ASUSTOR AS-604T NAS Server Review

Manufacturer: ASUSTOR Inc.
Product Name: ASUSTOR AS-604T
Model Number: 90-AS-604T00-MA10
UPC: 0887372000087
Price As Tested: $715 (Amazon | Newegg)

Full disclosure: The product used in this review was supplied by ASUSTOR

Everybody needs a NAS, I'm convinced. Maybe if I described it in terms of what the modern NAS has become - a Private Cloud, then everyone would better understand my conviction. Years ago, when Benchmark Reviews first started testing and reviewing NAS servers, they were intended to sit on your network as a sort of file server. You could access it using a file manager, like Windows Explorer, and you could also employ some backup software that was typically supplied by the vendor, and often proprietary. Today, as we all know, everything is wide open. Access anything, anywhere is not just a dream anymore, its reality. Hardware is still important, but it's the depth and breadth of the software that is becoming more of a differentiator.

The ASUSTOR AS-604T NAS Network Storage Server uses a familiar hardware platform - Intel Atom and a Linux distro, but the design team didn't stop there. I'm sure they know who their competition is, and what their strengths and weaknesses are. Their job was to conceive and build a product that offered something more, more of what people want. If you've perused the long list of features on some of my previous NAS reviews, you might wonder, "What could they possibly add, to what the market already expects?" As it turns out, there are some improvements that were ready to be explored; they just needed a slightly different perspective.

The AS-604T doesn't economize on the hardware side, in order to provide a richer feature set, quite the contrary. The four-bay tower uses one of the speediest Intel Atom Dual-Core CPUs, the D2700, ticking over at the top clock speed within the Atom family - 2.13 GHz. The powerful Intel ICH10R on the South side is used to expand the interface capability of the Atom, which lacks the PCI Express lanes that many of the support chips rely on to communicate with the CPU. One GB of DDR3-1066 system memory supports the rest of the internals. Two Gigabit Ethernet network ports are standard, with no expansion capability for additional Network Interface Cards (NIC). Four SATA 6Gb/s drive bays offer single disk and RAID 0/1/5/6/10 configurations. The capability for hot spares is available with some of the disk configurations. ASUSTOR employs a single 1 GB flash memory module to store firmware and applications on the AS-604T motherboard. This Disk-On-Memory (DOM) acts like the system drive, yet it takes up very little space and uses almost no power.

Benchmark Reviews has tested quite a few NAS products, ranging from the QNAP TS-119 NAS single-disk offering made for home users, to the Goliath QNAP TS-879U-RP 8-Bay NAS for the storage needs of large businesses. We've recently tested the NETGEAR ReadyNAS NV+ v2 NAS servers, which falls in the middle between those two extremes. Let's see how this new 4-bay device compares to its competitors.

Closer Look: ASUSTOR AS-604T NAS Server

The bottom line with any high performance storage solution is that the number of drive spindles in play is often more important than almost any other factor, assuming that everything else is based on reasonably modern technology. When you combine the higher level of performance with the greater flexibility for online RAID capacity expansion & online RAID level migration, the additional cost of the extra drive bays always looks like a bargain instead of conspicuous consumption. This is the reason more and more people are opting for NAS systems with at least four bays, even though they may not need all that capacity now. What initially looks like overkill in a NAS system might just be the very thing that saves the day some years down the road.

The ASUSTOR AS-604T is a relatively small unit, which is arranged in a tower format and should fit in anywhere, in a variety of home or business settings. The standard model is a diskless unit; ASUSTOR doesn't sell them with drives installed, but there are a number of distributors that will bundle the NAS with some sensible drive combinations. The size and weight are similar to competing models: 185.5mm (H) x 170mm (W) x 230mm (D), and 7.7 kg without drives installed. Each HDD you install will add about 1-1/2 pounds, depending on your choice of drive. Many users will be looking at 2TB and 3TB drives for a unit like this, and they're heavier than most. There are no handles on the unit, which might make it a bit difficult to pick the whole thing up once it's fully loaded, but its compact size works in its favor once you are actually carrying it. The top and side panels have a brushed metal finish, which has a pretty smooth texture compared to some of the rougher powder coat finish that covers some units.

