CeBIT 2010 First-hand: LG comes up with five feature-rich network drives

LG aims to grab a large share of the storage market with these releases

The N4-NAS offers series four bays for hard drives.

N4B2 It has a Blu-ray burner onboard.

The N2B1 and N2R1 have two Festplattenbays.

LG The NAS have a low energy consumption.

LG aggressively expanded its network drive portfolio by introducing not less than five NAS (Network Attached Storage) here in CeBIT Hannover, Germany. The Korean electronics giant intends to make your computer network less cluttered by providing some highly integrated solution. For example, the top models N4B2 and N4R2 come with four bays for hard drives and up to eight terabytes storage capacity before.

N4R2

At first glance, the N4R2 looks more like a Mac CPU rather than a network attached storage. The dirty white body and silver front machine comes with as many as 12 USB ports and e-SATA connectivity. It also has a Blu-ray burner drive on-board, and four hard drives (totaling eight terabytes) with a write speed of 57 MB/S. the hard drives are hot-swappable i.e. one can swap the operation to another drive in case the present drive fails or becomes full. It will consume less than 1W of power when in Stand-by mode, making it very energy efficient. The NAS is compatible with Linux, Windows and Mac. The N4R2 packs an Intel Dual-core processor, which should make it price-friendly too.

N4B2

The N4B2 also comes with four bays for hard drives and up to eight terabytes storage capacity, inside a case that is 165 x 162 x 230mm is size. Most of the features are similar to that of the N4R2, including the hot-swappable hard discs, Blu-ray burner, e-SATA support and memory card reader. The N4B2 is powered by the Intel Atom N280.

N2B1

The N2B1 comes two hard drive bays and the Blu-ray burner. Like the above model, this one also has the hot-swappable feature, and can host a network printer as well. It is compatible with Windows, Linux and Mac-based computers and networks. It even lets users to play music files through iTunes. LG throws in 3 USB ports and 1 e-SATA drive. It supports almost all possible transfers including CIFS/SMB HTTP / HTTPs, FTP / FTPs, Print Server and iSCSI (ODD only).

N2R1

Looks similar to the N2B1, this NAS comes with built-in DVD burner and up to 2TB of storage space. This one doesnot come with a Blu-ray drive though, and supports Ethernet and 802.11g Wi-Fi connectivity. The N2R1 has two hard drive bays. The technology is pretty much similar to the above model.

N1T1

The smallest among all comes with one HDD bay. This is the basic NAS where you won’t find most of the advanced features otherwise present in the above models – like there is obviously no hot-swap and no Blu-ray burner (only a DVD writer). It has a dimension that is less than half of the bigger models at 67 x 150 x 210mm. The N1T1 is compatible with Windows, Mac OS 10 and Linux.

All the machines should be available in Germany by April. The N1T1 will carry a price-tag of 199 euros ($271) – pricing of the other models are not known yet.