Hey everyone! Marco here from ASUSTOR! We thank Wendell for taking a look at our NAS! We love listening to feedback. If you have questions, comments, praise and criticism, feel free to reply to me and I will happily hear you and reply! Thanks again!
Is a socketed version coming? I'd be interested in a more "green" solution, as I am often alerady upgrading my servers when i downgrade my PC. Buying a dead-end platform isn't really in the mentality.
Also, any chance of getting a slightly beefier SKU, or maybe a socketed version? I can think of a few uses for this thing, but can't help but feel it might be held back a bit by that modest CPU.
I'm on the opposite end of the wishes spectrum :) I want something smaller, that would allow up to 6 M.2 SATAs (I don't know all the raid modes by heart, but generally I'd want replication so that data is not lost whenever one of the SSDs is dead) where I could back up my photos.
Super impressive, ASUSTOR. I like that this is a turnkey/noob-friendly solution that can also ease people into doing more complex things with Docker, etc. Now I have something I can recommend to less experienced users who are looking to set up a NAS!
I purchased one at put in the 12x2TB Samsung drives, and love it; Its not as fast as I wanted, and I would Glady pay a few hundred more for a fsater CPU to get the full 10gb speeds/PCI lanes, with a lower power footprint too... I thought it was great value, but also would spend a few bucks more for more PCI lanes version for faster speeds for the LAN.
Nice. From a connectivity side, I would have prefered to see 2x 2.5gb ports to enable a redundant fallover and ensurance of high avalibility. But I do recognize that for many home networks this may not be the highest priority. I'm glad it is not exclusively coud enabled - seeing far too many devices going that route and not something I need nor do I want for any of my network infrastructure devices. So good work Asustor!
We do have dual 2.5GbE on the six SSD version, the Flashstor 6. We do offer a 2.5GbE USB adapter that works on our NAS too as failover if needed. The thing is, we squeezed blood out of a rock with this SoC and basically used every PCIe lane it had to offer and made it compact while trying to minimise bottlenecks. Thank you for your praise and support! And we say NO to always-online and NO to endless subscriptions!
@ASUSTOR_YT Very imressed with your 6-slot Flashstor after using for about a week. We will continue to support any company that rejects the subscription model!
i use old chromebooks for this kinda stuff...yup, they re even slower, but at least they aren't in the landfill, and for SATA SSD's they work just fine enough and with built-in wifi too!
imho running vms and docker containers over nvmes is pretty awesome been able to run everything pretty flawlessly, while 4k streaming plex, controlling my home with homeassistant, all super quietly. nice to not have to worry about certain apps (like kasm) requiring ssds for installation. rather than port forwarding for the asustor ezconnect service, i prefer using cloudflare tunnels for remote access which has been super easy to set up through a docker run command on the flashstor. i agree maybe it's not "insane" but in reality what NAS on the market is really that insane without it becoming just a beefed up computer that consumes a lot of power. i think this will be the future of NAS machines, esp as nvme ssd prices decline just depends on your use case. I can see this becoming a main nas for important resources and hdd NAS as an archive
This thing is awesome for remote data processing. I had the 12 bay maxed out with WD Black 4tb's in a Raid10. Plugged in to my data processing tower with remote desktop was a game changer for my workflow. Far more efficient and cost effective vs. the old Qnap nas setups we had (if you just want to dump a bunch of data on it, process it, then move it off for storage...)
Can I ask you a question? Lets say an ssd is faulty and you need to replace it to begin restoring parity was it - anyway - can you easily identify the ssd that you need to replace? Can you use the rest of it befire you get the new drive or do you need to park it untill you get one to your place? What if the fault is not in the ssd but it is in the file system? Nobody ever mentions corrupt file system. To me that is worse that drive failure - it happens instantly and you lose all data. Does this device has any way to combat this problem? Can it restore the file system if it suddenly gets corrupted? Or does it all gets magically erased and you are left with working ssds with all the data still on them but all the data pointing to the files and all the names - gone - leaving you with an impossible to sort out mess?
I'm running the 6 drive version for a few months now. Has been good so far, the OS is competent enough, though not on Synology level. Theoretically the system is unlocked, so you can install any OS on it you like (OMV for example), though I have not tried that yet.
Thanks for posting! I've been interested in the performance of their all-flash arrays. I'm actually on my third asustor (first two still work, I just need moar). I've been really happy with the price to performance for these boxes. Especially at a lower price point, having 2.5Gb nics (sometimes multiple, supporting aggregation) is greatly appreciated. I keep my as strictly NAS's, they don't talk to anything off my networks. I've been really, really happy with them.
I have it for a year now. My advice is use raid 10, as CPU sucks. And get nvme heat sinks from ASUS. Also get 2.5Gbe USB to Ethernet dongle. It is amazing device, I use 10GB nic for iSCSI for VMWare farm, and 2,5GB for client connectivity. Brilliant review, I think the best on Tube.
I've been waiting for a review of this for a long while (is this a review? or an overview?) ... Either way ... thanks, Wendell. All the same, I can't wait for more companies to make devices *like* this so that the prices don't make my remaining eye boil in its socket! 😱
AFAIK, when you select RAID 5 (or any other mode) you get a mdraid managed (software) RAID 5 with either EXT4 or BTRFS as simple filesystem on it. There's only an issue with BTRFS' native raid 5/6 mode where it actively manages distributing data between disks. With mdraid it's simply a filesystem that writes on a single (virtual) disk provided by a (virtual) raid controller. And as long as mdraid has no fundamental flaws you're fine (or in hot water) either way. Synology uses essentially the same mdraid + BTRFS setup. So ultimately when choosing a filesystem you don't have to worry about raid level compatibility but only whether you like e.g. the snapshot capability of BTRFS or the simplicity of EXT4.
At 7:49, you said you opted for btrfs over EXT4, but then said you shouldn't use btrfs for RAID 5. You show EXT4 highlighted though. Just wondering, is EXT4 the choice for RAID 5?
Finally able to sit down and watch the video today. I have been looking at it for a media server running Ubuntu with JellyFin. Thank you for the informed video on the device. Maybe it is going to be underpowered for my needs though.
We understand that the Celeron has had a bad rap over the years, but we do believe that the SoC we used is definitely more than adequate. We optimise our software for our devices and keep the bloat out of it so that it is able to really stretch its arms. We have Jellyfin available for the NAS and it works extremely well as the GPU does all the work.
Thanks for the video, I had never hear of Tailscale before. Would you consider doing a video on it and how feasible it would be for a small business running with a partly remote staff set up?
A home for all those 1tb nvme I have laying around? May sound crazy too some people but Nvme have been out a while and starting to see retirement ready pc's with 500gb/1tb drives coming out of service with 90+% life still left on them lol. Also have a few just personal PCIE 3.0 drives that literally just got retired for larger drives but have life in them.
Hmmm I will put this on my list for my Drobo replacement. I known their limited but I have been using them for 25 years with their ability to increase capacity incrementally with no hiccups, I just can't let it go🤔
Would love to see a video you using their rackmounted NAS. Setting up a backup environment and some docker container installs would be a great tutorial.
Hello Wendell, I have a few of these units, all with TrueNAS SCALE installed on them. With regards to your ZFS comment, it runs exceptionally well with TrueNAS and easily hits network speed thresholds on varying levels of ZFS (1/2/3). Please note: There is what I consider a manufacturing defect. The heatsink is not properly making contact with the CPU and thus there are considerable thermal issues. The CPU will hit 100*C and peg there continually due to improperly sized heatsink unit and how it makes contact with the CPU. This causes issues that are not acknowledged nor addressed yet by ASUSTOR for months.
