Asustor Drivestor 4 Pro (AS3304T) NAS Review

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If we remove all drive caddies, located at the left side you can see the actual motherboard slash PCB. Nothing much is going on there aside from the fact you can see a heat-sink that cools the processor. It's clearly passive and thus makes use of the cooling fan housed in the back of the NAS.

 

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At the rear of the NAS, we see the SATA3 connectors, four of them. If you are going to install HDDs, please check the ASUSTOR QVL list of supported units. Most of them will all work fine up to 16 TB even. But in the past, I installed four really old HDDs, and when the NAS dropped out of sleep mode I heard all kinds of weird noises. Two of them regained active status and one was stuck somehow between hot/sleep. Not ASUSTOR's fault of course, but this is why you always need to check the QVL list for supported storage units. 

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Apparently i cannot take proper photos anymore, but that's a HDD resting in the caddy. The NAS rests on rubber feet which will help against resonating noises. The NAS itself is reasonably silent. For our testing, we are mounting SSDs in an effort to max SATA3 speeds on that 2.5 Gbps connection. The NAS supports hot-swappable hard disks and comes with proper disk tray locks. 


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If you like to use SATA3 SSDs then that's possible as well. Remove the side skits, and use four screws at the bottom to insert the SSD shut in that tray. now you can slide them in and utilize them.


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Below you can see port 2 is connected to the 10 GigE infrastructure (purple), the NAS locks in at 2.5 Gbps (lighter purple-ish color). Always keep in mind that you need a 5 or 10 GigE switch as well in your infrastructure, also on the client-side (PCs) you'd need compatible ethernet adapters.
 

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I think we're ready to go. Let's start up the software installation of ADM, after which we configure the NAS for all the needs and requirements you wish for.

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