Addonics Technologies Inc. announced on Monday the NAS 2.0 adapter, a second generation of the small and portable Addonics NAS (network attached storage) adapter, with list price of $59.99.

The NAS 2.0 adapter provides a transfer rate of approximately 15-20 MB/s (megabytes-per-second) when connected to a Gigabit network. This doubles the transfer rate of the Addonics original NAS adapter

The NAS 2.0 adapter supports both SMB (Server Message Block) and the open source Samba network protocols. This allows cross-platform access of all shared data for most versions of Windows, Mac OS X, and various Linux distributions.

For remote users who are not connected over a LAN (local area network), the NAS 2.0 Adapter provides FTP (file transfer protocol) access for up to eight simultaneous users with Internet connections anywhere in the world. In addition, the NAS 2.0 adapter can also be used as a bit-torrent downloading appliance for direct download to the attached USB (universal serial bus) storage device.

Besides the ability to convert any USB 2.0 hard drive or SSD (solid state drive) into a NAS device, the NAS 2.0 adapter has two high speed USB 2.0 ports; one for connecting USB 2.0 / 1.1 mass storage devices and one for connecting USB printer to share over a network.

The new adapter, which is lightweight and simple to install, can be set as an UPnP AV server to share photo/music files stored on the file server with XBOX 360 video game consoles connected to the LAN.