Take a network attached storage (NAS) and merge it with a high-end Android thin client and you end up with the GS-King X from Beelink, one of the more adventurous Chinese personal computer companies. The box is not cheap but the combination of the features offer some tantalizing prospects.
As a NAS, it can hold up to two 3.5-inch 16TB hard disk drives (perhaps one from our best NAS hard drives guide) but we suspect it could take 18TB, 20TB HDDs and even 100TB SSDs (the world’s largest storage devices from Nimbus) but this hasn't been tested in real life yet.
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At 165 x 118 x 106mm, it is small enough to be parked behind a TV set or under the couch. The Android box is powered by Android 9.0 (without any clear path to Android 10 or the newly announced Android 11) but it does also feature OpenELEC.
The rest of the feature list includes a hexa-core Amlogic S922X-H processor with a six-core GPU. It supports HDMI 2.1, allowing 4K to be output at 75Hz. There’s a Gigabit Ethernet port, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, four USB ports, a whopping seven audio connectors as well as a card reader and a mysterious “upgrade button”.
The audio subsystem of the device is handled by an ESS DAC-ES9018 audio chip and a RICORE RT6862 op-amp processor. We don’t know if it supports hot swap or RAID-1/0 or whether the fan that cools it (it is powered by a 57W PSU) is loud.
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