Shuttle OMNINAS KD20 NAS Hands-On

Shuttle has branched out from its usual fare of small-form-factor PCs to jump into the network-attached storage (NAS) and personal cloud market, with the OMNINAS KD20 making its debut at Computex this week. A compact two-bay backup, file sharing and media serving box, the KD20 can handle up to 8TB across a pair of 3.5-inch SATA drives and comes with apps for various mobile platforms for grabbing your content while on the go.

Connectivity includes a gigabit ethernet port and three USB ports – two on the back and one on the front panel. There's also an SD card reader for directly transferring files from a digital camera or media player.

As for the user-interface, as you'd expect it's browser-based. There's support for standalone BitTorrent downloads and DLNA media-server functionality, and Shuttle will offer iOS and Android apps for phones and tablets.

Build quality seems good – though Shuttle obviously has some experience making small, sturdy hardware – though the company is obviously coming from behind in terms of things like software flexibility; rivals like Synology already offer plugin-based feature expansion, for instance. Still, Shuttle looks to be aiming for the long-haul, with the KD20 only being the first of the new OMNINAS range. Pricing is yet to be confirmed, as is release date.