I've been looking at this device for a while...it has some pretty awesome capabilities and the fact that it uses SSD media makes it a great fit for a niche market, the mobile #vanlife crowd. They are as connected as any, and sometimes morso. The digital nomads will see this as a great way to work with larger data sets or video editing and then backing up their work on a spinning rust drive that is in a nice soft and protected from vibration case. RAID is not a backup! With this NAS, and Starlink, you could do a lot of work on the road.
Just picked up one of these today not realizing the Celeron slowness issue, populated it with Samsung 990 4TB Pro nvme drives. Pays to read the product tech specs and understand the limitations prior to purchasing. Very satisfied with the FS6712X nontheless. Update, just watched this again and noticed the 'you shouldn't use raid 5 for btrfs', it's amazing how long those issues have been going on for such a great filesystem, sad..
The issues with BTRFS RAID5/6 stem from the design itself, which is why it is taking so long to fix - and is likely never to be fully fixed, given that BTRFS claims on-disk format to be finalised and stable.
not really related to the video but I was looking into tailscale with the video in the background and I wasn't sure about it but now that Wendel endorsed it I'm going to install it on EVERY device I own ;)
I tried one of the 6 bay units and sent it back after a week. Not only was it foreign to me after using 2 Synology NAS units, but it's biggest problem was only being able to do 1 thing at a time. The programming took over my computer and I couldn.t go on and do something else. It also was very Chinese and support was hard to find.
niche? Yup. it intrigues me. the CPU is the sticky point. I would have preferred a more capable unit, something like a Ryzen 2600 or 3600, perhaps a G unit as well. More overall oomph and cores. 6 seems about the sweet spot to me and with SMP, these are just about the limit of what would be enough without a fan cooler and/or water. The 12 drives... AH finally enough ports in a small form factor... Living the Dream...
I think this is an amazing product. In my mind it only suffers in 2 areas: 1) No support for 22110 form factor, and 2) No ECC support. Although, I can see how some would want a higher performance CPU. Super low error rate M.2 nvme (1 sector in 10^-17 bits read) seem only to be available in 22110 format. But try to make an equivalent device with a current in-production cpu. It’s difficult to find a motherboard supporting ECC with 3-pcie or more slots for quad m.2 to pcie adapters. And if you do, they are likely in workstation or server motherboards that are in the $500-750 range. Cpus with ecc are $300 and up. So we are talking $1000 plus case, power supply and 3 quad cards (10gbe likley comes on a server or workstation motherboard). You would likely either use 6-dual m.2 nvme to pcie x8 supermicro cards, or 3-qnap quad m.2 nvme to pcie x8 or x4 (no bifurcation needed) cards . Costing $300 or $510 respectively. Budgeting $250 for power supply and case we have $1000 + $300 or $510 + $250 = $1550 to $1760, without ram. Now granted, this would be a more powerful system, but its near 2x the cost of the Asustor. Plus its not very compact. The least expensive system I have found for this is about $600-$700. A used supermicro server using a 2014 xeon E-2600 v4 motherboard. The motherboard has 3 pcie x16, 2 pcie x8 and 1 pcie x 4 slots. But its a E-ATX card, so difficult to find a small case for it. Considering all of that. I think the Asustor is a fantastic product.
An interesting experiment would be filling it up with power-hungry high-end SSDs like Samsung 980 or 990s and checking how warm they actually get. Due to the slow and shared PCIe interfaces these SSDs should idle a significant amount of the time.
Straight up waste it's an Celeron with a mere 8 PCI Express Lanes of (Gen 3) IO. Get the cheapest 2TB NVME's you can get for this use case. From where I'm at that would be (Mushkin SSD Element M.2 2TB) for under 70 euro's Fill it up and call it a day.
The purpose of this experiment would simply be to examine if fast “high-end” M.2 SSDs idling due to the host system being so anemic and not being able to transport data to and from the SSDs would let them stay cool enough to be operated in such a small form factor. I personally don’t toy with anything without proper ECC or powerloss protection anymore.
@@screamingiraffe Thanks for offering your assistance! How is the temperature (delta degree K over room temperature) of the hottest SSD in the enclosure immediately after doing a sequential full write over the entire available storage space (parallel write processes over all SSDs at the same time, something like a RAID0)? Any issues with temperatures >60 C?
@@screamingiraffe It would still be faster than any traditional hard drive right? Would you mind explaining your disappointment a little bit as I'm planning to get exactly the same number/brand of SSDs you got. My use case is just really for SSD storage and I want it to be as tough as I can make it with TLC SSDs that will last for years.
Interesting product. Probably less jank than the old 17 inch hp laptop that i got from the garbage bin because it had a dead hdd which i currently use as a "server"
You said that m.2 does not make sense for this sort of product why? So do you mean that a NAS with Sata makes more sense? I would appreciate your thoughts on the same
Hold up. Is there a single/dual drive version of this? The myAsus Portal with the streaming apps installed seems like a fantastic start to Android TV Alternative. But would be nice if it was cheaper.
Thank you, L1T. Imo zerotier > tailscale. Particularly when one examines each company's corp governance. On World Backup Day 2024, please do a 6-month retrospective on this device. Kindest regards, neighbours and friends.
They advertise over a 1,000 Mbps write speed on a 10 gbe network. All reviews I’ve seen can’t get much over 600. What’s the deal? Oh and the advertising was in raid 5
Neat. I think for my particular use case, which is more industrial/OT, Synology is king. Will very, very likely remain that way. Wouldn't USUALLY require this throughput.
I had a couple of Synologys. It offered me an easy inexpensive onramp to entry level NAS/server. My home server solution arc (as a software developer not a managed ops guy) went from local backups. > USB enclosure > Drobo > Synology. The Synology is great if one doens't want to spend time rolling one's own NAS/server with off the shelf parts but once you start thinking about consolidated docker and virtualization services, Synology suffers from the same sort of performance issues as this Asus device due to weak processor. Not sure if it exists but my ideal for home use would be a NAS/server that allows me to not only add extra storage but the option to upgrade to fast processor and high end GPU. Supermicro, Dell, HP et all sell enterprise solutions like this but no one that I know has taken a successful stab at this for the home use space at a more consumer friendly price point than enterprise.. I became so frustrated waiting for someone to please take my money I eventually went the DYI route. Bought an 3970x Threadripper, mobo with built-in 10Gb nic, 256GB ECC RAM, some hypercards, coupled it with a bunch of 8TB NVMe SSDs. and a cheap Netapp 24 bay 3.5" JBOD that connects to server with mini-sas cable (You can find 24 bay NetApp JBOD for as low as 300 bucks on ebay). I spent more by going with the Threadripper, lots of RAM and rackmoutnable Silverstone RM52 case but other than that you could keep the total cost of a similar server under $2K (not including drives) and it would smoke any Synology. Since DDR5 supports error correcting memory high core counts are common in consumer CPUs now, it should be possible for a manufacturer to mass produce a pre-made server close to the performance of my setup for around the same money. The trick is rather than pair with an Epic and sundry failover parts (like the Enterprise end of things does) they could pair it with mid or high end desktop CPU, ATX/ITX board, and other consumer grade parts. In a nutshell... someone needs to sell essentially a pc desktop but in a form factor and OS mostly designed to be used as storage, virtualization and dockerization. The mistake companies keep making while taking a stab at this is they go overboard on performance/features and making thing proprietary which ends up with enterprise-like prices... or under performing like this NAS.
