The EDS14 first saw the light of day - sort of - about a year ago when the USB Station 3 was previewed. This was the supposed successor to the USB Station 2, a low-cost diskless unit that Synology introduced in 2010 and which is now showing its age. However, the USB Station 3 as such never materialised.
The EDS14 (the 'E' is short for Embedded, by the way) is of higher specification than one might expect. It is based around a 1.2GHz Marvell Armada 370 processor with 512MB RAM. It also has twin Gigabit Ethernet ports. At present it runs the previous release of the DSM operating system, DSM 4.3.
With a typical selling price of around £165 in the UK, the EDS14 is not exactly cheap. But it is undoubtedly an unusual and attractive niche product.