Exterior

Asustor adheres to the same design guidelines with most of their products, and an untrained eye will easily confuse Asustor and QNAP products. There are external differences between their high-end servers, but their overall design uses the same pattern of a greyish, metallic top and side cover, and there is the black front panel with its LCD screen. The Asustor AS7004T's external build quality is great, and the finish on its metallic part looks and feels good.

At the front are two buttons: one is the on/off switch and the other the copy button so particular to NAS servers. You can make the "power" button put the NAS to sleep, or have the unit shut down completely after pushing it down for 1.5 seconds. In the bottom-left corner are the copy button and a USB 3.0 port.

ADM provides you with many options for the copy button's functionality, which is nice if you want a fast backup option to and from an external drive. It was also about time a manufacturer chose to install a USB 3.0 port at the face of a NAS instead of the rear since such a port also greatly boosts usability. The removable trays (or caddies) don't feature any locks, which may sound strange to some administrators since this NAS is mostly for business-centric environments where physical data protection is an essential feature.


A description of all LED indicators can be found in the Quick Installation Guide.


The two-line LCD screen displays useful information about the state of the NAS, and it deactivates automatically once the boot-up phase completes to conserve energy. You can also set it to show custom texts or the local temperature. Four buttons next to the screen allow you to check on various states or perform some basic administrative tasks.


Only one of two sides features ventilation holes, which is something it has common with QNAP's servers.


The small fan in the rear cools the PSU down, while the larger fan cools the NAS. There are many I/O connectors in the rear, including two USB 3.0 and 2.0 ports, each, two eSATA ports, and an HDMI and S/PDIF port. There are also two Gigabit Ethernet ports, a common feature among high-end NAS servers; some even feature four such ports.


The bottom comes with four removable rubber feet.


The trays can easily be removed; you just have to push a button along the bottom.


This server's trays don't feature locks, but a simple mechanism secures them in place, and it only takes a flat-headed screwdriver to do so. Since this is mostly a business-centric NAS, we would have liked actual locks on these trays to enhance overall physical security.


The trays are metallic and of very good quality. They can hold either 3.5" and 2.5" drives, and all the necessary screws to do so have been included.