Anyone know if you can just install Proxmox to these? I know it's possible with other Asustor nases but given the odd layout of this machine it might not work.
It's a mini PC with a BIOS and a HDMI port, you can install whatever you want. The M.2 slots are served by pcie switches that are used also in cheap pcie -to-dual M.2 slot cards that work fine on Linux
7:58 You say you’re choosing BTRFS but then chose EXT4 on the screen, then you say you chose RAID 5 and BTRFS, and then you say that BTRFS is not recommended for RAID 5 so confusing. You say one thing, but the screen screen shows something else then you say you want RAID 5 with BFS but say that you shouldn’t use BTR Sf with RAID R
IMO with SSD capacities getting larger and cheaper and spinning-rust price/performance having stagnated these last few years we are going to see a lot more of these NVMe SSD oriented pro-consumer NAS/servers in the future. This product line is a move in right direction but a miss in implementation. The support for up to 12 m.2 drives is awesome but they paired it with weak processor and older RAM. This dramatically limits its virtualization and dockerization potential. I'd consider paying twice the money for a much better processor with faster RAM. Or alternatively have a board with upgradable CPU. Something like this with higher end NUC-like processing of some micro-pcs and now you're talking. This might be a niche use case for someone that needs fast storage that they can physically move around but the economics for most use cases don't work with this device. Its doesn't really make sense to put 1TB SSDs in such a device when you can buy a micro -pc for a bit more money with far faster processor and a larger SSD. And top of the line 8TB NVMe M.2 are still expensive per TB. Whose going to pair $10k in SSD storage to a slow processor rather than spend a bit extra and get a decent processor paired to some of Asus own Hypercards no less.
I'm not sure how anyone could look at hard drives have having stagnated on price. $200 on rare sale as little as 3 years ago got you a 14TB hard drive. These days you can easily get a 20TB hard drive for less than $200. If you're willing to go manufacturer refurb, you can get a 22TB drive for $220. This system isn't intended for "dockization." This metal and plastic box would make a horrendous dock and the heavy mentals would make the fish sick. It's also not intended for Dockerization (the process of converting software into Docker container). This is literally a fit-for-purpose device that solves the problem stated: fast access to mass storage over a network. Just because it's not useful *for you*, doesn't mean it's not flying off the shelves. Yeah, you can buy a Micro PC, good luck with 10GBE. Good luck with >1 NVME slot. Good luck with both of those at this price range. Good luck with redundancy on one (1) NVME drive. 8TB NVME SSDs are easily found for $400. There was one on sale for $357 just the other day. "A bit extra on a server"
@@tim3172 Compare the drop in HDD prices and density versus drop in prices of SSDs and density in same timeframe. Not even close. The trendline could change with some revolutionary development in HDDS (or stalling in SSDs) but I doubt it due to physics limitations in how HDDs work. At the moment tape drives ironically have a higher probability of long term survival than HDDs. if wasn't so long ago micro-hdds were being used in cameras. Today SD cards have eliminated them This system is intended at least partially for dockization-like functionality not just fast storage (which is what the pre-installed apps are about) Not sure where you get your claim you can "easily" find 8TB nvmes m.2. ssds for $400. Certainly not on ebay, amazon, bestbuy, or newegg. I'm all ears if you have an actual source As for micro PC, granted you'd pay more per TB for dual larger M.2 NVMe but you can already buy prebuiilt ITX systems with upgradability to 10Gb nic, dual nvme support and faster processors that blows this out of the water. As for your trolling comment...two can play that game. Only a dumbass would think that this niche product represents what most consumers would prefer. I would bet money most of the early adopters buying this aren't really thinking through the economics carefully. And most them will be disappointed once the reality of the poor processor performance sinks in. The product category is a legit emerging one but I stick to my thesis this particular implementation misses the mark due to weak processor
@@tim3172 HDDs have "stagnated" on price mostly because SSDs are halving their price/TB every two years or so while HDDs are more or less on a linear curve with a decrease of ~$3-$5 / TB every year. HDDs just cannot get any more capacity in 3.5" form factor, HAMR and equivalent tech will not be able to get here quickly enough to compete with 32TB 2.5" SSD drives, not to mention EDSFF drives. When you can build a 1U disk shelf with 36 slots per rack, when you can get 1152 TB blade servers per 1U rack... No way 3.5" HDDs on 30-40 TB can compete with that in the enterprise. And since the enterprise is HDD bread and butter... Meanwhile 4TB m.2 SSDs are below $200 and 8TB are $650 right now for brand new, was $800 a few months ago. So SSDs got consumer level covered, and enterprise levels covered already or very soon. Pretty soon HDDs will be only marketable to cold storage.
It's clearly meant to be an appliance, and the large amount of M.2 slots is to get more and cheaper SSDs, not to fill it with the biggest and most expensive possible. FFS man wtf are you doing that needs 48TB of NVME SSD storage? And why are you looking at a consumer device to fill those needs? Go get a Supermicro server or something
@@marcogenovesi8570 Sure someone could go with lots of little drives to save money on storage but why not instead go with a micro-pc or ITX system with larger dual m.2 and much faster processor for a little more money? Even a mid-range desktop processor would be far far more useful because of better docker and virtualization support. An ITX case would also make the system more upgradable too. Buying this is like buying a sportscar with 100 hp engine. Sure it has a niche use case but for most it's a mismatched pairing of components. As for your suggestion of going with supermicro. we are talking SOHO/prosumer use case whereas enterprise equipment tends to be loud and expensive. I would much prefer to buy ready-made home server in this category (as do many others) but non-DYI options are still essentially non-existent at prosumer price point.
Hi there! We're not ASUS, we are ASUSTOR and we were spun off into an independent entity twelve years ago. We develop our software in house as well as use open source components with the modularity of Linux's design.
@@ASUSTOR_YTThanks for the reply? Sorry if the tone didn't track, it wasn't a jibe, it was just a curio! 🙂 I know that ASUS (in general) has worked closed to opensource stuff before with their networking gear. Either way, thank you for the good insight into your process!
@@marcogenovesi8570Sorry, I'm not quite sure where you're going with this ... I'm not really asking for me ... I was curious about how they got to where they are. (and what they have)
With 4TB NVMe storage rapidly becoming affordable, the Flashstor is even better than Wendell give it credit for :) But yeah, for archival storage make sure you have a backup too.
"Hard drives don't wear out in the same way SSDs do." Weird, all of the NAS and NAS "Pro" drives have a duty limit on their warranty. Workload Rate Limit (WRL): 300 TBW/year. I'm sure you know more than WD and Seagate, though. (TBW figures are nothing more than warranty figures, X TBW or Y years, whatever comes first. In the same way your engine doesn't blow through the hood at 50,001 miles or 5 years and 1 day, your drive will, in all likelihood, not fail anywhere close to the stated figure. It's largely a way to artificially segment a product range, more money = more warranty.)
Warranty shenanigans don't mean anything. SSDs will wear out A LOT faster than HDDs unless they are enterprise SSDs designed for high write loads (i.e. are basically overprovisioned to hell and back)
You won't need heatsinks. You are not running PCIe Gen5 NVMes there and whatever NVMes you put in there they will not be running fast and so they will not run very hot.
We've been selling our NAS devices for twelve years and test our file systems and their updates to ensure stability and we do this to maintain the trust we have built up over the years. However, it doesn't matter what file system you have, if there is no backup solution, there is no protection.
