On Tuesday, EMC's Iomega division announced a series of free upgrades to its StorCenter ix2 NAS appliance, adding PC-less BitTorrent downloads, remote access, and improved Mac support.

Iomega introduced the StorCenter ix2 last October, pledging that the NAS would be a platform as well as a storage unit, part of a way to differentiate the StorCenter from the dozens of rival products in the market. The new features will ship as part of the existing 1- and 2- terabyte StorCenter ix2s, but can be upgraded to by existing owners via an Iomega update.

The update adds five new features. Of the most interest to enthusiasts will be the native support for the BitTorrent protocol, which means that users can download torrent files without the need for a PC. This was a hot feature a couple of years ago, with Orb Networks, Netgear, and Asus and some lower-profile NAS products. It's not quite clear whether support will be built in for white- and black-listing IP addresses to prevent third-party snooping.

Remote-access capabilities will be free for the first year and $9.95 annually thereafter. With remote access, users can apply for a special Web address and use it as a Web-based FTP protocol for uploading and downloading files remotely. Users will be able to purchase custom URLs for an additional charge, Iomega said.

The last three enhancements are a bit more prosaic: folder quotas, to prevent Junior's movie collection from hogging the entire storage space; jumbo frames, a technology to help improve the speed of large file transfers; and Apple File Protocol support, for improved interaction with Apple OS X machines.

DLNA, uPNP, and Bluetooth support are already built in.

"With the simplest set-up process in the industry, the ix2 not only provides home and small business network storage users with such important features as media serving, Bluetooth and video surveillance capabilities, now we've added remote access so users can connect to their files from anywhere in the world, as well as the new standard in peer-to-peer file sharing and much more," said Jonathan Huberman, president of Iomega and the Consumer and Small Business Products Division of EMC, in a statement. "That's the power of network computing with Iomega and EMC."

The 1TB StorCenter ix2 Network Storage appliance is available worldwide for $299.95; the 2TB model is available for $479.95