Chrispy_I've never understood announcements of this sort.

Of course it's compatible. It's a SATA interface, on commodity SATA controllers, using STANDARD protocols. If Seagate made a new, larger hard drive I would 100% EXPECT it to work and Asus' hardware/firmware/software would be FAULTY if it was incompatible with the industry standard it claims to support.

If they have to modify their software to support larger drives, than that's just proof that their software team is short-sighted, narrow-minded, and oblivious to the way the industry has worked for the last 30+ years. Don't ever announce that you've fixed something that should never have needed fixing in the first place. Anyone who can read between the lines will interpret that as "they've fixed a very dumb mistake, caused by shortsightedness and poor planning - a problem that should never have existed in the first place, so my faith that the rest of this software/firmware is robust has been undermined and I'm not so sure I should buy another one in the future."

Dr. DroIt's clearly some sort of "advertisement press release", to the best of my knowledge, limitations on drive capacity were primarily related to early controllers and/or legacy BIOSes such as the Award BIOS used on some budget socket 775 motherboards that did not support EFI emulation and thus capped out at ~2 TiB (it could not address more). It hasn't been a problem in a very long time.

I understand the appeal of a NAS box such as this one, but at the same time, I'd much rather build a server box of my own - or even purchase an old decommissioned server, install Fedora on it and do my own thing (which is what I do).

Chrispy_I mean, a single 24TB Ironwolf Pro costs more than sort of NASes Asus is talking about that require USB connectivity, so yeah - by the time you're spending $2000 on drives you don't put it in a plastic consumer hotbox powered by a single wall-wart and limited to USB for anything better than gigabit or perhaps 2.5GbE if it's one of the higher-end consumer NASes.

I haven't used Asustor's enterprise NASes, I gather they're decent but they're also priced like datacenter storage servers and not running the MyArchive consumer backup software that Asustor focused on for this announcement.

Dr. DroRight now my server box is some repurposed Core 2 Quad Q9505 system on a Gigabyte G41 board, but I've run it to the bone. I've no wish to even open it to clean at this point. I've been looking at buying a (new) server to replace it, I just need it to be dual-port 1GbE and perform reasonably well so I can run a file service (samba share), perhaps Jellyfin, a BitTorrent client and a local Minecraft server, with enough room so I can stuff it with 4 HDDs or so.

I'm mostly looking at a base spec Dell PowerEdge T150, it'd do it for me. It's about 1000 bucks cheaper than a 4-bay Synology DS423+ here at 3.799 BRL ($760) it just hurts knowing that it's essentially a Pentium Gold G6405T prebuilt with a single 8 GB ECC stick and a 2 TB HDD. Ughh. I could easily upgrade it on my own over time, though, so there's that.

Chrispy_isn't a 3-5-year old office cast-off perfect for that? You don't need the latest platform, Dell 14th Gen tower servers from 2019 onwards are probably being dumped on ebay cheap, or companies are paying companies to take them away for recycling at this point.