QNAP is hoping that a big old box of storage isn't just for office users, selling a stripped down network-attached storage device with some cool multimedia features.
The TS-110 has just one hard drive bay, good for up to 2 TB of total capacity, running on an 800 MHz Marvell processor with 256 MB of RAM. There's a lot of feature jargon here for the storage geek: Q-RAID 1 for high data redundancy, iSCSI Target service with Thin Provisioning and a Gigabit LAN port and policy based IP blocking. I like how the TS-110 will also send you a text message if something goes wrong with the unit.
But the real push towards the home user is in the TS-110's multimedia features. QNAP promises support for "a wide range" of media players, most notably the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 game consoles. The device also acts as a PC-less download center, able to pull down files via BitTorrent, FTP and regular HTTP either through the network or remotely via the Internet.
And with several computers attached to the network, the TS-110 can perform centralized back-ups. My favorite feature? Though not unique to this device, the TS-110 can stream video, music and photos to an iPhone or iPod Touch through a DLNA/UPnP app.
This seems like a product for the power user who wants more than just a home multimedia server, as the TS-110 can host Web sites, store files and back-up several computers, but it's certainly more accessible than NAS devices with multiple storage bays (QNAP also plans to sell the TS-210, which has two bays for twice the capacity). Unfortunately, there's no word on price, so we can't fully tell how this will stack up against bigger NAS devices and against simpler multimedia boxes.