We've all got data that we can't live without, the question is, how long do you want to be without it? Very few people are going to want to live without their important information for any length of time, and a RAID configuration that includes some redundancy is undoubtedly called for. With four SATA drives installed, you can have:

• RAID 0 (Disk Striping)
• RAID 1 (Disk Mirroring)
• RAID 5 (Block-level striping with distributed parity)
• RAID 6 (Block-level striping with redundant distributed parity)
• RAID 10 (Striped (RAID 0) array whose segments are mirrored)

The most popular choice is going to be RAID 5 because it offers the highest capacity with built-in redundancy. RAID 6 offers additional redundancy, allowing for continued operation even with two simultaneous drive failures, and this option is available for the ASUSTOR AS-604T. RAID 6 is very popular for larger NAS units and mission-critical data stores, because if one individual drive fails in a RAID 5 implementation, the array instantly starts operating as a RAID 0 configuration, which has NO redundancy. It stays in that vulnerable state until the array is rebuilt, which is a slow process that generally taxes the system and the remaining drives to the max, and can take several hours to complete. RAID 10 is mostly popular with database managers because it typically offers better performance than RAID 5 or RAID 6. It offers no better protection against data loss, however. There is no front door on the enclosure, all of the four drive trays, with their locking handles are exposed in the front. There are no locks on the handles, just a push button release at the bottom which needs to be activated in order to lift up the lever and remove the drive tray. I always advise people to use locks if they are available, and to think twice before unlocking the release lever. Trust me when I say that you do not want to start accidentally pulling drives out.

The LCD panel and the four square navigation buttons to the right of the display allow the user to find their way through a number of system configuration settings. This is a relatively common feature on mid or high-end NAS products, but the ASUSTOR goes way beyond this, by allowing you to customize the display to a degree. Under normal conditions, the display is only active when configuration changes are being made, or when there is a fault condition. The AS-604T software has an option for displaying the internal temperature (always a good thing to know on disk-based systems), or a custom text string entered by the administrator. The custom text scrolls continuously, which allows for long messages.

Around the back of the ASUSTOR AS-604T, you can see all of the hardwired I/O points. Starting at the top right is a single USB 3.0 jack, dressed up in blue. There is a mate to it on the front panel, also USB 3.0, also in Blue. Directly below is the system Reset button, followed by two eSATA connectors. Next, a 1000BASE-T Ethernet jack is paired with dual USB 2.0 jacks, with an additional set of identical jacks just below that. The Ethernet ports are labeled 1 and 2, which is thoughtful. Surprisingly, not everyone does that. Down in the right hand corner is an HDMI connector, which is meant to be used for delivering streaming video direct from the NAS. At the very bottom is a spot for a Kensington lock hole. The left hand side of the rear panel has the integrated power supply, with its own fan, and an IEC receptacle integrated into the rear panel. The main cooling fan is below that, taking up most of the real estate, with its 120mm dimensions. This is the largest cooling fan I've seen on a 4-bay NAS, and it paid dividends with low speeds and quiet-running.

There is one set of ventilation holes on the left side of the ASUSTOR AS-604T, which serves to direct cool air directly to the main control board. Most of the cool air is drawn through the front of the unit, through the drive trays. That air passes over the HDDs and is then exhausted out the rear of the unit. The additional holes in the side panel also help to balance the flow, especially if you let dust build up on the drive trays in front. I've yet to use a NAS that had effective filtering, although a few had mesh on the front door to help catch some dust. In order to keep things cool when needed and quiet the rest of the time, the fan speed is modulated by a temperature controller on the main PCB. Most of the smaller NAS models I've reviewed were reasonably quiet, and the fan noise was never really noticeable during my daily use. The ASUSTOR AS-604T continued that pattern, blending in to the background noise of my study. The larger fan really helped keep the noise down. I actually noticed drive noise more than the fan on this NAS, which is unusual.

The bottom of the ASUSTOR AS-604T is a simple affair with four composite feet, and a product label with MAC IDs and Serial numbers. I do wish that the default user name and password were printed on the bottom label. I know it's a minor security risk, but it's always a struggle for me to find the right paperwork with that information in it, if I ever have to do a hard reset on a device like this. For the most part, a NAS usually just sits there and runs for very long periods of time without attention. Then, when it finally does need attention, all the manuals and user guides have long been discarded. The feet are held in place with screws, which is much better than relying on adhesive, as the feet can slip sideways a bit if the glue gets loosened somehow. The bottom surfaces of the feet have a soft polymer compound in the center, which prevents scratches, while the hard plastic outer shell keeps everything securely in place. The feet are pretty low profile, but there is enough room to get your fingers underneath when lifting the unit up.

