Back in September, we revealed that ASUS were working on a new home server model for the worldwide market and as you may have seen yesterday, the official announcement was made.
The ASUS TS Mini Home Server packs two drives into a small chassis, and is powered by an Intel Atom N280 processor at 1.6GHz and up to 2Gb RAM. For $349, they’ll include a single 500GB hard drive, whilst $529 will earn you a single 2TB hard drive, leaving a hard drive bay for future expansion. Talking of which, the product is blessed with a mighty 6 USB ports and 2 eSATA ports (due mainly to the existing design of the included motherboard rather than a grand design for massive future expandability) so you won’t struggle for storage space in the future.
Full specs as follows:
| Processor | Intel Atom Processor N280 1.66GHz |
| Memory | Total Slots: 1 (Single Channel) Capacity: Maximum up to 2GB Memory Type: DDR2 800 Memory Size: 1GB 2GB |
| Hard Drive | 2 x 3.5 inch 7200RPM Configuration Option: 500GB, 1TB, 2TB |
| LAN | LAN: 10/100/1000Mbps |
| Ports | 2 x eSATA Port 1 x RJ-45 ports (Gigabit) 6 x USB2.0 ports |
| Dimensions | 245 mm (H) x 96 mm (W) x 204 mm (D) |
| Power Consumption | Avg. 24.5W |
I was fortunate enough to get a sneak preview of the TS Mini a few weeks ago from ASUS here in the UK. It’s a nice looking product which will compete with HP’s LX195 in the USA – whilst it doesn’t have the same level of add-ins on board compared to HP’s product, you do get improved expandability thanks to that extra hard drive bay (which, incidentally you have to open the box to access – there’s no easy slide out drive trays as you may have seen on other home servers).
From the briefing I received, a number of exclusive add-ins are planned for the product including cloud storage options, DLNA media server, full compatibility with D-Link’s IP Cameras as well as a hardware monitoring tool. Read/write performance is said to be extremely snappy at 108MB/s and 54MB/s respectively with a Gigabit Router.
Certainly a neat little package that’s worth investigating.
Those of you in the US can pre-order now from Amazon (2TB Model, 500GB Model) – rest of the world? I reckon we’re looking at 2010…
More Info: ASUS
