Acer to release Aspire Easystore home server

ACER WILL SHOWCASE its Acer Aspire Easystore home server tomorrow, targeted at the US market.

The cubish 8 by 7 by 7-inch box has an Intel Atom 230 processor inside, along with 2GB of DDR2 memory, a 1TB hard drive with three bays for swappable hard drives making up a grand total of 7TB possible data storage (8TB if you replace the shipped 1TB hard drive with a 2TB model), five USB ports, one eSATA port and a Gigabit Ethernet port. It also comes with Microsoft's Windows Home Server, but might do better as a UPnP server with Linux installed.

Acer is hoping its new offering will help it diversify out of the netbook, notebook and desktop market in the US to become popular with small businesses and people running home networks who want to be able to access their files from any PC in the house. At this little storage cube's low $400 price point that is not an unrealistic ambition. Acer's Easystore box may well give rival home server vendor HP a run for its money.

HP's more established MediaSmart server is remarkably similar to Acer's new Easystore product, but the smaller Taiwanese firm has already shown itself to be aggressive and astute at snatching away market share from its American competitors in the US PC market, having already gained against Dell and HP in the PC notebooks and netbooks segments.

The firm's acquisition of Gateway back in 2007 has also given Acer a channel marketing presence along with some valuable experience in the North American PC market. Acer might have a winner here. µ

L'Inq
Cnet