QNAP has added three "affordable" NASes for home and SOHO users.
The TS-x12 line includes the single-bay TS-112, dual-bay TS-212, and quad-bay TS-412. All are powered by 1.2 GHz Marvell Kirkwood (88F6281) processors with 256 MB of DDRII RAM and 16 MB of flash.
You can think of the x12’s as either a step up from the x10 line (TS-110, TS-210, TS-410) or a step down from the older x19 line (TS-119, TS-219, TS-419). The x10s have the same RAM size (256 MB), but use an 800 MHz Marvell Kirkwood. While the x19’s use the same processor with double the RAM (512 MB).
The TS-112 and TS-212 have three USB 2.0 ports and single 10/100/1000 Ethernet LAN port, while the TS-412 has four USB 2.0 and two Gigabit LAN ports. The TS-112 and TS-412 also have eSATA ports (one and two, respectively). But the TS-212 has no eSATA port.
All models accept either 2.5" or 3.5" SATA drives up to 2 TB capacity, but only the TS-412’s enclosure design allows hot-swapping.
All three models run QNAP’s V3 firmware with extensive feature set including iSCSI initiator and target, media serving, online RAID level migration and expansion, Apple Time Machine and Amazon S3 backup and more.
All models ship later this month at list prices of $179, $269 and $469 for the TS-112, TS-212 and TS-412, respectively. With so many similar models, perhaps it’s time for QNAP to clean house and retire older models. As it is now, consumers face a daunting task to choose one model over another.