Now that we've had a thorough tour of the exterior, let's do a complete tear-down and see what the insides look like. The next section covers Insider Details.

Insider Details: ASUSTOR AS-604T NAS Server

The insides of these things are always more interesting than the outsides, at least to me. The AS-640T comes apart very quickly and easily, with about three screws that need to be removed on the rear panel. Once they're out, the outer shell slides a bit to the rear and then lifts off, revealing all the internal parts. Further disassembly requires a few more screws, including one covered by the obligatory "Voids The Warranty" warning label. Fortunately, this screw doesn't need to be removed in order to access the additional SO-DIMM slot, where you can add a few extra Gigabytes of DRAM to the AS-604T. Once these half dozen screws are removed, the rear panel comes off with the fan attached to it, and the tear down can begin in earnest. The main controller board takes up the entire left side of the unit, and nearly everything is integrated on the one board, including all the back panel connectors. The exceptions are the backplane where all the SATA connections for the drives are located, and the LED display and menu buttons from the front panel, which connect via ribbon cable and a small card-edge connector. The main controller PC board attaches to the inner chassis with four screw and threaded standoffs.

Once you remove those couple of screws holding the rest of the chassis together, it comes apart in several smaller pieces. Most of the inner framework is permanently fastened together or formed from a single sheet, so there are very few loose components that form the actual chassis, and it stays dimensionally stable. The backplane is held securely in place, at seven different locations. Six of those are grooved pins and keyhole slots, and one has a machine screw in that location. The result is a very stiff backplane, which is exactly what you want for a component that has 1 kg HDDs occasionally slamming into it. The 250W integral power supply sits on top of the drive bays and is held in place with two screws on the rear panel and two more inside the chassis. The electrical output looks very close to a standard ATX motherboard supply, and you can see where the pigtails from the PSU are connected to the main controller board along its top edge.

The main controller board is densely populated, but not as much as a high performance video card. The main PCB and backplane connect with an x4 PCI Express connector located toward the rear of the controller card, between the CPU and the stacked I/O connectors at the very rear of the unit. All the electrical current comes through the main controller PCB. With all the current that needs to go out to the hard drives, a four-bay unit like the AS-604T is probably the limit for this type of power distribution scheme. I suspect the AS-606T, with six HDDs to feed, has SATA power connections landed directly on the backplane PCB. The two passively cooled heatsinks cover the main chips supplied by Intel, the Dual-Core D2700 Atom CPU, and the ICH10R Southbridge that provides the PCI Express lanes, the eSATA connections, and the RAID logic. These two ICs do the bulk of the work for this NAS device; the only other chips that are even moderately stressed are the memory and the Ethernet controllers. The larger heatsink is on the ICH10R, which was not designed specifically for low power applications like the Atom CPU was, and actually does a lot of the heavy lifting in this application.

The drive bay is one large space, with grooves formed into the sheet metal chassis to provide four separate slots for the drive trays to slide into. There are plenty of ventilation cutouts in the chassis and the backplane to allow air to make its way towards the one large 120mm fan on the back panel. The open area on the left inner panel is where the air from the holes on the outside cover eventually flows, after passing over the main PCB and the two heatsinks there, sitting on top of the CPU and Southbridge.

The drive bays are not marked on the front bezel, and the individual drive trays are not marked. With the unit safely turned off, it's OK to remove one or more drives and after they slide out the front, they look like this. Each steel-framed tray holds one individual drive, and the tray is a common part across several models in the ASUSTOR product line. Since the trays are not labeled with the chassis slot number, you can mix and match them all you want, until you build a drive array and then you had better remember which one goes where. I recommend making your own labels or marking the trays with a Sharpie as soon as you start installing drives into the unit; if you mix them up the NAS won't recognize the array, and worst case you could end up destroying data as you try to figure out which drive is which. Inserting and removing the drive trays was smooth and positive, both with HDDs mounted in the trays and without. The latches acted like a locking lever; once the trays reached the end of their travel, swinging the latch down levers the tray firmly into place.

