Xiaomi has started selling its first network attached storage device, the Xiaomi Smart Storage. It costs CNY 2,699 (approx USD 400 or KES 52,000) for the cheapest version, arrives with two hard drives already fitted, and is on sale in China only.
Think of it as your own private cloud, sitting in your house. A network attached storage device, or NAS, is a small computer with its own hard drives that plugs into your router and stays switched on. Every phone, laptop and TV in the building can reach it. Because it never sleeps, it works quietly in the background: your phone photos are backed up there, same for your security camera footage, and your saved films play to the TV on demand.
The point is what you stop paying for Cloud storage from Google, Apple or Dropbox. Which are bills you deal with every month. A NAS is bought once. The space is yours, the files sit in your house, and nothing disappears if a card expires.
What you get
The Smart Storage takes two drives and supports up to 30TB in each, so 60TB in total. Three versions ship with the drives inside: 4TB at CNY 2,699, 8TB at CNY 3,499 and 16TB at CNY 5,499, which is roughly $402, $521 and $818 respectively. Xiaomi offers warrant for the whole unit for three years.
It runs a quad-core Realtek chip with 4GB of memory. The network port is 2.5 gigabit, two and a half times quicker than the standard port on a home router, which is what lets several people pull video off it at once without stuttering. There is a USB port and an HDMI output, so it plugs into a television and plays stored video at 4K with HDR10 colour. It is smaller than a shoebox at 20cm wide, 16cm tall and 8.5cm thick, in an aluminium shell, and weighs 2.3kg.
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Sixteen people can have separate accounts on one box, so a household shares the hardware without sharing folders. Xiaomi cameras can record to it directly, up to 360 days of footage from four cameras.
Xiaomi never wanted to build it
A drawing labelled “10G NAS” turned up by accident in Xiaomi’s promotional images for network switches in May 2025. Customers in China spotted it and asked for it loudly enough that Xiaomi’s ecosystem boss, Chen Bo, promised publicly to build one. When they opened up crowdfunding for it, the run took 30,000 orders in its first hour.
You cannot buy one anywhere apart from China. Xiaomi sells it on JD.com in China and has not confirmed it will be available anywhere else.
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