Asustor AS-5102T NAS review - Asustor Introduction

Meet a rather versatile NAS unit

We keep a sharp eye on storage developments here. The market is changing rapidly, a couple of years ago the consumer and SoHo environment pretty much all used simple external storage devices like USB HDD encasements and external eSATA solutions. In the middle of the mainstream and high-end sector is a market for DAS units and at the other side of the scope we of course NAS units. A couple of years ago NAS storage units where to be found only in the enterprise and corporate environments as those solutions where not only expensive but also required a proper Ethernet infrastructure and a system administrator that could configure it. Then there was the smart-phone revolution and apps where born, PCs are getting smaller by the day and SSDs got popular. Herein lies the success of broad and diverse NAS units, a standalone server that you hook into your network, and all these many devices in your household can now share and stream data. Your Smart TV or HTPC could have a game or movie loading / streaming from the NAS. Quickly access your data with your smartphone, stream a video over NAS on your tablet. Yeah NAS slowly transformed into a file server with a lot of functionality. 

While the dynamics have changed rapidly over the past few years, our demand for massive volume storage capacity has increased, with the help of WiFi and Gigabit Ethernet in general in our homes we started evolving in our lifestyle and thus requirements. It's exactly in the lifestyle segments where the latest NAS units come in. NAS units are really small handy servers that not only function as storage devices, they are getting more functionality combined with ease of use as well. With prices going down, and everybody having high-speed LAN Ethernet at home the market is slowly adapting and targeting NAS devices at a hard to convince and very money attentive consumer. One of the companies out there making a really good effort in offering you a handy and more affordable NAS unit is Asustor.

Armed with new firmware and an updated GUI + priced competitive against the big guns in the industry like Qnap, Synology and Netgear a year or two ago Asustor entered the market. We review the AS5102T NAS. We went blank into this review as we never had tested this brand before, but armed with very good hardware and an excellent software suite the AS-5102T is not only a fast file server, it's loaded with applications and media functionality as well. 

Todays tested model NAS unit has two swappable HDD bays, RAID functionality, eSATA, Gigabit Ethernet, USB (2.0/3.0) and then a heap of software functionality that blows you away completely. I mean this puppy can download torrents, has an FTP server, a MySQL server, a WEB server, built-in media center and even an iTunes Server. It's compatible with all major OSes including APPs you can use on your smart-phone, all combined with user and group based management, yeah a proper NAS.

As you will observe, this little box has an implausible amount of tricks in it, from file-sharing, to usenet or torrent downloading, towards being a fully fetched Joomla CMS server, hey man whatever you need is served and it's doing so with an Intel Celeron 2.0/2.41 Turbo GHz quad-core based box and 2GB of memory. Power consumption sits at 10 Watts with one HDD. 

 So yeah, have a peek and then lets head into the review.