Shuttle OmniNAS KD20 review

The KD20’s very simple web interface includes a BitTorrent client, so you can leave your NAS downloading some of the many legitimate and free-to-distribute Creative Commons-licenced music and videos distributed as torrents. Unfortunately you can’t use the BitTorrent client while the UPnP media sharing feature is enabled. There’s also no way to search torrent listings sites. You can also set up the OmniNAS KD20 as a web-accessible Share Box, a personal remote cloud storage device that’s made available by registering it as a subdomain of omninas.net.

The web interface is friendly but lack some of the features of more advanced rivals

While the KD20’s streaming performance is certainly good enough to send HD video to a PC elsewhere on your network, this NAS doesn’t have the fastest transfer speeds. When we set it up as a RAID1 array using a pair of 3TB Western Digital Red drives, it achieved an average throughput of 39.7MB/s in our large-file transfer speed test (based on a write speed of 50.7MB/s and a read speed of 28.7MB/s), and an average of just 7.5MB/s in our small file throughput test.

We don’t recommend using RAID0 normally because it doesn’t provide data redundancy. However, RAID0 can be appropriate for a media server that typically won’t store the only copy its data. You may, for instance, have your home videos on DVD. If you do plan on using the NAS as a backup target, we strongly advise against setting it up as RAID0.

In addition to providing you with extra space, another advantage of a RAID0 configuration for the KD20 is that it improves the NAS’s poor throughput speeds, producing an average large file transfer speed of 46.9MB/s based on a write speed of 48.1MB/s and a read speed of 45.8MB/s. The average transfer speed in our small file test was just 6.6MB/s.

Although the OmniNAS doesn’t cost a great deal and is easy to use, the presence of a USB3 and SDXC port aren’t enough to recommend it over more polished media streaming NAS devices such as the Budget Buy-winning D-Link ShareCentre DNS-325, which costs a few pounds less, has more features and, even on our older and significantly slower test equipment, performed better in small file transfer speed tests.