Specifications, Pricing and Availability

The specifications list is certainly impressive with its massive list of features and functions. The duo part of the names comes from the dual HDDs that the unit is capable of holding. The unit will auto configure the RAID to RAID 1, full protection of your data, with just two clicks. During the RAID configuration setup you can select RAID 0, but we don't recommend that option, since your risk of losing data is increased.

The MyCloud Duo is stated to have gigabit Ethernet, but it'll be difficult for the 750MHz dual-core ARM processor to fill the pipeline with that amount of data. There is enough processing power to run a handful of background tasks, but the 128MB DDR2 DRAM is fairly small for a device you are asking to handle your Bit-Torrent, FTP, and media server tasks at the same time.

Akitio has their own web portal for your mobile connection back to your data. The site is myakitio.com and it works similar to the MyCloundNAS interface that QNAP released and we wrote about several months ago.

The difference in price between the QNAP unit we tested and the Akitio MyCloudNAS is massive. We managed to find the MyCloud Duo online for as low as $143 in the US. We also found a reference to a $129 price, but the web page was down when we inquired. The unit does not ship with drives so you'll need to purchase one or two SATA HDDs to get it up and running.