Asustor Drivestor 4 AS1104T 4-Bay NAS

[crmaris]

The Asustor Drivestor 4 (AS1104T) is a highly affordable NAS with some features that are usually only found in much more expensive products, including storage expansion and a 2.5 GbE port. It is suitable for home users who need something reliable and user-friendly without it breaking the bank.

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[Octavean]

Good review.

IT was better then I thought it would be and maybe its OK for the money at ~$270 in this economy. However, its not a long term solution IMO given the lack of NVMe SSD cache support. X86 / 864 support would have netted better Plex support (transcoding) as well as other applications. While 2.5GbE isn't bad there is no upgrade path to 10GbE. Too many compromises IMO.

 

[TheLostSwede]

Good review.

IT was better then I thought it would be and maybe its OK for the money at ~$270 in this economy. However, its not a long term solution IMO given the lack of NVMe SSD cache support. X86 / 864 support would have netted better Plex support (transcoding) as well as other applications. While 2.5GbE isn't bad there is no upgrade path to 10GbE. Too many compromises IMO.

Sorry, but what exactly do you need the SSD cache for in a consumer NAS?
I have a DIY NAS with no SSD cache and a 10Gbps card and I can pull over 750MB/s from it.

Also, you can't upgrade any ARM based consumer NAS that is currently in the market.
Technically the SoC can do the video transcoding, but I guess Asustor didn't want to pay for the codec from Realtek to do it.

 

[Chrispy_]

I'm sold on DSM because it's a really great consumer NAS OS (Hell, it's not terrible for SMB and I wouldn't get fired for using it at enterprise level).

However, this is quite simply $200 cheaper than alternatives from Synology of QNAP and when money matters it's hard to ignore. I think I'd rather gamble on Asus than Coolermaster when it comes to budget home NAS solutions, only because Teramaster customer reviews are absolutely chock-full of "this update destructively erased my whole array" comments. Whether genuine or fake, the mere hint of such a possibility is enough to scare me away.

 

[Octavean]

Sorry, but what exactly do you need the SSD cache for in a consumer NAS?
I have a DIY NAS with no SSD cache and a 10Gbps card and I can pull over 750MB/s from it.

Also, you can't upgrade any ARM based consumer NAS that is currently in the market.
Technically the SoC can do the video transcoding, but I guess Asustor didn't want to pay for the codec from Realtek to do it.

I have a NAS with 10GbE but have never seen ~750MB/s just from the HDD's. Perhaps I should experiment more with a DYI solution, as I recall that yielded better results (albeit at higher power usage). Or maybe I need faster HDD's.

Any NAS this cheap likely wouldn't have an upgrade option so no surprise there. However some manufacturers have produced 5GbE USB Ethernet adapters that work on their closed systems. Unfortunately those typically don't seem to be significantly faster then 2.5GbE.

 

[Makaveli]

I'm sold on DSM because it's a really great consumer NAS OS (Hell, it's not terrible for SMB and I wouldn't get fired for using it at enterprise level).

However, this is quite simply $200 cheaper than alternatives from Synology of QNAP and when money matters it's hard to ignore. I think I'd rather gamble on Asus than Coolermaster when it comes to budget home NAS solutions, only because Teramaster customer reviews are absolutely chock-full of "this update destructively erased my whole array" comments. Whether genuine or fake, the mere hint of such a possibility is enough to scare me away.

This was pretty much my reasoning for going with the Asus NAS AS1004T V2 which is less powerful than the reviewed unit. I really only need to serve media files for playback from an andriod box which does all the heavy lifting and some small back ups that I manually push over to the NAS. And with those basic needs it does what I want without costing me $500.

 

[TheLostSwede]

I'm sold on DSM because it's a really great consumer NAS OS (Hell, it's not terrible for SMB and I wouldn't get fired for using it at enterprise level).

However, this is quite simply $200 cheaper than alternatives from Synology of QNAP and when money matters it's hard to ignore. I think I'd rather gamble on Asus than Coolermaster when it comes to budget home NAS solutions, only because Teramaster customer reviews are absolutely chock-full of "this update destructively erased my whole array" comments. Whether genuine or fake, the mere hint of such a possibility is enough to scare me away.

The Asustor team consisted of ex Synology and QNAP staff originally.

I have a NAS with 10GbE but have never seen ~750MB/s just from the HDD's. Perhaps I should experiment more with a DYI solution, as I recall that yielded better results (albeit at higher power usage). Or maybe I need faster HDD's.

Any NAS this cheap likely wouldn't have an upgrade option so no surprise there. However some manufacturers have produced 5GbE USB Ethernet adapters that work on their closed systems. Unfortunately those typically don't seem to be significantly faster then 2.5GbE.

This was with RAID-5.

 

[billEST]

asustor have unique option for storage : you can read no raid disk directly out the nas , or the contrary
you can put TO of data from pc in a disk and put in the nas : all the data will be on the net..