In case you want to add DRAM to the ASUSTOR AS-604t, it's a relatively easy proposition. Remove the outer cover, which is just three screws worth of effort. Then peel back the protective plastic cover on the left side of the chassis, and the empty, spare DIMM slot is exposed and easily accessed. The standard memory is sitting in a similar slot on the other side of the board, and is not accessible without further disassembly, which will void the warranty. There's 1 GB of DDR3-1333 installed on the interior DIMM slot, and the outer slot is intended to accept a 2GB upgrade, although a 1GB SO-DIMM would probably work. If you need a memory upgrade, you are going to want to go for as much as you can install, and the ATOM CPU can only address 4GB. Many applications won't really benefit from more memory, so be sure it will benefit your purpose before going to the trouble of upgrading. Hint: basic file transfer operations don't need any extra RAM to improve their function.

So far we've had a good look at what there is to observe as far as hardware goes, but let's dig down one more layer, down to the chip level where the technology really starts to get interesting. I love my shiny hardware just as much as the next person, but it's only part of the story....

Technology Details: ASUSTOR AS-604T NAS Server

The ASUSTOR AS-604T uses one of the most powerful Intel Atom Dual-Core CPUs based on 32nm fabrication technology, the D2700. Introduced in Q3 of 2011, the D2700 operates at the highest available clock frequency of the Atom family of CPUs, 2.13 GHz. It's a dual core unit, and it supports Hyper-Threading on its two physical cores. Observing the CPU usage chart during operations, I saw all four (virtual) cores being used concurrently, so the Linux-based operating system has no problems taking advantage of multiple cores and processing threads. The integrated graphics controller runs at the faster clock speed of 640 MHz, which normally wouldn't be important for a NAS, but the ASUSTOR family of NAS models allows direct streaming of HD video, so the increased performance does come in handy. Lastly, the 1MB Intel Smart Cache and the integrated memory controller that supports DDR3-1066 DRAM are both performance enhancing features that are at the forefront of what's available in low power computing these days. While the D2700 is going EOL in September of this year, there is plenty of stock available to keep making ASUSTOR NAS towers for a while.

The biggest chip on the board is actually not the CPU; it's the SATA interface/ RAID controller chip. Intel's ICH10R is perhaps one of the most widely used RAID controllers in x86 PCs, just because it was attached as the Southbridge to several generations of high-end Intel CPUs since it debuted in 2008. Short of doing a full blown custom ASIC, it's hard to beat the performance of this mainstream solution, which was developed back when the most common way of increasing disk throughput was to RAID several HDDs together. Today's Southbridges (err.... Platform Hub Controllers) are rightly judged more by their ability to squeeze the utmost performance out of the latest SSDs, but the ICH10R served admirably during the transition period between high speed spindles and flash memory. ASUSTOR took the unusual approach of not using the SATA ports on the ICH10R to interface with the HDDs in the drive bays, instead using them only for the eSATA connections on the back panel. The 4x hard drives in the front of the NAS are managed by Marvell 6Gb/s controllers that are connected to the ICH10R by PCI Express lanes. I suspect they did it this way, in order to have a consistent architecture that was scalable to larger units, with more drive bays. Plus, there's the side benefit of the 6Gb/s interface that isn't available from the ICH10R. Not that you'll notice any difference with mechanical hard drives....

Besides the CPU and ICH chips, the two most important bits of silicon on any NAS have to be the NICs and the SATA controllers. Those are the two endpoints for the entire device, and everything has to pass through one or both of them. The two Gigabit Ethernet controllers are supplied by Broadcom and they incorporate both Media Access Control (MAC) and a Physical Layer (PHY) port. Each BCM57781 chip supports one Ethernet jack on the rear panel, and connects to the rest of the system by an x1 PCIe Rev. 1.1 interface. Broadcom is one of the premier suppliers of NICs and switching products to the enterprise market, so it's no surprise that ASUSTOR picked them for their brand new NAS line. I'll share some network throughput graphs later that will show just how good these NICs are.

Marvell supplies the SATA 6Gb/s Host Controllers, two 88SE9125 ICs that each support two 6 Gb/s SATA interface ports and a one-lane 5.0 Gb/s PCIe host interface back to the motherboard. There is a whole family of parts in this series, and this one is optimized for use with a central RAID controller on the system board. In this case the ICH10R provides both the logic behind the RAID functions and the PCI Express lanes that connect to the Marvell SATA controllers.

