Updated – Thecus has announced a four-bay rackmount Atom-powered NAS and released a module that enables HDMI-equipped NASes to act as media players.
The new Thecus N4510U is a 1U rackmount NAS powered by an unnamed Intel Atom with 2 GB of DDR3 RAM. Network connection is via dual Gigabit Ethernet ports supporting failover and link aggregation.
Other ports include four USB 2.0, two USB 3.0, one HDMI, one VGA, one eSATA and audio mic/line imputs and line output. Four hot-swappable bays support 3.5" SATA drives configurable in multiple RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10 and JBOD volumes with optional AES-256 encryption and EXT3/EXT4/XFS filesystems.
The N4510U comes in two versions with a single 200W power supply (N4510U-S) or with a 250W redundant supply (N4510U-R). Like all Thecus NASes, its features include McAfee anti-virus protection, VMware Ready certification, iSCSI thin provisioning and support for DropBox, ElephantDrive and Amazon S3 cloud backup.
The N4510 will be available soon. Pricing was not announced.
In separate news, Thecus said it has released its Local Display add-in module. The free module adds Internet browser, console terminal access and media playback via xbmc to Thecus NASes with HDMI ports, such as the N5500.
Control and navigation of the module require an attached USB keyboard and mouse. TV viewing is also supported for a handful of USB DVB-T dongles from Avermedia, HAMA, Energy System and Geniatech.