The geeks over at Engadget spied the new Acer Altos easyStore storage appliance at CeBIT and the little device looks pretty slick. Inside the black and orange case is an Atom 230 CPU to run things and power the storage appliance.

Other features of the device include the 945GC + ICH7R chipset, a quartet of hot swappable drive bays, a PCI-E x4 slot, five USB ports, and a sole eSATA port. The drive bays are hot swappable so you can add or remove drives without powering down.

The gadget sounds a lot like the Drobo I have been using for a few years with its hot swap bays and slick RAID system that ensures no data is lost even if one of the array drives dies. I wonder if the Altos can do that? My Drobo lacks network connectivity though. Pricing and availability information is unavailable at this time.

Via Engadget