The ASUSTOR AS-604T is unusual in its support for a dedicated HDMI display output that is driven entirely by the NAS. Intel recently released a new 64-bit driver for multimedia support, and only a few vendors have followed up with software that allows direct connection from the NAS to a HDTV. It's a real bonus for supporting streaming video and other multimedia, if you decide to use your NAS for content delivery in addition to basic storage. In order to do that, some extra chips are needed that you typically don't see deployed on a NAS. The Chrontel CH7318C is a high speed HDMI level shifter that converts low-swing AC coupled differential input to an HDMI 1.3 compliant output. The Intel Atom D2700 has an Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3650 integrated on it that can handle dual displays, but still needs the extra chip to handle HDMI. One other welcome addition to this NAS is USB 3.0. Renesas Electronics (nee NEC) provides their ubiquitous D720200 chip for USB 3.0 duties. I can't remember the last time I saw any other chip being used for this function.

1GB of DDR3-1333 memory is supplied as standard on the ASUSTOR AS-604T; it's carried on the SO-DIMM form factor and is addressed by the CPU in Single-Channel mode. The Atom D2700 CPU can support up to 4 GB of DRAM, and with the 1GB DIMM already installed in Slot zero, the AS-604T is currently limited to running a total of 3GB of memory. If you void the warranty by breaking into the chassis and replacing the supplied DRAM with a 2GB part, I'm not sure whether the system BIOS will support the rogue upgrade or not. The single SO-DIMM in my sample was supplied by ADATA and is rated for DDR3-1333 with timings of 9-9-9 for CL-tRCD-tRP. The CPU is limited to 1066 DRAM speeds, so the DDR3-1333 modules are operating well within their limits.

Last, but not least is the Flash memory implemented as a Disk-On-Module (DOM) device, which is 512 M of SLC-based NAND sourced from local Taiwanese manufacturer ADATA. Serving up a Linux-based operating system to an Atom CPU is the dog's life for a flash memory chip; this module never breaks a sweat.

To measure isolated NAS power consumption, Benchmark Reviews uses the Kill-A-Watt EZ (model P4460) power meter made by P3 International. Obviously, power consumption is going to depend heavily on the number and type of drives that are installed. The power draw also depends on the fan speed that's required to keep the drives cool. When the ASUSTOR AS-604T first booted up with one WD 750 Black HDD installed, it idled at 25W. Read operations pulled only a few watts more - 29W, and Writes took an even 30W, with one disk. With all four drives installed, spinning up the platters drew 110W for about a second, and then it settled down to 44W at idle. The AS-604T drew 48W during Read operations with the full complement of disks installed; Writes drew 51W. When the ½ hour timer kicked in and the drives were powered down, the power consumption went down to 26W. In full Sleep mode it went all the way down to a measured 1W. I say "measured" because the P4460 power meter isn't accurate down at the 1-2W level. So the best I can say is that the 1.4W claim that ASUSTOR makes for sleep mode power consumption is certainly within reason.

We've seen the ins and outs of the hardware, and the technology under the hood; now let's take a quick look through the list of features that you get with the ASUSTOR AS-604T. The next couple of sections are kind of long, but it's critical to understand what features you get with these units, and what you don't. It's not just a box full of drives; it's capable of much more than that.

ASUSTOR AS-604T NAS Server Features

As the volume of personal and business data continue to rise exponentially, the systems we use to store and manage it have become more complex. I started my long relationship with computers when program storage meant a shoebox full of punch cards. Now, a bare-bones PC starts off with almost a million files on it BEFORE you add your own data. I'm not going to tell you that computing is going to get any simpler, that's an outright lie, but I can say that the tools we use to manage them are going to make it easier. ASUSTOR has introduced several new features with their new NAS line that makes it stand out from the crowd. We'll look at the newest and most unique features first, and then cover some of the more common ones.

