14 DAY TRIAL // Early last week, storage multinational company Thecus has announced its new windows-based storage line on its official website. They’ve introduced three Intel-powered products with up to 16 bays for hard disk drives.
The smallest of three brothers is the W8900. It’s powered by an Intel Core i3-2120 dual-core processor clocked at 3.3 GHz and comes with eight hard drive bays. It is a rackable unit and fits into a 2U space.
The W12000 is powered by an Intel Xeon E3-1225 quad-core processor working at 3.1 GHz. It has also a 2U height and sports six external USB 2.0 ports, two located on the front panel and four on the back. It also has two USB 3.0 ports on the back side that seem to belong to a separate controller mounted in one of the motherboard’s slots.
On the storage side, W12000 comes with an LSI 2008 HBA card with eight 6 Gb/s SAS/SATA ports that has an 8x PCI-e bandwidth. The 12 hard drive bays are fueled by a 500W or greater power supply with 80-Plus efficiency certification.
Networking is controlled by Intel’s 82574L Gigabit controller.
The W16000 is powered by the same Intel Xeon E3-1225 quad-core processor working at 3.1 GHz, but it comes with the highest number of hard drive bays, specifically sixteen of them.
All three storage servers presented by Thecus here have 8 GB of DDR3 memory, come with a 250 GB 5400 rpm or 7200 rpm storage drive for the operating system and have one eSATA and one HDMI port on their backside along with the two USB 3.0 connectors.
The operating system is Windows Storage Server 2008 R2, Standard Edition provided by Microsoft that takes care of the traditional file transfer protocols like NFS, SMB and others.