Honestly - I thought these were a stupid product when I first saw them. I thought who's going to buy premium storage drives and bottleneck them with a tiny insufficient CPU that doesn't have nearly enough I/O. Then within 6 months or so I start seeing sub $100 2TB budget NVMEs actually coming in cheaper or the same price as SATA drives and I start to think, maybe this product isn't as dumb as I thought - though it still needs to be cheap. The price seems a bit too steep still. Though I do see how some people could want simple and new over used and higher performance. (side note: honestly shocked how expensive TR4 is still - guess that happens when it's the latest HEDT platform and has more PCIE than X299, that was my first thought, but 48 PCIE lanes leaves no room to add in an SFP or SFP+ network card if all 12 M.2 are populated. It's also shockingly hard to find a board that doesn't screw around with the slots and just provides three 16 lane slots. Why oh why did AMD have to abandon HEDT!?!?! TR4 was such a great start.
The ideal would be a premade server but I went the DYI route because I couldn't find any home servers that didn't come with enterprise problems (loud, pricy and typically no space for a high end GPU or alternatively not enough space for drives). I put together a server with a 3070x with a ASUS Zenith Alpha Extreme (has onboard 10Gb/s nic and supports 5 M.2s , Asus Hypercard (another 4 m.3 for total of 9) 256GB ECC and RTX3090 (currently in process of upgrading to 4090), and rackmountable RM51 case. The main issue was the GPU which takes up the usual 3 slots. This wasn't an Asus problem per se. It's an industry wide motherboard. case. and GPU form factor standards problem. It's a chicken and egg problem They all sell boards and GPUs they know will waste PCIe slots because of the outdated form factor standard that unfortunately persists. Hopefully the issue will be addressed in the near future but there are a couple of workarounds in the present 1. going with a waterblock. I decided against this for my own use case due to the risks, cost and extra maintenance (for minor performance difference) 2. Custom GPU bracket. There are case mods for mounting the GPU vertical but those are a gimmick for appearance, They usually won't free up PCie slots and in come situations cover even more of them. The only DYI workaround I could find to free up GPU covered slots was an outlier company that builds GPU brackets that fit on 120mm fan fittings. Then use a PCIe extension Riser cable. The GPU looks weird where its mounted but this is a closed case so doesn't really matter. Haven't noticed any heat issues caused by the unusual airflow,
Hi there! There are very few options from Intel that support ECC. However, we do test our software extensively to maintain stability on our NAS devices. As for AMD processors, well. Product development takes some time, so if AMD processors are your thing, then stay tuned!
Yeah. U.2 (or even better U.3) makes more sense than m.2 in most use cases for fast network storage coupled with virtualization and dockerization. More reliable., hotswap, and cheaper per TB (at max 8TB size of current M.2 drives). At the enterprise end of things that's what most companies looking for performance already do. I had a Synology. Wanted to migrant to a u.3 server but ended with DYI m.2 solution running on a threadripper (using Asus hypercard). The two main problem with u.2/u.3 were price and lack of consumer GPU support. Nearly everything in this category still seems geared for the enterprise rather than prosumer. What I've been looking for my next DYI server build... a rackmountable 24 bay u.3 NMVe server case for for under 1k (with backplane, caddies , space for a swappable ITX or ATX motherboard, 4090 GPU, and standard consumer PSU).
@@marcogenovesi8570 That's most NAS units in general. The disk costs are going to trump what the actual NAS costs depending. And U.2 drives aren't really expensive, plenty of new 4TB+ drives available at competitive prices. Brand new Intel P5500 3.84TB drives for example are $190 with a full warranty at serverpartdeals. $165 if you buy the dell version. I would rather have these drives than consumer M.2 drives imo
@@marcogenovesi8570 In the past you would be right but currently you can buy new 8TB U.2 SSDs cheaper than you can get 8TB M.2 SSDs (600 bucks on ebay) The problem is no one is producing a cheap NAS for them yet but probably will soon given the cheaper prices and significant advantages U.2 has over m.2. While M.2 SSDs are typically faster peak sequential in real world random IOPs and server sustained loads. U.2 will usually crush m.2 in performance. (not to mention the flash NAS's 10Gb/s nic bottleneck also would eliminate any peak sequencial performance edge an M.2 NAS would have) Running out of DRAM isn't the only problem with SSDs with sustain loads. Heat also can lead to throttling. U.2 runs cooler due to the passive heat dissipation of it's form factor. U.2 typically have far greater TBW. I have a couple of raided Intel U.2s working as a cache drive for some HDDs in array. They have 12 PB TBW (versus 1.2PB for latest Samsung 990). At my current pace of writes I might wear out one in a decade or so. U.2 hotswap is easier to maintain and keep running. You rarely (if ever) have to bring a server down for anything other than OS updates. (and if the OS supports kernal live patching Kernal not even that)
This specific product annoys me because it's apparently the only way in the world to install more than one or two m.2 drives in a single chassis. I just want to use this small mountain of 256-512 drives instead of throwing them away as e-waste. I shouldn't have to pay $600+ for that.
I know there are PCIe switches and whatnot in these, but the pricing on these Celeron NAS prebuilts is just awful. They should spend some of their huge budget on a CPU that doesn't cost $10 wholesale.
Hey everyone! Marco here from ASUSTOR! We thank Wendell for taking a look at our NAS! We love listening to feedback. If you have questions, comments, praise and criticism, feel free to reply to me and I will happily hear you and reply! Thanks again!
Is a socketed version coming? I'd be interested in a more "green" solution, as I am often alerady upgrading my servers when i downgrade my PC. Buying a dead-end platform isn't really in the mentality.
Also, any chance of getting a slightly beefier SKU, or maybe a socketed version? I can think of a few uses for this thing, but can't help but feel it might be held back a bit by that modest CPU.
I'm on the opposite end of the wishes spectrum :) I want something smaller, that would allow up to 6 M.2 SATAs (I don't know all the raid modes by heart, but generally I'd want replication so that data is not lost whenever one of the SSDs is dead) where I could back up my photos.
How do you even pronounce your company name? AsuStore makes more sense to me than AsusStore that everyone says.
Questions? Yes. When are you going to supply them to the UK so I can buy one please?
Super impressive, ASUSTOR. I like that this is a turnkey/noob-friendly solution that can also ease people into doing more complex things with Docker, etc. Now I have something I can recommend to less experienced users who are looking to set up a NAS!
Thank you for your support!
When I first saw this, the weak CPU really threw me off, but it's not really about NVME throughput - it's all about the form factor.
I purchased one at put in the 12x2TB Samsung drives, and love it; Its not as fast as I wanted, and I would Glady pay a few hundred more for a fsater CPU to get the full 10gb speeds/PCI lanes, with a lower power footprint too... I thought it was great value, but also would spend a few bucks more for more PCI lanes version for faster speeds for the LAN.
Same here, except I went for the 4TB 990 pros, over-spent by quite a large margin
Nice. From a connectivity side, I would have prefered to see 2x 2.5gb ports to enable a redundant fallover and ensurance of high avalibility. But I do recognize that for many home networks this may not be the highest priority. I'm glad it is not exclusively coud enabled - seeing far too many devices going that route and not something I need nor do I want for any of my network infrastructure devices. So good work Asustor!
We do have dual 2.5GbE on the six SSD version, the Flashstor 6. We do offer a 2.5GbE USB adapter that works on our NAS too as failover if needed. The thing is, we squeezed blood out of a rock with this SoC and basically used every PCIe lane it had to offer and made it compact while trying to minimise bottlenecks.
Thank you for your praise and support! And we say NO to always-online and NO to endless subscriptions!