World's first NAS with System Sleep Mode

Power consumption concerns get magnified for devices that are turned on 24/7. Most networking equipment falls into that category, and arguably, a NAS is a piece of networking equipment. I know for sure, that the ones I use (as opposed to the ones I test) are up and running all day, every day, just like the router and switch they're connected to. The various PCs, tablets, media components, and portable devices that are on the network go on and off at various points in the day, but not the NAS. Here's a representative sample of idle power consumption from some units I've tested: 33W, 51W, 8W, 13W, 7W, 22W. There are some low numbers mixed in there for sure, but nothing that can match the 1.4W spec of the ASUSTOR AS-604T when it's in sleep mode. Combining the ultra low power sleep mode with the high processing power of the ATOM D2700 platform is like having your cake and eating it too.

A boundless variety of Apps

There's no way to compare the number of apps for this platform in a way that makes sense. The landscape is constantly changing, and the quality of the apps is just as important as the quantity. ASUSTOR is just starting out in this market, against some long-established players. Right now, the top downloaded apps are: Download Center, Boxee, iTunes Server, UPnP Media Server, Surveillance Center, and Plex Media Server. With a total of 91 available apps, these six seem like the most mainstream, and their relative popularity makes sense.

Built-in HD media player(s)

For years, I've seen video connections on the rear panels of NAS units, and then been disappointed when I read in the manual that it was only for use in "Maintenance" mode, in most cases only accessible by factory technicians. Intel and a couple of forward-thinking NAS vendors have finally opened up the video port for use by the general user. The Intel D2700 Atom CPU in the ASUSTOR AS-604T, can actually support dual displays with its GMA 3650 integrated graphics processor running at 650 MHz, but this implementation only has one available port.

Users have a number of ways to stream multimedia (usually video content) directly from the ASUSTOR AS-604T. Boxee's media center app is the de facto first choice as far as ASUSTOR is concerned. It can be controlled from your iOS or Android portable device, via the AiRemote function that is standard with the AS-604T, or just plug a keyboard into one of the USB ports on the NAS. Not everyone is in love with Boxee though, and there are other options that are gaining a lot of traction. Plex Media Server works quite well, as do iTunes Server and the generic UPnP Media Server. No matter what your preference is, there's a way to get streaming video out of this NAS and into your HT rig.

Flexible 2-way backup solutions

2-way backup is not unique to ASUSTOR, but their emphasis on it is. In addition to using a NAS to back up data from workstations on the network, the AS-604T can use other devices as backup repositories for the data that's stored on the NAS. It can be a manual process, partly automated using backup apps, or you can set up what I think is the pinnacle of backup solutions: Rsync. By continuously maintaining an exact duplicate of all the data on your NAS in another, physically separate environment, Rsync provides a very robust and convenient way to achieve peace of mind about the fate of your data. Find a buddy or a relative with a compatible NAS, and provide continuous data protection for each other, without the monthly fees to Carbonite, et. al. There are Cloud options as well; we'll discuss them in a minute. The key issue I see here is that ASUSTOR is taking the lead on helping people realize that a single set of backups is not enough.

AES 256-bit folder based encryption

If you've followed our NAS coverage in the last few years, you will remember that we've tried using data encryption a couple of times and it has been found wanting. Not from a functional perspective - it works as well as it's supposed to, but the performance hit is unbearable. ARM-based CPUs, Atom dual-cores, Core i3, nothing worked very well at all. An i5 or i7, with Intel's AES-NI instruction set is the only hardware that can handle full-volume encryption. ASUSTOR took a unique approach, though. They reasoned that some people might be interested in encrypting only a portion of their data, if it could be done with very little performance penalty. Guess what, they were right. With the AS-604T, I can encrypt my tax data and other financial or personal data, and leave all my pictures and videos in the clear. ASUSTOR calls it Folder-Based Encryption, and it's a real step forward in providing usable data security to the consumer level NAS users.

Anywhere access with Cloud Connect^TM

What do you get when you mix a Private Cloud with a Public Cloud? Answer: a Hybrid Cloud. So, I take my (private cloud) NAS and link it to a (public) cloud service, and voila, I have the best of both worlds. You have the security and control of a private cloud, and you have the world-wide access of the public cloud. ASUSTOR has set up a service called Cloud Connect, which is not to be confused with Google Cloud Connect that is being discontinued on April 30, 2013. At this stage in the evolution of the NAS market, a public cloud app is expected, so the AS-604T doesn't score any extra points by including this service. On the other hand, they don't lose any points by not having it, or offering a lame version that is painful to use. Cloud Connect meets all the normal, expected requirements for a modern NAS.

