VIA’s own stats pitch the Nano against Intel’s previous generation single-core processor, the Atom N270:
Detailed testing and comparison of the two processors is beyond the scope of the review, but you’ll find plenty of great articles online comparing the chips, including this one from ZDNet and comparison benchmarks between the VIA C7 and Nano at Benchmarkreviews.com. The headlines? The VIA Nano may consume a little more power than the Atom, but it’s still low enough to matter and performs very well indeed.
With regard to the rest of the specs, two hard drive bays may be a little restrictive for power users, but 4TB of storage is more than enough for many households and small offices, and three USB ports provides plenty of scope for external storage expansion when required. Some may say that dual Gigabit Ethernet ports is overkill, but particularly in the small business arena, it’s a feature you’ll find on much higher priced network storage devices. If you need to ensure that you always have access to the server, it’s a life saver in the event of a hardware issue.
Verdict
The M’SERV S2100 from VIA is the perfect next step for the company in taking their barebones home and small business server solution forward. The S2100 retains everything that made the Artigo A2000 a success – (small footprint, low cost, ease of build) and solves its major achilles heel, replacing the C7 with the 64-bit Nano processor. That unlocks a much needed hardware compatibility path for those wishing to run Windows Home Server today and Vail when released.
The hardware itself is small enough to hide away in a corner, in a cupboard or leave sitting on the desk (although its fan noise reduces the desirability of this option) and unless you have an extremely large amount of data to back up, the two drive bays fitted with 2TB drives will provide more than enough capacity to be getting on with even with folder duplication switched on.
If you’re looking for a small but capable home or office server with low power consumption and good enough performance for basic tasks, the Nano-powered M’SERV S2100 should definitely be on your list to consider when it hits the market.
