14 DAY TRIAL // ASUS has been working on its mini twin-drive Home Server for some time, and it seems that the product is finally ready to make its debut on the German and Austrian markets. The company built the Home Server as a means of backing up photos, music, videos or other types of data, as well as of facilitating data sharing, retention and protection.
The ASUS Home Server is known as the TS mini and is powered by an Intel Atom central processing unit (CPU) that runs at a clock frequency of 1.66GHz. The product employs two SATA hard disk drives (HDDs), each with a capacity of 1TB. The total memory capacity is of 2GB and the connectivity is enabled by an integrated Gigabit Ethernet module. Furthermore, the product's I/O options include two eSATA connectors and six USB ports.
Among the various functions of the ASUS TS mini, the Home Server will be usable for the aforementioned data-retention, sharing and backup tasks, but will also be able to provide advanced streaming capabilities. Stored music, videos, photos and other digital media files, as well as content directly from the Internet can be streamed to television sets, computers and media players. In addition to this, ASUS will also be offering an extra 500GB of WebStorage free of charge for one year, so that even large files from peer-to-peer networks can be stored and shared files may be directly linked to social media sites.
The ASUS TS mini will have to compete against the Acer Aspire easyStore Home Server line, which has great expandability at a lower price point. The main asset that ASUS' device has is its low power consumption of 24.5 watts in idle mode and of only 27.9 watts when in operation. The battle over the European home-server market segment is scheduled to begin sometime in March, when the TS mini Home Server from ASUS will be launched with a price tag of 399 Euro.