@ASUSTOR_YT Very imressed with your 6-slot Flashstor after using for about a week. We will continue to support any company that rejects the subscription model!
i use old chromebooks for this kinda stuff...yup, they re even slower, but at least they aren't in the landfill, and for SATA SSD's they work just fine enough and with built-in wifi too!
imho running vms and docker containers over nvmes is pretty awesome been able to run everything pretty flawlessly, while 4k streaming plex, controlling my home with homeassistant, all super quietly. nice to not have to worry about certain apps (like kasm) requiring ssds for installation. rather than port forwarding for the asustor ezconnect service, i prefer using cloudflare tunnels for remote access which has been super easy to set up through a docker run command on the flashstor. i agree maybe it's not "insane" but in reality what NAS on the market is really that insane without it becoming just a beefed up computer that consumes a lot of power. i think this will be the future of NAS machines, esp as nvme ssd prices decline just depends on your use case. I can see this becoming a main nas for important resources and hdd NAS as an archive
This thing is awesome for remote data processing. I had the 12 bay maxed out with WD Black 4tb's in a Raid10. Plugged in to my data processing tower with remote desktop was a game changer for my workflow. Far more efficient and cost effective vs. the old Qnap nas setups we had (if you just want to dump a bunch of data on it, process it, then move it off for storage...)
Can I ask you a question? Lets say an ssd is faulty and you need to replace it to begin restoring parity was it - anyway - can you easily identify the ssd that you need to replace? Can you use the rest of it befire you get the new drive or do you need to park it untill you get one to your place? What if the fault is not in the ssd but it is in the file system? Nobody ever mentions corrupt file system. To me that is worse that drive failure - it happens instantly and you lose all data. Does this device has any way to combat this problem? Can it restore the file system if it suddenly gets corrupted? Or does it all gets magically erased and you are left with working ssds with all the data still on them but all the data pointing to the files and all the names - gone - leaving you with an impossible to sort out mess?
I'm running the 6 drive version for a few months now. Has been good so far, the OS is competent enough, though not on Synology level. Theoretically the system is unlocked, so you can install any OS on it you like (OMV for example), though I have not tried that yet.
Thanks for posting! I've been interested in the performance of their all-flash arrays. I'm actually on my third asustor (first two still work, I just need moar). I've been really happy with the price to performance for these boxes. Especially at a lower price point, having 2.5Gb nics (sometimes multiple, supporting aggregation) is greatly appreciated. I keep my as strictly NAS's, they don't talk to anything off my networks. I've been really, really happy with them.
I have it for a year now. My advice is use raid 10, as CPU sucks. And get nvme heat sinks from ASUS. Also get 2.5Gbe USB to Ethernet dongle. It is amazing device, I use 10GB nic for iSCSI for VMWare farm, and 2,5GB for client connectivity.
Brilliant review, I think the best on Tube.
I've been waiting for a review of this for a long while (is this a review? or an overview?) ... Either way ... thanks, Wendell.
All the same, I can't wait for more companies to make devices *like* this so that the prices don't make my remaining eye boil in its socket! 😱
Thank you for your praise and support!
Got one of these and 12x2TB SSDs. Using it for off-board storage for a Mac Studio... didn't want to pay the Apple SSD tax.
AFAIK, when you select RAID 5 (or any other mode) you get a mdraid managed (software) RAID 5 with either EXT4 or BTRFS as simple filesystem on it. There's only an issue with BTRFS' native raid 5/6 mode where it actively manages distributing data between disks. With mdraid it's simply a filesystem that writes on a single (virtual) disk provided by a (virtual) raid controller. And as long as mdraid has no fundamental flaws you're fine (or in hot water) either way. Synology uses essentially the same mdraid + BTRFS setup. So ultimately when choosing a filesystem you don't have to worry about raid level compatibility but only whether you like e.g. the snapshot capability of BTRFS or the simplicity of EXT4.
At 7:49, you said you opted for btrfs over EXT4, but then said you shouldn't use btrfs for RAID 5. You show EXT4 highlighted though. Just wondering, is EXT4 the choice for RAID 5?
Finally able to sit down and watch the video today. I have been looking at it for a media server running Ubuntu with JellyFin. Thank you for the informed video on the device. Maybe it is going to be underpowered for my needs though.
We understand that the Celeron has had a bad rap over the years, but we do believe that the SoC we used is definitely more than adequate. We optimise our software for our devices and keep the bloat out of it so that it is able to really stretch its arms. We have Jellyfin available for the NAS and it works extremely well as the GPU does all the work.
Thanks for the video, I had never hear of Tailscale before. Would you consider doing a video on it and how feasible it would be for a small business running with a partly remote staff set up?
A home for all those 1tb nvme I have laying around?
May sound crazy too some people but Nvme have been out a while and starting to see retirement ready pc's with 500gb/1tb drives coming out of service with 90+% life still left on them lol.
Also have a few just personal PCIE 3.0 drives that literally just got retired for larger drives but have life in them.
Hmmm I will put this on my list for my Drobo replacement. I known their limited but I have been using them for 25 years with their ability to increase capacity incrementally with no hiccups, I just can't let it go🤔
No ZFS, but LVM will be just fine and great SW ugprade if you are up for it.
Would love to see a video you using their rackmounted NAS. Setting up a backup environment and some docker container installs would be a great tutorial.
We'd be happy to send one.
@@ASUSTOR_YT oh please do!
@@SuperMari026 No probs! Depends if L1T requests one though.
Hello Wendell, I have a few of these units, all with TrueNAS SCALE installed on them. With regards to your ZFS comment, it runs exceptionally well with TrueNAS and easily hits network speed thresholds on varying levels of ZFS (1/2/3).
Please note: There is what I consider a manufacturing defect. The heatsink is not properly making contact with the CPU and thus there are considerable thermal issues. The CPU will hit 100*C and peg there continually due to improperly sized heatsink unit and how it makes contact with the CPU. This causes issues that are not acknowledged nor addressed yet by ASUSTOR for months.
I've been looking at this device for a while...it has some pretty awesome capabilities and the fact that it uses SSD media makes it a great fit for a niche market, the mobile #vanlife crowd. They are as connected as any, and sometimes morso. The digital nomads will see this as a great way to work with larger data sets or video editing and then backing up their work on a spinning rust drive that is in a nice soft and protected from vibration case. RAID is not a backup! With this NAS, and Starlink, you could do a lot of work on the road.
Just picked up one of these today not realizing the Celeron slowness issue, populated it with Samsung 990 4TB Pro nvme drives. Pays to read the product tech specs and understand the limitations prior to purchasing. Very satisfied with the FS6712X nontheless.
Update, just watched this again and noticed the 'you shouldn't use raid 5 for btrfs', it's amazing how long those issues have been going on for such a great filesystem, sad..
The issues with BTRFS RAID5/6 stem from the design itself, which is why it is taking so long to fix - and is likely never to be fully fixed, given that BTRFS claims on-disk format to be finalised and stable.
not really related to the video but I was looking into tailscale with the video in the background and I wasn't sure about it but now that Wendel endorsed it I'm going to install it on EVERY device I own ;)
I tried one of the 6 bay units and sent it back after a week. Not only was it foreign to me after using 2 Synology NAS units, but it's biggest problem was only being able to do 1 thing at a time. The programming took over my computer and I couldn.t go on and do something else. It also was very Chinese and support was hard to find.
coming months will be exciting.
raidz epansion
and a usable btrfseaid5, btrfs raid stripe tree, are both said to lend in the foreseeable future.
niche? Yup. it intrigues me. the CPU is the sticky point. I would have preferred a more capable unit, something like a Ryzen 2600 or 3600, perhaps a G unit as well. More overall oomph and cores. 6 seems about the sweet spot to me and with SMP, these are just about the limit of what would be enough without a fan cooler and/or water.
