QNAP Systems, Inc. today announced its new 1U, 4-bay rack-mountable NAS server called TS-409U, aimed at SMB and enterprise users. It runs on Linux with 500MHz SoC CPU and 512MB of DDR2 memory, and should take care of your storing, backing up, sharing and archiving tasks.
It includes features such as RAID 0/1/5/6/5 + spare disk redundancy, Online RAID Capacity Expansion, Online RAID Level Migration, etc.
Mr. Troy Lin, the Product Manager of QNAP, claims that "TS-409U is positioned as the most affordable, reliable, and feature-rich 1U storage server to meet backup and storage demand.”
Furthermore, it seems that QNAP was thinking ahead of the competition and TS-409U apparently allows for one more hard drive failure compared to other NAS of the same level. That means that if, for instance, you have RAID 5 or RAID 6 setups, you’ll be able to rescue data even if, respectively, two or three of your hard disks fail.
Also, upgrading this baby should be a breeze, since a feature called Online RAID Capacity Expansion allows for starting small (meaning cheap) and upgrading to better RAID setups without even turning your server off.
There are no details on availability yet, but we'll report as soon as we know more.