The new Atom chips also use 10 watts of power, three less than the predecessor chip, Ramamoorthy said.

On the low end, the NAS servers come in two-drive configurations but they can scale to six drives and up to 4GB of DDR3 RAM. One reseller, Acustor, is offering an eight-drive version by using a PCIe expansion unit.

A four drive NAS array from QNAP

David Tuhy, general manager of Intel's Storage Group, said that the new NAS line is already being sold by three OEMs: Asustor, QNAP and Thecus. Others, such as Mpstor and Dane-Elec, are planning to begin selling D2550 and D2500 NAS products for small-businesses.

Depending on how many drives the NAS is configured to, data can be protected by RAID 0, 1 and 5. The RAID software is provided by McAfee, which Intel acquired last year.