Final Words & Conclusion

Final words and conclusion

ASUSTOR has been around for a year or two now and quite honestly I did not expect their NAS solution to be up there on the level with say QNAP. Well, the AS-5102T has proven me wrong as it is one of the best NAS units we have ever put our hands on. It is fast, flexible, energy efficient and comes with an extensive software suite that is as configurable and flexible as anything we have ever tested. 

Overall usage

This box that is highly configurable in terms of HDDs capability. You get RAID 0,1 and 5 functionality with 4 tray versions bringing some extra value into this little NAS unit, it supports hot-spares as well. So if one drive fails, the hot spare could automatically kick in and migrate. For performance you really should not opt for RAID on a Gbps NAS unit anymore, however for redundancy RAID mirror could be something you value. The two bay unit as tested today can take huge TB sized HDDs, so if you use two 6TB HDDs you are going to see a two bay 12 TB NAS unit, with seriously fast performance. Mind you that for the newer 6TB and higher HDDs you need the latest firmware installed. Then again, for security reason ALWAYs have the latest firmware installed. Backups ... it's something this device does so well. The ease and comfort of your precious data being stored outside the system backed up over the Ethernet is just fantastic. Again we see nice configurability here as well; we can schedule backups from the server side (NAS) of things making it a standalone unit operating all by itself.

Performance

We reached high transfer speeds over our Gigabit Ethernet connection and though Ethernet will always bring in some performance and lag issues over a network connection I must admit that I liked what I saw, it's plenty fast for all your activities. With large files and a fast enough HDD over a Gigabit connection you will reach 100 MB/sec on read and writes, likely even higher. So for this type of connection, really it can hardly go any faster. The performance comes from the processor, the quad-core Celeron is plenty fast and combined with 2 GB memory, you are set really. Even for the GUI and OS side of things we can say that the NAS is responsive and very fast. The usage of this processor also makes your applications fast and responsive, anything Apache and mysql related for home usage will function fine and responsive.  Yeah for a unit that draws roughly 10 Watts I am still a little surprized. 

Flexibility

Here we land at the rest of the features and functions. You'll have your FTP server, you can upload images and music, make slideshows out of it and show it on the web server of the device or watch photos and videos with the help of a software suite on your smartphone. You can stream DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) and this NAS can be automatically discovered by Digital Media Players (DMP), Digital Media Renders (DMR) and Digital Media Controllers (DMC) allowing Pictures, Music and Video to be shared instantly at any time at home. All DLNA Certified Devices are capable of streaming content instantly from this NAS.

The NAS can act as an iTunes server, with your mobile or say Apple iPod Touch you can stream music over Wifi. You can share files over the internet if you wanted to, and the list goes on and on. Keep in mind though that everything on this box is targeted at consumers and small business users (SOHO). Though you can access the WEB directory and make your own website, control and configuration over say the MySQL server we do warn you to take security measures. Make sure you secure your public files with proper Unix/Linux permissions. Thus at least a CHMOD 755 on Directories and preferable 644 on files. You can login to the box through SSH.

The application list you can use on this machine is ginormous. Who even thinks of making a torrent download server inside the NAS box ? You insert a .torrent file in the software option and all of the sudden the NAS is downloading content from the internet. It's nearly crazy to witness, how nice is that.

A cool feature is the HDMI connector and thus HD television compatibility. You can connect this NAS directly towards an HDTV, Full HD 1080P  (60Hz) is supported. From there onward just connect a keybaord and mouse to the NAS USB Port and in the home screen you can startup Chrome and access the admin interface of this NAS. Obviously though XBMC is factory installed as well, you can playback music and videos from it. The picture quality is good, we however did note that with MKV movies the playback is not perfect. We noticed a bit of jitter every now and then, indicating that the processor is having it rough with 1080P content. It works and the movie is wacthable, but for movie playback we do advise a proper mediaplayer or smart TV and not this NAS unit.

Energy Efficieny

We tested this unit with an SSD so that we are certain that the storage unit can never be a bottleneck in terms of measuring storage performance. This SSD uses roughly 3.5 Watts. The traditional HDD these days uses roughly 5 Watts. So if you'd use one 8TB HDD for example, this unit would still hover in the 10 Watt range, an amazing number TBH. That said in idle and low usage circumstances the NAS unit uses roughly 7 to 8 Watt. Under storage load 9 watts, and when we use the media-player over 1080P we measured a maximum of 12 Watts. We assume you will add two HDDs thus add another 5 Watts.

However, if your HDD is not used for say 30 minutes, it'll go into sleep mode and thus does not use any measurable power. Add to that extender power saving features like an S3 suspend to RAM sleep mode for this NAS combined with a quad-core Celeron and 2 GB of memory, then we have to admit that this NAS unit is very energy efficient. Especially considering the performance and server like applications it houses. Impressive results.

Final words and verdict

And with that said we are going to close to review. There are so many more options and features available that we have not been able to discuss. The problem is that a NAS is not just a file-server anymore, these are fully fledged file serving servers with a plethora of applications and functionality. The ASUSTOR AS-5102T with the new updated software definitely is one of the most versatile NAS units we have tested. We like what we saw for hardware, software and functionality. The overall performance is really good, it is Gigabyte Ethernet compatible and at 425 EURO / 450 USD it is not cheap though we feel the price is fair. I have some reservation about the media-player functionality over HDMI. It seems that this processor is not fast enough to perfectly playback 1080P. I mean it's good, but we did have an occasional stutter. Nothing big, but i am a media-player/center specialist and aficionado and on that end, things need to be perfect in my book. The ASUSTOR AS-5102T is definitely recommended for the consumer side of the market, an incredibly fun and handy NAS with excellent performance and extensive features that you may expect from a NAS unit anno 2015.

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