14 DAY TRIAL // As desktop and mobile computer systems are very popular and widely available nowadays, it is not uncommon to meet several of them in certain households and for those users that are thinking about building a network in order to link all those systems, NORCO designed and manufactured the DS-520 home server and network attached storage appliance.
The NORCO DS-520 comes equipped with either an Intel ultra low voltage Celeron M (the DS-520F version) or a Pentium M ( the DS-520G model) central processing unit so it is more like a standalone computer system than a simple networking appliance. The Celeron M runs at a speed of 600MHz while the Pentium M equipped variant tops 1GHz and for a faster responsiveness, the server is also equipped with a mobile random access memory module, users being able to upgrade to a maximum amount of 1GB.
On the storage side, the NORCO server appliance is able to handle up to five hot swappable Serial ATA II hard disk drives, so adding storage capabilities is fairly easy, while the presence of three external SATA ports as well as four high speed USB 2.0 connectors can greatly enhance the range of storage devices that can be linked to it. Apart from the external storage devices, the NORCO DS-520 also comes with the capability to connect to many other electronic devices like digital media cards, wireless adapters, printers and so on.
Thanks to the total of eight SATA II ports, the home server appliance from NORCO is able to house as much as 8TB of data while on the software side it can handle just about any x86 compatible operating system, including Windows Home Server, Windows XP, Linux, OpenFiler, FreeNAS, Samba and OpenBSD. The internal and external hard disk drives can be setup in several RAID configurations and among them are the most popular and widely used RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10 and JBOD arrays.
On the networking side, the NORCO DS-520 home server and network attached storage box come with two 10/100 Intel 82551ER powered Ethernet ports or two Gigabit Ethernet port centered around the Intel 82541PI chip. As the NORCO server system is in fact a fully functional computer system, it also features an integrated Intel graphics solution, a serial port, two PS/2 ports for mouse and keyboard and one IRDA connector. The NORCO DS-520 and all its variants are available now, for a retail price of $620.