Asustor AS6404T NAS Review - NAS Explained

by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 06/15/2017 09:03 AM [

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Asustor AS6404T

The Asustor AS6404T can house four hard drives or SSDs. This NAS unit is tied to two Gigabit Ethernet jacks, meaning 1000 / 8 minus QOS and random overhead like error-correction is roughly a maximum of 100 to 125 MB/sec on a single Gigabit Ethernet connection. The tested AS6404T can house four storage units, these can be set up in Single, JBOD, RAID 0/1/5. Once you have installed your hardware, you'll need to bind the NAS to your Ethernet with a CAT5e/6e cable to a switch; the Asustor NAS offers more connectors though including USB 3.0. When you have your HDDs installed, and the device connected through your PC you'll need to start-up a software suite to bind and set up your configuration. Please look at the install CD for that. Or if you have a smartphone, simply use a smartphone app like FING and scan the network, Asustor will show up with a corresponding IP. Type the IP into your browser and you can start setting up the unit.

CPU: Intel Celeron J3455 Quad-Core 1.5 GHz (boost up-to 2.3GHz) Processor
Memory: 8GB SO-DIMM DDR3L (4GB x2, Expandable. Max 8GB)
HDD: 4 x SATA3 6Gb/s; 3.5"/2.5" HDD/SSD Compatibility
Maximum Internal Raw Capacity: 40 TB (10 TB HDD X 4, capacity may vary by RAID types)
Expansion: USB 3.0 x 4 (Type A x3, Type C x1)
Network: Gigabit Ethernet x 2
LCD Panel
Output: HDMI 2.0 x 1, S/PDIF x1
System Fan: 120mm x 1
Infrared Receiver
Audio Output: S/PDIF
Power Supply Unit / Adapter: 90W x1
Input Power Voltage: 100V to 240V AC

The (current at time of writing) price level for this unit is €699,00

An Apollo Lake Celly in her Belly

Goldmont is a micro-architecture for low-power Atom, Celeron and Pentium branded processors used in systems on a chip (SoCs) made by Intel. The Apollo Lake platform with 14 nm Goldmont core was released late 2016. The Goldmont architecture borrows heavily from the Skylake Core processors and offers more than 30 percent performance boost compared to the previous Braswell platform. The Asustor AS6404T uses a new Apollo Lake Intel Celeron Quad-Core Processor (J3455) at 1.5 GHz base clocks that can boost towards 2.3GHz. The processor incorporates Intel's HD Graphics 500 GPU operating at 250 MHz with a burst frequency of 750 MHz. This IGP can manage resolutions up-to 3840x2160 @30 Hz and offers support for:

Video decode hardware acceleration including support for HEVC (H.265), H.264, MVC, VP8, VP9, MPEG2, VC-1, WMV9, JPEG/MJPEG.
Video encode hardware acceleration including support for HEVC (H.265), H.264, MVC, VP8, VP9, JPEG/MJPEG.

With such video support embedded, ASUSTOR implemented an HDMI 1.4b connector as well as an optical S/PDIF output. KODI is available as an app, hence you can use this product as a full fledged media server/player as well. But obviously everything from UPnP to Plex can be installed as well. Factory installed is 2x4 GB memory, offering 8 GB memory set up in dual channel mode (typically you only have single channel on NAS servers, so this will help out great with memory intensive applications like databases). That memory however is limited to a maximum of 8 GB, so you cannot make it a 16 GB unit. Loaded with four HDDs, ASUSTOR lists the following energy consumption values:

Power Consumption: 24 W (Operation);
11.2 W (Disk Hibernation);
0.44 W (Sleep Mode)

The AS6404T can swallow four 3.5-inch HDDs, but the trays used can also house 2.5" storage devices such as SSDs. Depending on your choice/preference in HDDs up-to 10 TB HDDs are supported, please do check their QVL list for supported storage units here. You will notice multiple USB 3.0 connectors and, as mentioned, the unit sports two Gigabit Ethernet ports. Why two you might wonder? With Link aggregation however you could increase that number significantly and range towards roughly ~225MB/sec. Link Aggregation Group combines a number of physical ports together to make a single high-bandwidth data path, so as to implement the traffic load sharing among the member ports in the group and to enhance the connection reliability (link bundling is also what it can be referred to).

You network topology needs to match though:

Your switches need to support Link aggregation (layer2)
Your NAS needs to support Link aggregation (this one obviously does)
You need multiple Gigabit controllers in your PC or use multiple PCs
You need fast enough storage units
You'll need multiple network links for and to your switch.

Operating system compatibility wise the NAS supports file sharing across Linux, UNIX, Mac, and Windows platforms. We will be testing with Windows 8.1 and 10. Also for the more advanced among you, Windows AD (Active Directory) is supported to help create an easy-to-access environment. SSH login and web page SSL login enables users to transfer, store, and share data securely. Since this product acts as a server, ALL PC's within your network can connect to it, with or without access rights.

Times have changed and our storage requirements have moved from Kilobytes, to Megabytes, to Gigabytes and now even Terabytes of storage. And sure, it won't be long until we reach Petabytes either. Oh, and after that there's Exabytes and then Zettabytes!

File Storage Capacity by Bits and Bytes
	Byte	Kilobyte	Megabyte	Gigabyte
Kilobyte	1,024	1	1,024	1,048,576
Megabyte	1,048,576	1,024	1	1,024
Gigabyte	1,073,741,824	1,048,576	1,024	1
Terabyte	1,099,511,627,776	1,073,741,824	1,048,576	1,024
Petabyte	1,125,899,906,842,620	1,099,511,627,776	1,073,741,824	1,048,576
Exabyte	1,152,921,504,606,850,000	1,125,899,906,842,620	1,099,511,627,776	1,073,741,824
Zettabyte	1,180,591,620,717,410,000,000	1,152,921,504,606,850,000	1,125,899,906,842,620	1,099,511,627,776

So we passed the Terabyte marker. With our hefty demand in storage capabilities, the industry had to constantly adapt and introduce new features in hardware. Storage units got much bigger in volume over the year, 6 TB HDDs have just been introduced onto the market with 10 TB already in the pipeline. In that line of storage solutions there is one product series growing fast and now reaching SOHO and consumer based markets. They are called NAS units, Network Attached Storage. And there has been a lot of development in these nifty little boxes. Pretty much they are little servers that can hook onto your network and then function as file-servers.

The NAS units are often small, do not use a lot of power compared to, say, your PC, but they are highly configurable, offer redundancy as some models can even handle RAID internally. Network Attachable Storage units are among the most advanced home servers available on the market today. Products feature multiple HDD setups, partitions, RAID, USER and USERGROUP based access, FTP, web server, MySQL, hot swappable drives; these are just some of the features that a NAS unit can handle. And though expensive, a product like this is just too darn handy when it comes to file-storage and management over your network.

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