ASUSTOR Announces AS4002T and AS4004T NAS with 10GbE

[btarunr]

ASUSTOR Inc. has announced today that two new NAS devices will be joining the ASUSTOR family. The AS4002T and AS4004T are our first consumer NAS that integrate 10gb Ethernet with an RJ45 connector. The AS4002T and AS4004T are the world's first NAS containing a Marvell Armada Cortex-A72 64-bit dual-core processor. Compared with the previous generation of processors, these NAS offer 3½ times more computing power. 2GB of DDR4-2400 memory is also included, which is faster and more efficient than DDR3. Both the AS4002T and AS4004T have a 10gb Ethernet port and two Gigabit Ethernet ports, which create a fast networking environment that is 10 times faster than a Gigabit network. Network aggregation technology can also be used to combine the three RJ45 ports to triple the speed of a gigabit connection without 10gb hardware.

The new AS4002T and AS4004T come with a brand new appearance. The front panel is a removable crystal black magnetic panel, which is not only aesthetically pleasing but also dust-proof. Actuated inlets are arranged around the panel to optimize heat transfer, while the inner honeycomb structure strengthens the pressure area to avoid damaging hard drives from external impact. In addition, both models support hot-swapping hard drives. The hard disk is fully secured using the caddy, and the hard drives can be quickly installed or replaced without any tools.



ASUSTOR product manager Johnny Chen pointed out: " Both beginners and professionals will be more than satisfied with the excellent performance and convenience brought by these two new NAS. It is worth mentioning that a 10-Gigabit network and the full set of equipment is required to achieve maximum speeds. The AS40 series is affordable for both consumers and businesses. We are very pleased to be releasing a NAS that both consumers and businesses will find to be one of the best values for a NAS."

The AS40 series is sold with the latest version of ADM. Once initialized by the installation wizard, this fully-featured ASUSTOR NAS can be used immediately to experience the convenience of remote storage management, backup, and sharing of data anywhere and anytime.

AS4002T and AS4004T Specifications

• Marvell Armada Cortex-A72 1.6GHz dual core CPU
• 2GB of DDR4-2400 RAM
• 2x Gigabit Ethernet ports
• 1x 10-Gigabit Ethernet ports
• Read speeds of up to 1146MB/s on RAID 5
• Write speeds of up to 584 MB/s on RAID 5
• Front panel USB 3.1 Gen1, power button, one-touch backup button.
• Rear USB 3.1 Gen1
• Supports hard drive hot swapping
• Tool-less installation
• Supports hardware encryption
• Supports JBOD, single drives, and RAID levels 0 and 1 while quad bay units also support levels 5, 6 and 10
• Supports up to 12TB per hard drive
• Supports seamless system migration
• Supports MyArchive drives

For more information, visit the product pages of the AS4002T and AS4004T.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[bug]

Not a bad way to get rid of mechanical drives from home desktops.
But does anyone know how easy it is to replace/upgrade the disks on a running RAID1 configuration? Can you replace one disk and then the other? Can you up the capacity while doing so? (And yes, I realize these questions are in no way specific to Asus' solutions.)

 

[TheLostSwede]

Not a bad way to get rid of mechanical drives from home desktops.
But does anyone know how easy it is to replace/upgrade the disks on a running RAID1 configuration? Can you replace one disk and then the other? Can you up the capacity while doing so? (And yes, I realize these questions are in no way specific to Asus' solutions.)

Yes, you can migrate a RAID, but it's time consuming and stresses the disks a lot, so it's not something you want to do too often.
You can obviously also expand the storage area available if you upgrade to larger drives, but this would be done after the drive migration and you'd have to migrate both drives so they're the same size still.

 

[bug]

Yes, you can migrate a RAID, but it's time consuming and stresses the disks a lot, so it's not something you want to do too often.
You can obviously also expand the storage area available if you upgrade to larger drives, but this would be done after the drive migration and you'd have to migrate both drives so they're the same size still.

