14 DAY TRIAL // NAS devices continue to play an important role in home and small office networks, so I-O Data figured it was time for a new one to make its appearance.
The market for network-attached storage devices has just grown by a tiny bit, courtesy of I-O Data, whose research and development team completed the LANDisk HDL-Z2WSLP NAS server.
I-O Data deals in a wide variety of storage solutions, as well as connectivity adapters like the USB 3.0 to DVI converter unveiled back in November, 2011.
Still, the company had gone quite some time without a new NAS release, so the arrival of the LANDisk HDL-Z2WSLP may be just what the doctor ordered.
Then again, it should be noted that this is more than a simple data centralization solution: it doubles as a small print server as well.
That said, the CPU at the heart of the item is an Intel Atom D510 whose clock speed is of 1.66 GHz.
With two bays, it is possible to have two HDDs inside the unit at any given time, which means that people have options.
The default package includes two 1TB HDDs, for a total of 2TB, but one can choose various other capacities in either 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch form factors.
Moving on, there are five USB 2.0 ports available (hence the possible print server role), plus a pair of eSATA 3 Gbps ports, so that extra capacity may be added via external enclosures.
Finally, since this is, in the end, still a NAS device at its core, it wouldn't do not to have network connectivity, so I-O Data tossed in two Gigabit Ethernet connections.
The LANDisk HDL-Z2WSLP supports CIFS (SMB), HTTP, FTP and WebDAV protocols, among other things, and runs Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system.
The OS is even pre-configured to run headless and can be loaded with anti-virus software, meaning that other machines can make do without anti-virus software of their own if all they do is access the data centralized on the NAS.
February 2012 is when sales are supposed to start in Japan, for 120,540 JPY, or $1,542 / 1,191.37 Euro.