Digital Storage Products From QNAP, OWC And Line At The 2022 CES

CES 2022 was a hybrid event that had about 45,000 attendees compared to more than 170,000 in 2020.  It also had 2,300 exhibitors, down from prior events.  Several large vendors were missing from the event due to concerns with Covid.  We cover digital storage and memory and their applications.   

In prior CES shows many companies have shown their storage and memory products as well as complete consumer electronics products.  This includes big companies such as Samsung who often show some of their SSDs and DRAM products at the CES show as well as their TVs, household appliances and other consumer products and the same for SK hynix.  I didn’t see any Samsung memory and storage products on display at the 2022 CES.  Likewise, many storage companies such as Seagate and Western Digital were absent from the CES exhibit floor and associated briefing suites.  There were a few storage products I found at the 2022 CES and associated media events including those from QNAP, OWC and line.  

The image below shows two network attached storage (NAS) products from QNAP shown at the 2022 CES.  

QNAP was showing network attached storage (NAS) systems targeted at multimedia playing as well as video editing applications.  The HS-264 is fanless device intended for home multimedia playback and stores photos, video and music with streaming done using an Intel Celeron quad-core processor and two 2.5GbE ports and two HDMI 2.0 outputs. With port trucking between the two 2.5 GbE ports 5Gbps bandwidth is available.  Note that QNAP was also showing a network device that delivers 2.5GbE over Cat 6 cables designed for 1 GbE.  The product supports two 3.5-inch SATA HDDs and comes with 8GB of non-expandible DRAM.  QNAP’s booth included a partner, Silent Angel showing their Munich M1 HiFi-grade network music streamer. 

QNAP was also showing two products targeted for video editing.  Their TS-264T4 is a NAS device with 10GbE and Thunderbolt 4 interconnects.   The NAS includes 8GB of DDR4 DRAM and two NVMe PCIe SSD slots that can be used for a high-performance SSD cache.  It also supports four 3.5-inch SATA HDDs for mass storage.  The device outputs two HDMI 4K signals at once.  An Intel UHD graphics processor (GPU) can also perform high performance AI functions such as facial recognition.  Real time transcoding allows 4K h.264/h.265 encoding to support more playback options.  The image below shows the two NAS products shown at the 2022 CES.

QNAP’s TS-h1290FX is a 12 bay U.2 NVMe and SATA all flash NAS with ZFS storage and 25GbE connectivity and supports the QuTS or QTS operating system.   The producs uses a AMD EPYC 16 core 7302P/8 core 7232P processor.  The product supports inline deduplication and compression for optimal storage utilization.  It also supports virtual machines and containers and NVIDIA graphics cards for video processing.  Expansion enclosures can be used to achieve higher storage capacities.  Three models of the product are available with different DDR RDIMM capacities and AMD EPYC processors.

OWC had an exhibit I saw at a couple of media events during the 2022 CES.  OWC was showing new hardware including its OWC ministack STX as well as its Atlas Series Media Storage and Card Reader.  The company was also showcasing its connectivity and storage solutions, shown below.

The OWC miniStack STX is a Thunderbolt™ 4 Certified storage and hub expansion solution that seamlessly stacks with the Apple Mac mini. With a universal SATA HDD/SSD bay AND an NVMe M.2 PCIe SSD slot, one can expand a mini’s storage capacity. Three Thunderbolt (USB-C) ports enable you to connect to millions of Thunderbolt, USB, and future USB4 drives, displays, A/V mixers, cameras, and tablets, as well as desktop accessories like a keyboard, card reader, or mouse. The OWC ministack STX is offered as a solution with up to 26TBs of storage capacity, or you can buy it and add your own storage.

The OWC Atlas Pro cards let you go from shooting to transferring images to your computer with the highest workflow efficiency. the heart of each OWC Atlas S Pro card lies advanced pseudo-Single-Level Cell (pSLC) flash memory. This near enterprise-grade feature offers up to 10X higher memory endurance than common SD cards to protect your irreplaceable shots and footage. Additionally, you’ll enjoy up to 276MB/s write and up to 290MB/s read consistent performance over the card’s entire capacity.  Atlas Pro products include high performance CFexpress Type B cards, the Atlas S Pro UHS-II V90 SD media Card and the Atlas FXR thunderbolt and USB bus-powered CFX reader.

linecloud is a NAS product from a company called LINE which was showing other products including a cooling system for overclocked laptops.  The product will hold up to four SATA 3.5-inch HDDs and it will be setup with a smartphone and managed with a mobile application.  It is targeted at content creators and the company said that it would launch as a beta product in the Fall of 2022.

Besides a few digital storage products there were exhibits, keynotes and presentations on all manner of consumer as well as industrial products.  There was a display of flexible electronics in the Sands Convention Center.  A company called Meta was showcasing the use of metamaterials created with a roll coating process that can alter sub-light electromagnetic radiation to create new types of lenses, filters and other devices.  John Deere was showing an autonomous tractor and how satellite and drone imaging and AI can be used to optimize farming.  GAF and Timberline Solar were showing solar collectors built into a shingled roof.  

There were several companies showing lower cost solid state lidar that will allow the use of this range-finding technology in more consumer applications.  Educational products for kids to learn to code and control robotic devices were on display.  AI with avatars for interfacing with customers and in various robotic devices were on display and advanced higher power battery and fuel cell technologies were there that could fuel the next generation of industrial and consumer products.

The 2022 CES was smaller than in past years due to Covid concerns.  There were storage products on display from OWC, QNAP and line.  Many products using digital storage and memory were on display as well as other technologies that will enable future generations of industrial and consumer products.