN ports but no USB connectivity.
Mac and Windows notebooks/desktops and IOS/Android smart phones/tablets run a LiFE app which can automatically send picture images, music, videos and other files to the Amber box. It can stream videos to TVs and be accessed remotely to do things with files, such as stream them to TVs or share them.
Latticeworks says it streams videos with no buffering and photos can be facially-indexed. There is no storage of data in third-party clouds and a proprietary LattisNet cloud service is used only for user ID management and data routing verification.
This reminds us of Connected Data’s Transporter box for businesses, which also provide private cloud file-sharing.
The Amber product costs $399.99 with a time-limited discount from $549.99 and is only available in the USA.
The product is said to perform better if it is installed in front of a home router, rather than behind it. The FAQ says; “Being behind another router could in some cases make for poorer connection when connecting from the outside.”
Its claimed main superiority over a home NAS product is cloud security; “Other solutions rely on public third-party clouds, so you never really know who has control of your data. When you store your digital life in Amber – your data is yours and yours alone.”
Western Digital’s MyCloud personal NAS runs up to 20TB in capacity, five times larger. It has pretty much the same feature set and costs less. A 2TB My Cloud Home has a promo price of $139.99, discounted from $159.99.
Is the Amber product worth $260 more? What do you think?