The 12 drives... AH finally enough ports in a small form factor... Living the Dream...
I think this is an amazing product. In my mind it only suffers in 2 areas: 1) No support for 22110 form factor, and 2) No ECC support. Although, I can see how some would want a higher performance CPU. Super low error rate M.2 nvme (1 sector in 10^-17 bits read) seem only to be available in 22110 format.
But try to make an equivalent device with a current in-production cpu. It’s difficult to find a motherboard supporting ECC with 3-pcie or more slots for quad m.2 to pcie adapters. And if you do, they are likely in workstation or server motherboards that are in the $500-750 range. Cpus with ecc are $300 and up.
So we are talking $1000 plus case, power supply and 3 quad cards (10gbe likley comes on a server or workstation motherboard). You would likely either use 6-dual m.2 nvme to pcie x8 supermicro cards, or 3-qnap quad m.2 nvme to pcie x8 or x4 (no bifurcation needed) cards . Costing $300 or $510 respectively. Budgeting $250 for power supply and case we have $1000 + $300 or $510 + $250 = $1550 to $1760, without ram. Now granted, this would be a more powerful system, but its near 2x the cost of the Asustor. Plus its not very compact.
The least expensive system I have found for this is about $600-$700. A used supermicro server using a 2014 xeon E-2600 v4 motherboard. The motherboard has 3 pcie x16, 2 pcie x8 and 1 pcie x 4 slots. But its a E-ATX card, so difficult to find a small case for it.
Considering all of that. I think the Asustor is a fantastic product.
An interesting experiment would be filling it up with power-hungry high-end SSDs like Samsung 980 or 990s and checking how warm they actually get. Due to the slow and shared PCIe interfaces these SSDs should idle a significant amount of the time.
Straight up waste it's an Celeron with a mere 8 PCI Express Lanes of (Gen 3) IO.
Get the cheapest 2TB NVME's you can get for this use case. From where I'm at that would be (Mushkin SSD Element M.2 2TB) for under 70 euro's
Fill it up and call it a day.
The purpose of this experiment would simply be to examine if fast “high-end” M.2 SSDs idling due to the host system being so anemic and not being able to transport data to and from the SSDs would let them stay cool enough to be operated in such a small form factor. I personally don’t toy with anything without proper ECC or powerloss protection anymore.
Just populated it with 12 4TB 990 pros, what would you like to know other than the disappointment I have
@@screamingiraffe Thanks for offering your assistance!
How is the temperature (delta degree K over room temperature) of the hottest SSD in the enclosure immediately after doing a sequential full write over the entire available storage space (parallel write processes over all SSDs at the same time, something like a RAID0)? Any issues with temperatures >60 C?
@@screamingiraffe It would still be faster than any traditional hard drive right? Would you mind explaining your disappointment a little bit as I'm planning to get exactly the same number/brand of SSDs you got. My use case is just really for SSD storage and I want it to be as tough as I can make it with TLC SSDs that will last for years.
Interesting product. Probably less jank than the old 17 inch hp laptop that i got from the garbage bin because it had a dead hdd which i currently use as a "server"
I saw this on Final Jeopardy: "What looks like a Courier HST but takes 12 M.2 drives?"
Lmao
Hi I’m sure this has been answered. But with the network share can a friend who lives across the country access the media?
I was using wireguard instead of tailscale but I guess there is no going back now that it works fine :D
You said that m.2 does not make sense for this sort of product why? So do you mean that a NAS with Sata makes more sense? I would appreciate your thoughts on the same
Hold up. Is there a single/dual drive version of this? The myAsus Portal with the streaming apps installed seems like a fantastic start to Android TV Alternative. But would be nice if it was cheaper.
If you were to roll your own, what's the most cost-effective way to glue 12 m.2 NVMe to a dual 25GbE NIC?
Probably an old Threadripper with three of those 4 x 4 NVMe cards (using 48 lanes), and putting the dual 25 gbe card in an 8x slot.
Thank you, L1T.
Imo zerotier > tailscale. Particularly when one examines each company's corp governance.
On World Backup Day 2024, please do a 6-month retrospective on this device.
Kindest regards, neighbours and friends.
Which program can be installed (like TeamViewer) to access remotely to the nas and work everywhere over the internet?
+1 for Tailscale.. its great
If they had a version with a real CPU and QSFP+ or QSFP28, I'd buy one for sure.
We are working hard to create even bigger and better models! Stay tuned!
@@ASUSTOR_YT Trust me when I say there is a HUGE market for this, it just need the oompf the celeron can't give with the gen 3 lanes (just 8)
I had one of those 20 years ago, a master system.. I used to play 8 bit games in it.
They advertise over a 1,000 Mbps write speed on a 10 gbe network. All reviews I’ve seen can’t get much over 600. What’s the deal? Oh and the advertising was in raid 5
Anyone know how tall a heat spreader can be on the NVMe drives? I think the beQuiet ones I saw were 15mm. Think 4TB drives might get toasty.
"Just one of these will saturate a 10gb ethernet connection"
Better get cracking adding Infiniband to my homelab then
😅
Neat. I think for my particular use case, which is more industrial/OT, Synology is king. Will very, very likely remain that way. Wouldn't USUALLY require this throughput.
I had a couple of Synologys. It offered me an easy inexpensive onramp to entry level NAS/server. My home server solution arc (as a software developer not a managed ops guy) went from local backups. > USB enclosure > Drobo > Synology. The Synology is great if one doens't want to spend time rolling one's own NAS/server with off the shelf parts but once you start thinking about consolidated docker and virtualization services, Synology suffers from the same sort of performance issues as this Asus device due to weak processor.
Not sure if it exists but my ideal for home use would be a NAS/server that allows me to not only add extra storage but the option to upgrade to fast processor and high end GPU. Supermicro, Dell, HP et all sell enterprise solutions like this but no one that I know has taken a successful stab at this for the home use space at a more consumer friendly price point than enterprise.. I became so frustrated waiting for someone to please take my money I eventually went the DYI route. Bought an 3970x Threadripper, mobo with built-in 10Gb nic, 256GB ECC RAM, some hypercards, coupled it with a bunch of 8TB NVMe SSDs. and a cheap Netapp 24 bay 3.5" JBOD that connects to server with mini-sas cable (You can find 24 bay NetApp JBOD for as low as 300 bucks on ebay).
I spent more by going with the Threadripper, lots of RAM and rackmoutnable Silverstone RM52 case but other than that you could keep the total cost of a similar server under $2K (not including drives) and it would smoke any Synology. Since DDR5 supports error correcting memory high core counts are common in consumer CPUs now, it should be possible for a manufacturer to mass produce a pre-made server close to the performance of my setup for around the same money. The trick is rather than pair with an Epic and sundry failover parts (like the Enterprise end of things does) they could pair it with mid or high end desktop CPU, ATX/ITX board, and other consumer grade parts.
In a nutshell... someone needs to sell essentially a pc desktop but in a form factor and OS mostly designed to be used as storage, virtualization and dockerization. The mistake companies keep making while taking a stab at this is they go overboard on performance/features and making thing proprietary which ends up with enterprise-like prices... or under performing like this NAS.
Nice review! I hope you meant linux 6.1 and not 5.1🙂
Things have changed. A quad core celeron is limiting.
WOW!, Thats speNNNNdy.
