The Making of an AI NAS That Looks Like an Egg Steamer

A NAS is essentially a "private cloud drive" that sits in your home or office. Photos, videos, documents, and work files can all be stored on it, accessible anytime from your phone, computer, or tablet—and shareable with family and colleagues.

The core job of a traditional NAS is storage. It can hold multiple hard drives and store vast numbers of files—but that's exactly where the problem lies. Getting files in is easy; finding them again is hard. Search relies almost entirely on file names and folder paths. You have to remember when a photo was taken, which folder it's in, and what the file was called. Video is even trickier—you remember a certain frame, but you have no idea which second it's at, so you're stuck dragging the progress bar.

Consumer expectations for storage keep rising: being able to store files is just the baseline; being able to find what you've stored is the new standard.

With AI, the NAS is transforming from a "passive warehouse" into a "proactive system."

The key difference in a new-generation AI NAS is the addition of local AI compute. It can handle AI tasks directly on-device, without relying on the cloud for everything. Where the hard drive used to be the heart of a NAS, more and more new products now ship with dedicated AI chips or high-performance processors.

The DA400 is powered by an RK3588 octa-core CPU, with an onboard RK1828 AI accelerator card. The RK1828 uses 3D high-bandwidth packaging technology, stacking high-speed memory directly on top of the chip vertically—so data stays close at hand instead of traveling long distances. This completely breaks through the memory bottleneck that limits on-device large models, letting local LLMs run smoothly and respond quickly.

The two chips divide the work: one handles the system and storage, the other is dedicated to AI tasks. Dual-path parallel processing with physical isolation means that while you're running a local LLM, functions like photo backup and video playback remain unaffected, with response times staying in the millisecond range.

This dual-chip approach lets the DA400 run local large models with up to 8B parameters smoothly, at generation speeds of up to 50 tokens/s. You can talk directly to the AI and have it find files, summarize documents, translate content, or answer questions—all processed locally, with data never leaving the device.

The AI Photo Library is one of the most practical scenarios. You can search in natural language, like "find last year's family photo at the beach" or "find my ID card." The DA400 automatically recognizes image content, faces, and scenes, and can even read text in screenshots, receipts, contracts, and meeting photos—so a keyword brings up what you need in seconds. It also automatically detects and organizes duplicate and similar photos, sorting them by people, pets, travel, and everyday scenes, keeping your library consistently tidy.

In addition, the DA400 supports semantic search for documents, contracts, project files, and creative assets—using keywords or natural language instead of file names and folders. It also supports RAW thumbnail previews, covering mainstream formats like Nikon NEF, Canon CR2, and Sony ARW.

But NAS devices on the market are still too... NAS. The features evolve, but the look mostly stays put. Black boxes, square and angular, tucked into a corner, barely noticeable. Use one for a while, and it ends up gathering dust.

That got us thinking: if a NAS is going to enter ordinary homes, why does it have to look like a cold, impersonal machine?

To make NAS more mainstream and easy for ordinary families to pick up, we believe the design shouldn't be bound by the traditional NAS stereotype. It doesn't have to hide in a dark corner under the TV stand—it can be more lifestyle-oriented, blending naturally into the home environment.

For example, it could be an "egg steamer" NAS. (Just kidding.)

As for why an egg steamer—not a rice cooker, not an air fryer—it's because it's small enough, quiet enough, and everyday enough that it doesn't look out of place on a sideboard.

And the real point of the "egg steamer" image lies in that transparent shell—data visible, safety untouchable.

Visible: You can see the hard drives running inside, the indicator lights on, the data alive. You have a clear view of its status, rather than a black box where you never know what's happening.

Untouchable: The transparent cover protects the internal structure—dust-proof, accident-proof, and safe from kids pressing buttons. It looks open, but there are clear boundaries.

Just like the lid on an egg steamer: you can see everything inside clearly, but you won't reach in and touch it. That's probably our most down-to-earth understanding of a home AI NAS—what should be seen is seen, and what should be protected is protected.

At the time, we were still figuring things out: how to fit hard drives, motherboard, cooling structure, and AI chip into a limited space, while making it look less like an "engineering sample" and keeping it quiet. 

The first version of the DA400 looked like this:

It was functional enough, but not lifestyle enough. We looked at it for a long time—it felt more like a device meant for a server room than something you'd want in your living room or study.

So we started over. We changed the cooling airflow, the body proportions, the materials and colors, every detail that made it feel "a bit cold."

There was a version in between where we nearly went off track.

That version had light strips—we wanted it to feel more techy, more "consumer-grade." The lighting effect worked, but problems quickly emerged: the light strips took up space originally meant for cooling, the airflow was compressed, and temperatures couldn't be held down during sustained large-model runs. Structural complexity also rose, making assembly much harder. It looked good, but it was hard to build and hard to cool.

That version was scrapped. It made one thing clear to us: the DA400 first has to be a stable, reliable NAS, and only then a good-looking device. Cooling and structure are the baseline—they can't give way to visual effects.

We continued refining, removed the light strips, and gave that space back to cooling and structure. With that as the foundation, the design gradually came together: the screen got bigger, the tilt angle was readjusted for clearer viewing. We want the DA400 to be more than a storage device hidden in a corner—it should be an AI private cloud you're willing to put on your desk, use every day, and let your family pick up easily.

In the end, we settled on the design you see now.

What the DA400 aims to do is put powerful local AI compute, simple and easy-to-use software interaction, and reliable storage performance into a better-looking, more lifestyle-oriented chassis.

It's a NAS. It's also an AI NAS.

It's for tech enthusiasts. And it's for every ordinary family.