One issue in the past has been that NAS boxes powered by Intel's Atom processors have been way too expensive to hit consumer level price points and as such this market space has been pretty exclusive to RISC – generally ARM or MIPS – powered solutions. This appears to be changing, as at the Intel Storage Forums inXtron was showing off its Akitio MyCloud Pro which is targeted to retail at sub US$200 while sporting an Atom processor and a fair few other goodies.The MyCloud Pro might not be a high-end Atom NAS, as it sports a 1.83GHz single core Atom D425 processor which can't really compete against more expensive NAS products with Atom's more recent D2x00 series or Atom processors. That said, for most home users – which this product is mainly targeting – it should offer some nice performance improvements over most RISC based NAS products in this price bracket. In fact, the MyCloud Pro offers comparative hardware to previous generation products from many of the more established players in the NAS market that sold for two to three times as much as the MyCloud Pro is expected to retail for.
Beyond the Atom D425 processor, inXtron has also added a single DDR3 SO-DIMM slot that accepts up to 4GB of 800MHz memory – although we don't know what the standard configuration will be – a half-size mini PCI Express slot and a USB DOM (Disk On Module), all visible in the PCB picture below.
When it comes to connectivity the MyCloud Pro might be a little bit light on features compared to more expensive products, but it has a single Gigabit Ethernet port, two USB 3.0 ports – via an ASMedia USB 3.0 host controller – and a front USB 2.0 port from which you can easily copy files from a USB storage device onto the NAS. As you can see from the pictures, the MyCloud Pro has space for a pair of 3.5-inch drives and it supports RAID 0, 1 and JBOD.
The UI we saw at ISF looked promising as well with a fairly simple to use point and click UI that borrows a bit from Apple's desktop design. There's of course support for all the standard features you'd expect to see such as UPnP-AV, NFS, FTP, Samba, sharing of content to social networking services and much more, although oddly enough the spec sheet didn't mention DLNA support. The MyCloud Pro does have a BitTorrent client built in as well as an iTunes compatible music server. Another handy feature is apps for iOS and Android devices.
Overall the Akitio MyCloud Pro looks like a really impressive piece of kit for the money and although inXtron has produced a few NAS products in the past, the MyCloud Pro is vastly more impressive. We're going to try and get a unit in for review to see if it lives up to the specs and see what the transfer speeds are like when in use, as many NAS boxes in this price range tend to suffer when it comes to shuffling large amounts of data across a home network to them, but hopefully this shouldn't be an issue in this case. The product has as yet to launch, but it's apparently not too far away.

Read more: inXtron shows off the Akitio MyCloud Pro at ISF by VR-Zone.com