Yeah, I wasn't expecting it to work magically. But can you do it in place? I.e. break up the array -> replace 1 disk -> copy from old disk to new one -> replace other disk -> rebuild array? Or do you need to image the whole thing, replace disks and then restore?
I'm sorry if this is pretty basic, because of the relatively high cost of a NAS solution I never invested too much time looking up details.

 

[Octavean]

Yeah, I wasn't expecting it to work magically. But can you do it in place? I.e. break up the array -> replace 1 disk -> copy from old disk to new one -> replace other disk -> rebuild array? Or do you need to image the whole thing, replace disks and then restore?
I'm sorry if this is pretty basic, because of the relatively high cost of a NAS solution I never invested too much time looking up details.

Basically you would pull a drive and replace the drive with a new one. Then rebuilt the degraded array. Repeat the same steps for the other drive or drives until they are all replaced but only after the degraded array has been rebuilt. Removing more drives then you have fault tolerance for would just crash the array and result in lost data.

Its a good idea to have a backup of the array though.

So for example, I have an 8 bay NAS completely populated with 8TB WD Red drives. The RAID array uses Synology Hybrid RAID 2 (SHR2) with dual drive redundancy (quasi RAID 6). This is completely backed up by a MediaSonic ProRAID H8R2-SU3S2 8 bay DAS (Direct Attached Storage) in RAID 50. That way if either were to fail the data can be restored via a backup copy.

These ASUSTOR NAS models look fairly good depending on price but I'm not crazy about the Marvell Armada Cortex-A72 1.6GHz dual core CPU processors. I would much rather have an Intel or AMD processor / SoC.

 

[bug]

Basically you would pull a drive and replace the drive with a new one. Then rebuilt the degraded array. Repeat the same steps for the other drive or drives until they are all replaced but only after the degraded array has been rebuilt. Removing more drives then you have fault tolerance for would just crash the array and result in lost data.

Its a good idea to have a backup of the array though.

So for example, I have an 8 bay NAS completely populated with 8TB WD Red drives. The RAID array uses Synology Hybrid RAID 2 (SHR2) with dual drive redundancy (quasi RAID 6). This is completely backed up by a MediaSonic ProRAID H8R2-SU3S2 8 bay DAS (Direct Attached Storage) in RAID 50. That way if either were to fail the data can be restored via a backup copy.

These ASUSTOR NAS models look fairly good depending on price but I'm not crazy about the Marvell Armada Cortex-A72 1.6GHz dual core CPU processors. I would much rather have an Intel or AMD processor / SoC.

Amazon has these listed for $250/350. I'm not too concerned about performance, I don't need much. What I'm concerned about is Asus who tends to have rather flaky software.

 

[TheLostSwede]

Amazon has these listed for $250/350. I'm not too concerned about performance, I don't need much. What I'm concerned about is Asus who tends to have rather flaky software.

As you already got a reply to the first question, I won't bother with that.
With regards to Asustor, well, the team behind Asustor are from QNAP and Synology, so they should know what they're doing with regards to software, as this is not their first rodeo so to say. Keep in mind that the ARM based NAS devices usually have more limited support for 3rd party software, so if you want to run certain 3rd party software, it might not work. So in other words, take a look at the manufacturers website to see if everything you want is supported on the model you plan on buying.

Another option to consider is the DIY route, as most of the free/open source software isn't that different from what these guys are doing and imho a lot quicker to get updated. You really wouldn't need much in terms of hardware to build a NAS, so if you got a spare PC, you technically have a NAS...
I went a bit overboard with 10Gbps Ethernet and some other crazy bits, but hey...

 

[bug]

Thanks, that's the lesson I learnt from my previous run ins with Asus: go to the product website and read the manual before buying. Works for motherboards, too, as too often advertised features are gated behind Windows-only software.

DIY I won't consider for now. Components are already rather expensive around here and what I need would be something small and quiet above all else. It's a legit option otherwise.