The Nimbustor 4 is silent, hardly consumes any power, and its power adapter, a crucial component in a product meant to operate around the clock, is of high quality. Overall performance is decent, but I expected even better performance given the quad-core CPU. Compared to the Synology DS620Slim I also evaluated using the same drives (Adata SSDs), the readings in real-life scenarios weren't as high, and the Synology offering uses a less capable SoC with only two cores.

The inclusion of NVMe support for SSD caching would also be nice as the NAS does clock in at $500. It does have a pair of 2.5 Gbps Ethernet ports and an HDMI 2.0a port you can use to directly connect the server to a monitor or a TV for high bit-rate multimedia content without stressing your network's infrastructure, though. Finally, for those of you who want to exploit the server's capabilities fully, Asustor offers a broad range of applications, covering almost every need. You will find more than 280 apps in App Central, including Surveillance Center, which will allow you to exploit the four provided camera licenses fully.

My major complaint is that I frequently lost it in my network. As it seems, the LACP (Ethernet teaming) feature has incompatibility issues with my hardware at least, so the NAS was either reporting a blocked status or that it was offline. I happen to have another Asustor NAS (AS5102T) in my lab I have been using 24/7 for quite some time now, and I never faced a similar problem with it. That NAS uses a different Ethernet controllers, though, and isn't configured in NIC teaming mode (LACP). I informed Asustor, of course, so this issue will hopefully be resolved in the next software update.

The fact that the storage of the Nimbustor 4 can be expanded through compatible expansion boxes is a strong asset. That having been said, these boxes are connected through the USB 3.0 ports instead of e-SATA, which will probably affect the SoC's performance. Another detail you should keep in mind before deciding between the Asustor Nimbustor 4 and Nimbustor 2 models is that the latter might cost less, but has half the RAM and a less capable SoC (Intel Celeron J4005) with two cores instead of four.