The Akitio My Cloud Mini Personal Server ($100, street) is a NAS that's a hybrid of local and cloud storage. The data you save to the internal drive or on attached USB or eSATA drives is accessible through the myakitio cloud service as long as you have an Internet connection. The MyCloud Mini is an intriguing little box with customization options and good features. The device is more likely to be embraced by those who like to spend time learning the nuances of their technology devices since not all configuration options and features are intuitive to set up, setup documentation needs work, and the interface is seriously wonky. The device is an interesting and decent NAS option overall, (though somewhat pricey for its capabilities) and the management interface seems like it could use a firmware upgrade, stat.

Specs MyCloud Mini is a small desktop form factor measuring 1.3 by 4.8 by 4.8 inches (HWD). The box is surprisingly heavyconsidering the sizeweighing a little over a pound. Aluminum housing gives the NAS a sturdy, if somewhat plain, appearance.

The front panel has the Akitio logo and one power LED. The rear panel has two USB 2.0 ports, an eSATA port, and a Gigabit Ethernet port. There's also a reset button, a power button, and a K-slot for physical security.

You can install a 2.5 inch SATA drive but you have to supply it yourself since the device ships diskless. Internal maximum storage capacity is 1.5TB. You can attach USB external drives formatted with FAT32, NTFS, HFS, EXT2, EXT3, EXT4, or XFS. The device also supports USB printers.

The internal SATA disk and the external eSATA drive being attached can be configured with RAID 0 or RAID 1 to expand capacity.

Setup The setup process leaves room for improvement. First, there isn't sufficient documentation about installing and configuring the SATA drive. There's no setup software, so you have to rely on the hard copy Quick Install guide that the NAS ships with, which has somewhat confusing instructions.

After installing the HDD, the guide instructs connecting the NAS to your network. The next step is to mount a partition from a newly installed SATA or USB drive from the Disk Manager. Although the guide does not specify how to get to Disk Manager, I found Disk Manager located within the Web-based management software. You have to login to the Web portal first, so the instructions seem a bit backward.

The web-based management portal is available at http://www.myakitio.com. To access, you have to enter the MAC address of the device and a username and password; all of which are located on a sticker at the bottom of the NAS. You can register the MyCloud Mini and give it an actual hostname, rather than use the MAC address every time to login. The Web interface, which is called iSharing, seems to have an issue handling a fresh install of a new drive. When I first accessed the management interface home page, I saw a spinning cursor. When the spinning stopped, I got the message, "Get data error."

When I clicked off the message, another window displayed that the system was running without a home partition and needed to be mounted. I clicked "Mount," but the system did not detect any drives. I decided to manually start up Disk Manager.

Disk Manager gives three options to configure disks: Auto, Advanced, and Expert. The latter two allow for manual configuration and with Auto, the system creates a suitable partition and formats the drives. Auto is the recommended option. I selected Auto and again, got the circling cursor, then a message on-screen: "Completed."

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Akitio MyCloud Mini Personal Cloud Server