So this network data storage other than m.2 on a motherboard
Wendell Have You ever Worked In Huntsville Alabama? Redstone Arsenal? You look like A Guy I bought A car from Back in The 90's
Anyone know if you can just install Proxmox to these? I know it's possible with other Asustor nases but given the odd layout of this machine it might not work.
If it is x64 PC-Compatible, I don't see a reason why not.
Yes it works fine.
I believe either Craft Computing or Raid Owl has done just that, but don't hold me to it. (I may be thinking of TrueNas instead of Proxmox.)
It's a mini PC with a BIOS and a HDMI port, you can install whatever you want. The M.2 slots are served by pcie switches that are used also in cheap pcie -to-dual M.2 slot cards that work fine on Linux
@@ASUSTOR_YT I wish more NAS-manufacturers would give me that exact answer ;)
Any luck on running custom os’s?
We have guides on a few third party operating systems. It is not locked.
yeah it's just a mini PC with a BIOS, you can install whatever
I love the concept of this thing. Do they make 10tb drives for this?
Unfortunately, 8 TB is the maximum on the market these days.
Not yet. 8TB is the max and is kind of expensive
7:58 You say you’re choosing BTRFS but then chose EXT4 on the screen, then you say you chose RAID 5 and BTRFS, and then you say that BTRFS is not recommended for RAID 5 so confusing. You say one thing, but the screen screen shows something else then you say you want RAID 5 with BFS but say that you shouldn’t use BTR Sf with RAID R
IMO with SSD capacities getting larger and cheaper and spinning-rust price/performance having stagnated these last few years we are going to see a lot more of these NVMe SSD oriented pro-consumer NAS/servers in the future. This product line is a move in right direction but a miss in implementation. The support for up to 12 m.2 drives is awesome but they paired it with weak processor and older RAM. This dramatically limits its virtualization and dockerization potential. I'd consider paying twice the money for a much better processor with faster RAM. Or alternatively have a board with upgradable CPU. Something like this with higher end NUC-like processing of some micro-pcs and now you're talking.
This might be a niche use case for someone that needs fast storage that they can physically move around but the economics for most use cases don't work with this device. Its doesn't really make sense to put 1TB SSDs in such a device when you can buy a micro -pc for a bit more money with far faster processor and a larger SSD. And top of the line 8TB NVMe M.2 are still expensive per TB. Whose going to pair $10k in SSD storage to a slow processor rather than spend a bit extra and get a decent processor paired to some of Asus own Hypercards no less.
I'm not sure how anyone could look at hard drives have having stagnated on price. $200 on rare sale as little as 3 years ago got you a 14TB hard drive.
These days you can easily get a 20TB hard drive for less than $200. If you're willing to go manufacturer refurb, you can get a 22TB drive for $220.
This system isn't intended for "dockization." This metal and plastic box would make a horrendous dock and the heavy mentals would make the fish sick.
It's also not intended for Dockerization (the process of converting software into Docker container).
This is literally a fit-for-purpose device that solves the problem stated: fast access to mass storage over a network.
Just because it's not useful *for you*, doesn't mean it's not flying off the shelves.
Yeah, you can buy a Micro PC, good luck with 10GBE. Good luck with >1 NVME slot. Good luck with both of those at this price range. Good luck with redundancy on one (1) NVME drive.
8TB NVME SSDs are easily found for $400. There was one on sale for $357 just the other day.
"A bit extra on a server"
@@tim3172
Compare the drop in HDD prices and density versus drop in prices of SSDs and density in same timeframe. Not even close. The trendline could change with some revolutionary development in HDDS (or stalling in SSDs) but I doubt it due to physics limitations in how HDDs work. At the moment tape drives ironically have a higher probability of long term survival than HDDs. if wasn't so long ago micro-hdds were being used in cameras. Today SD cards have eliminated them
This system is intended at least partially for dockization-like functionality not just fast storage (which is what the pre-installed apps are about)
Not sure where you get your claim you can "easily" find 8TB nvmes m.2. ssds for $400. Certainly not on ebay, amazon, bestbuy, or newegg. I'm all ears if you have an actual source
As for micro PC, granted you'd pay more per TB for dual larger M.2 NVMe but you can already buy prebuiilt ITX systems with upgradability to 10Gb nic, dual nvme support and faster processors that blows this out of the water.
As for your trolling comment...two can play that game. Only a dumbass would think that this niche product represents what most consumers would prefer. I would bet money most of the early adopters buying this aren't really thinking through the economics carefully. And most them will be disappointed once the reality of the poor processor performance sinks in.
The product category is a legit emerging one but I stick to my thesis this particular implementation misses the mark due to weak processor
@@tim3172 HDDs have "stagnated" on price mostly because SSDs are halving their price/TB every two years or so while HDDs are more or less on a linear curve with a decrease of ~$3-$5 / TB every year.
HDDs just cannot get any more capacity in 3.5" form factor, HAMR and equivalent tech will not be able to get here quickly enough to compete with 32TB 2.5" SSD drives, not to mention EDSFF drives. When you can build a 1U disk shelf with 36 slots per rack, when you can get 1152 TB blade servers per 1U rack... No way 3.5" HDDs on 30-40 TB can compete with that in the enterprise. And since the enterprise is HDD bread and butter...
Meanwhile 4TB m.2 SSDs are below $200 and 8TB are $650 right now for brand new, was $800 a few months ago. So SSDs got consumer level covered, and enterprise levels covered already or very soon. Pretty soon HDDs will be only marketable to cold storage.
It's clearly meant to be an appliance, and the large amount of M.2 slots is to get more and cheaper SSDs, not to fill it with the biggest and most expensive possible. FFS man wtf are you doing that needs 48TB of NVME SSD storage? And why are you looking at a consumer device to fill those needs? Go get a Supermicro server or something
@@marcogenovesi8570 Sure someone could go with lots of little drives to save money on storage but why not instead go with a micro-pc or ITX system with larger dual m.2 and much faster processor for a little more money? Even a mid-range desktop processor would be far far more useful because of better docker and virtualization support. An ITX case would also make the system more upgradable too. Buying this is like buying a sportscar with 100 hp engine. Sure it has a niche use case but for most it's a mismatched pairing of components.
As for your suggestion of going with supermicro. we are talking SOHO/prosumer use case whereas enterprise equipment tends to be loud and expensive. I would much prefer to buy ready-made home server in this category (as do many others) but non-DYI options are still essentially non-existent at prosumer price point.
960E ???
Is there a remote chance that this is a spunky asus version of something like openwrt with some heavy skinning?
why? This just a PC with a BIOS, you can install any OS you want
Hi there! We're not ASUS, we are ASUSTOR and we were spun off into an independent entity twelve years ago. We develop our software in house as well as use open source components with the modularity of Linux's design.
@@ASUSTOR_YTThanks for the reply?
Sorry if the tone didn't track, it wasn't a jibe, it was just a curio! 🙂
I know that ASUS (in general) has worked closed to opensource stuff before with their networking gear.
Either way, thank you for the good insight into your process!
@@marcogenovesi8570Sorry, I'm not quite sure where you're going with this ... I'm not really asking for me ... I was curious about how they got to where they are. (and what they have)
@@eliotcole Haha no worries, I am just clearing the air. Nothing about tone. We dont work in the same offices. We are run about 99% independently.
They are slow on updating the security updates.
they need to update the update speed of the updates of the security updates
With 4TB NVMe storage rapidly becoming affordable, the Flashstor is even better than Wendell give it credit for :)
But yeah, for archival storage make sure you have a backup too.
Thank you for your praise!
