Thecus Technology has reworked their their N3200 and announced their N3200 Pro. The brand new NAS will now feature an AMD Geode CPU. The device has features aplenty, including three SATA drive bays for up to 3TB of storage, optional Raid 5 striping and an LCD display. The unit will also offer photo, iTunes and DLNA-compatible server options as well as browser-based management. The N3200 Pro will also offer a service called the "Web Surveillance Server," which will allow uses to take regularly scheduled photographs just by plugging in a USB webcam.

The company has yet to release any pricing or availability but the previous N3200 model costs $339.

And I mean that in a good way. Their new units provide Ethernet connections and 7200RPM SATA-II drives in 320GB, 360GB, and 500GB sizes. And it’s not the features that make these attractive, but the pricing: the 320GB version, available now, is $149, a very attractive price even if all the thing does is show up as a simple share on the network. I imagine the 320GB version will go away once the 360Gb and 500GB models appear next month, since pricing will be $149 and $199 (you’ll notice the the entry-level price is the same as for the 320GB version).

Four SATA bays is better than two, I’d say, and so the Lanner NS04-3100 already has something over the QNAP TS-209 reviewed earlier (and, they even share the same hokey naming schemes). And, it looks like it will compete fairly well on features, as well, with Wi-Fi, iTunes server, UPnP AV media server, DLNA, and support for all meaningful RAID configurations and JBOD. Looks like the NAS server market is becoming enticingly competitive. Pricing and availability information is pending.

Okay, maybe not just for me, but since I’m a SOHO kind of guy, the QNAP TS-209 NAS server sure fits the bill. Sporting two hot-swappable bays, a 500MHz processor, 128MB of DDR2 RAM cache,  gigabit Ethernet, and up to 2TB of storage. And that’s just the hardware. Check out the server capabilities:

• File server
• FTP server
• Backup server
• RAID-1 Mirroring with Hot-swap design
• Remote Replication
• Web server
• MySQL server
• Printer server
• UPnP Media server
• Photo Sharing
• Download Station
• iTunes server
• Cross-platform support
• Scads of security

Coming soon for probably a fair amount of cash.