Asustor Unveils Pure-NVMe NAS, HDD NAS with M.2 Slots at Computex 2023

[btarunr]

Asustor at Computex 2023 pointed us in the direction in which personal high-capacity storage, particularly NAS servers, are headed. The company unveiled its first pure-flash based NAS, and conventional HDD caddie-based NAS that have M.2 NVMe slots. The Flashstor 12 Pro (FS6712X) packs twelve M.2 NVMe slots, and is driven by a Celeron N5105 processor with 4 GB of DDR4-2933 memory on an SO-DIMM slot (which you can expand).

The M.2 slots support various NVMe RAID modes, including single, JBOD, RAID 0/1/5/6/10, etc. Besides these you get two 5 Gbps USB 3.2 ports. Networking interfaces include one 10 GbE. The company also unveiled a more compact version of this, with the Flashstor 6 (FS6706T), which comes with six M.2 NVMe slots, the same processor and NVMe RAID features, but two 2.5 GbE interfaces instead of the 10 GbE on the Flashstor 12 Pro.



This trend of providing numerous M.2 NVMe slots with NVMe RAID capability continues across all the HDD-based NAS we were shown, including with the 4-bay Nimbustor 4 Gen 2 (AS5404T), which also provides four M.2 slots, and two 2.5 GbE interfaces; the 2-bay Nimbustor 2 Gen 2, which has two HDD caddies, but a healthy four M.2 NVMe slots with NVMe RAID capabilities; and two 2.5 GbE interfaces.



M.2 drives are, understandably, not as hot-swappable as HDDs, and so while the HDDs get convenient caddies, installing the M.2 drives involves taking off the top panel to expose a PCB with the four M.2-2280 slots. These use a tool-free (screwless) retention mechanism for the drives. On our way out, we caught a handful personal wired networking products, including a 2.5 GbE unmanaged switch, and AS-U2.5G2, a USB NIC that puts out a 2.5 GbE port, with a 5 Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 1 type-C on the other end (a type-A adapter is included).

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[Chaitanya]

ServetheHome already did review and had some interesting insights into design of that NAS.

 

[Crackong]

driven by a Celeron N5105

N5105 only has 8xPCIE (Gen3) links and you are hooking 12 nvme SSD on it?
WHY?

 

[Scrizz]

N5105 only has 8xPCIE (Gen3) links and you are hooking 12 nvme SSD on it?
WHY?

You're already going to be limited/bottle-necked by the 10Gb Ethernet. Having more lanes doesn't improve your throughput over the network.

 

[Chaitanya]

You're already going to be limited/bottle-necked by the 10Gb Ethernet. Having more lanes doesn't improve your throughput over the network.

And by dual 2.5Gbps on 6 bay/slot SKU.

 

[Crackong]

You're already going to be limited/bottle-necked by the 10Gb Ethernet. Having more lanes doesn't improve your throughput over the network.

The 10Gb NIC needs an x2 lane as well.
That leaves only x6 lanes for the SSDs, so they need to add another PCI-E lane switch chip into the machine.

It would be kind of a reasonable product if they equip the 6 slot model with the 10Gb NIC
Consider cost oriented QLC SSDs on the market are quite slow so 1 lane per SDD is still ok.

But they don't
Either you are going to stuck with 2.5Gb Lan, or eat the cost of the extra slots and the PCI-E switch chip just to get the 10Gb Lan.

 

[Jism]

These sollutions are the end of traditional spinning HDD's.

 

[Wirko]

These sollutions are the end of traditional spinning HDD's.

This particular one certainly isn't. You don't get very far towards this goal by using M.2 slots. U.2 and U.3, however, are much better, and SATA remains a good option for those who don't need the ultimate speed.

 

[Jism]

Less point of faillure,

Less power consumption,

Higher access times,

Silent.

I think SSD's are now more reliable then HDD"s within the first year anyway.

 

[Nirman04]

The 10Gb NIC needs an x2 lane as well.
That leaves only x6 lanes for the SSDs, so they need to add another PCI-E lane switch chip into the machine.

It would be kind of a reasonable product if they equip the 6 slot model with the 10Gb NIC
Consider cost oriented QLC SSDs on the market are quite slow so 1 lane per SDD is still ok.

But they don't
Either you are going to stuck with 2.5Gb Lan, or eat the cost of the extra slots and the PCI-E switch chip just to get the 10Gb Lan.

I seem to recall ServeTheHome saying that you can use link aggregation with the dual 2.5Gb ports - I’m wondering if this would be close enough to the optimum ratio of SSDs to network speed or whether you would still want to go for the 12 slot model to get full 10 Gb network speed?

 

[Scrizz]

I seem to recall ServeTheHome saying that you can use link aggregation with the dual 2.5Gb ports - I’m wondering if this would be close enough to the optimum ratio of SSDs to network speed or whether you would still want to go for the 12 slot model to get full 10 Gb network speed?

There are a lot of things to take into account for this. The most important one is the workload. If you're running sequential workloads, even the 10Gb would be limited in the 6 m.2 config.
If you're running 4k random and depending on individual drive performance, raid config, read vs write, etc, you might be able to just saturate the 10Gb with the 12 m.2 config.

A caching/tiered data set up with HDDs/SSDs would give an excellent comprimise of both capacity and speed that is still being limited by the network interface.