"Hard drives don't wear out in the same way SSDs do."
Weird, all of the NAS and NAS "Pro" drives have a duty limit on their warranty.
Workload Rate Limit (WRL): 300 TBW/year.
I'm sure you know more than WD and Seagate, though.
(TBW figures are nothing more than warranty figures, X TBW or Y years, whatever comes first.
In the same way your engine doesn't blow through the hood at 50,001 miles or 5 years and 1 day, your drive will, in all likelihood, not fail anywhere close to the stated figure. It's largely a way to artificially segment a product range, more money = more warranty.)
Warranty shenanigans don't mean anything. SSDs will wear out A LOT faster than HDDs unless they are enterprise SSDs designed for high write loads (i.e. are basically overprovisioned to hell and back)
I've had a couple SSDs fail on me.
@@MarkRose1337 HDDs fail too
could you fit m2 with heatsinks?
You won't need heatsinks. You are not running PCIe Gen5 NVMes there and whatever NVMes you put in there they will not be running fast and so they will not run very hot.
We do sell a three pack of heatsinks if needed.
When these come down to $299 and $500 I'll look at them.
Am I dumb if any NAS without ZFS scares me? I guess I could install TruNas.
All depends on your backup strategy. 🤡
We've been selling our NAS devices for twelve years and test our file systems and their updates to ensure stability and we do this to maintain the trust we have built up over the years. However, it doesn't matter what file system you have, if there is no backup solution, there is no protection.
Why does the box look like an AMD video card and box? 😅😊
Cause we're that cool 😎
@@ASUSTOR_YT hehe good answer. Love it! 😍
Honestly - I thought these were a stupid product when I first saw them. I thought who's going to buy premium storage drives and bottleneck them with a tiny insufficient CPU that doesn't have nearly enough I/O. Then within 6 months or so I start seeing sub $100 2TB budget NVMEs actually coming in cheaper or the same price as SATA drives and I start to think, maybe this product isn't as dumb as I thought - though it still needs to be cheap. The price seems a bit too steep still. Though I do see how some people could want simple and new over used and higher performance. (side note: honestly shocked how expensive TR4 is still - guess that happens when it's the latest HEDT platform and has more PCIE than X299, that was my first thought, but 48 PCIE lanes leaves no room to add in an SFP or SFP+ network card if all 12 M.2 are populated. It's also shockingly hard to find a board that doesn't screw around with the slots and just provides three 16 lane slots. Why oh why did AMD have to abandon HEDT!?!?! TR4 was such a great start.
The ideal would be a premade server but I went the DYI route because I couldn't find any home servers that didn't come with enterprise problems (loud, pricy and typically no space for a high end GPU or alternatively not enough space for drives).
I put together a server with a 3070x with a ASUS Zenith Alpha Extreme (has onboard 10Gb/s nic and supports 5 M.2s , Asus Hypercard (another 4 m.3 for total of 9) 256GB ECC and RTX3090 (currently in process of upgrading to 4090), and rackmountable RM51 case. The main issue was the GPU which takes up the usual 3 slots. This wasn't an Asus problem per se. It's an industry wide motherboard. case. and GPU form factor standards problem. It's a chicken and egg problem They all sell boards and GPUs they know will waste PCIe slots because of the outdated form factor standard that unfortunately persists. Hopefully the issue will be addressed in the near future but there are a couple of workarounds in the present
1. going with a waterblock. I decided against this for my own use case due to the risks, cost and extra maintenance (for minor performance difference)
2. Custom GPU bracket. There are case mods for mounting the GPU vertical but those are a gimmick for appearance, They usually won't free up PCie slots and in come situations cover even more of them. The only DYI workaround I could find to free up GPU covered slots was an outlier company that builds GPU brackets that fit on 120mm fan fittings. Then use a PCIe extension Riser cable. The GPU looks weird where its mounted but this is a closed case so doesn't really matter. Haven't noticed any heat issues caused by the unusual airflow,
I have 2 problems 1 No Ecc Memory 2 no Amd cpus available.
Hi there! There are very few options from Intel that support ECC. However, we do test our software extensively to maintain stability on our NAS devices. As for AMD processors, well. Product development takes some time, so if AMD processors are your thing, then stay tuned!
Would be interesting to have a U.2 version.
Yeah. U.2 (or even better U.3) makes more sense than m.2 in most use cases for fast network storage coupled with virtualization and dockerization. More reliable., hotswap, and cheaper per TB (at max 8TB size of current M.2 drives). At the enterprise end of things that's what most companies looking for performance already do.
I had a Synology. Wanted to migrant to a u.3 server but ended with DYI m.2 solution running on a threadripper (using Asus hypercard). The two main problem with u.2/u.3 were price and lack of consumer GPU support. Nearly everything in this category still seems geared for the enterprise rather than prosumer.
What I've been looking for my next DYI server build... a rackmountable 24 bay u.3 NMVe server case for for under 1k (with backplane, caddies , space for a swappable ITX or ATX motherboard, 4090 GPU, and standard consumer PSU).
Yeah let's make a consumer NAS where the drives cost twice as much as the NAS itself, that will work
@@marcogenovesi8570 That's most NAS units in general. The disk costs are going to trump what the actual NAS costs depending.
And U.2 drives aren't really expensive, plenty of new 4TB+ drives available at competitive prices. Brand new Intel P5500 3.84TB drives for example are $190 with a full warranty at serverpartdeals. $165 if you buy the dell version. I would rather have these drives than consumer M.2 drives imo
@@marcogenovesi8570
In the past you would be right but currently you can buy new 8TB U.2 SSDs cheaper than you can get 8TB M.2 SSDs (600 bucks on ebay) The problem is no one is producing a cheap NAS for them yet but probably will soon given the cheaper prices and significant advantages U.2 has over m.2.
While M.2 SSDs are typically faster peak sequential in real world random IOPs and server sustained loads. U.2 will usually crush m.2 in performance. (not to mention the flash NAS's 10Gb/s nic bottleneck also would eliminate any peak sequencial performance edge an M.2 NAS would have) Running out of DRAM isn't the only problem with SSDs with sustain loads. Heat also can lead to throttling. U.2 runs cooler due to the passive heat dissipation of it's form factor.
U.2 typically have far greater TBW. I have a couple of raided Intel U.2s working as a cache drive for some HDDs in array. They have 12 PB TBW (versus 1.2PB for latest Samsung 990). At my current pace of writes I might wear out one in a decade or so.
U.2 hotswap is easier to maintain and keep running. You rarely (if ever) have to bring a server down for anything other than OS updates. (and if the OS supports kernal live patching Kernal not even that)
$800 dollars with out any storage, wowsers that kinda steep.
Hmmmmm....Plex?
This specific product annoys me because it's apparently the only way in the world to install more than one or two m.2 drives in a single chassis. I just want to use this small mountain of 256-512 drives instead of throwing them away as e-waste. I shouldn't have to pay $600+ for that.
Icydock has a thing for this, and it's even been covered here before! ToughArmor MB873MP-B
lol i love how all the narrative is goin on and all yall showin is pi-hole
lmao that price 🤑
I know there are PCIe switches and whatnot in these, but the pricing on these Celeron NAS prebuilts is just awful. They should spend some of their huge budget on a CPU that doesn't cost $10 wholesale.
:)
4tb card max 48total what a joke why?
You are mispronunciation of the name
Is wrong
As-u-stor
Pronounce it like as you store
3rdst?
AsusImposter. The Imp is silent.
Disagree on the drives - Intel gen 3 nvme 2GB can be had for 60-70.