Network Recycle Bin

The Network Recycle Bin function allows the user to create a Recycle Bin for each logical volume. For instance, Volume 1 will have a Recycle Bin 1 created for it, and Volume 2 a Recycle Bin 2. Once a Recycle Bin has been created, it cannot be removed. Deleted files are moved to the Recycle Bin, letting you recover any accidentally deleted files, similar to how deleted files are handled on a standard desktop workstation. All files deleted via the following protocols are moved to the Recycle Bin: Windows File Service (CIFS/SAMBA), Apple Filing Protocol (AFP), File Transfer Protocol (FTP), File Explorer.

USB 3.0 Connection

Once you're used to Gigabit transfer speeds with your NAS, the thin trickle of data that passes through USB 2.0 becomes a painful experience. USB 3.0 comes to the rescue on the ASUSTOR AS-604T, with a max data rate that's 10x faster than the previous USB standard. Theoretical throughput is up to 5Gb/s, but there aren't any USB devices I know of that will actually provide that kind of speed. There are two USB 3.0 ports on the AS-604T; one is located on the front panel, and the other is on the rear panel. That's a distinct improvement in usability, compared to some competing models that only have one SuperSpeed USB port.

Apple Time Machine support
Online RAID level migration & capacity expansion
Hot swappable design

The remaining top features for the AS-604T are all in the same category. They're requirements for a modern NAS, and they need to be present and fully useable, not gimped versions. ASUSTOR delivers on all counts. Now that we've loooked at the most significant features of the ASUSTOR AS-604T, let's look at the Hardware and Software specifications that provide the power and performance to make those features run.

ASUSTOR AS-604T Hardware Specifications

Hardware Specifications

ASUSTOR AS-604T Software Specifications

The ASUSTOR AS-604T is designed for home use and small businesses. Nowadays, the typical home environment looks very similar to a small business anyways. When you have to combine the latest high tech devices, the legacy hardware and applications that everyone still has hanging around, the need to grant granular access to multiple terabytes of data with varying sensitivity, unified communications, and peripheral sharing - it's a daunting challenge. I also challenge you to tell me whether that last sentence refers to a small business or your own home network.

Because the ASUSTOR ADM system software is common across the product line, there are a great number of software features included with the AS-604T that the typical user will never use, never see, and never even know they exist. You can be sure though, that every corporate sys/admin is looking through this list of software capabilities and checking off the required boxes for deploying a NAS in a secure large-scale business environment.

Software Specifications

Operating System

• ADM 1.0 Onwards
• Built-in App Central for Various Apps

Supported OS

• Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, Server 2003, Server 2008, Server 2012
• Mac OS X 10.6 Onwards
• UNIX, Linux, and BSD

Supported Languages

• Deutsch, English, Français, Italiano, Nederlands, Polski,???, ??, ????, ????

Supported Browsers

• Internet Explorer 9 Onwards
• FireFox
• Chrome
• Safari

Network Protocols

• CIFS/SMB, AFP, NFS, FTP, WebDAV, Rsync, SSH, SFTP, iSCSI, HTTP, HTTPS

File System

• Internal Disk: EXT4
• External Disk: FAT32, NTFS, EXT3, EXT4, HFS+

Storage Management

• Supports Multiple Volumes with Spare Disks
• Volume Type: Single Disk, JBOD, RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 6, RAID 10
• Supports Online RAID Level Migration
• Supports Online RAID Capacity Expansion

iSCSI

• Maximum Targets: 256
• Maximum LUNs: 256
• Target Masking
• LUN Mapping
• ISO File Mounting
• Supports MPIO & MCS
• Persistent (SCSI-3) Reservations

Disk Management

• Scheduled Bad Block Scans
• Scheduled S.M.A.R.T. Scans

Network

• TCP/IP (IPv4 & IPv6)
• Link Aggregation: Supports 802.3ad and Six Other Modes for Load Balancing and/or Network Failover
• Jumbo Frame (MTU)
• VLAN
• ASUSTOR Cloud Connect^TM
• Wireless Network
• DDNS and EZ-Router

Backup Solutions

• Rsync (Remote Sync) Backup
• Cloud Backup
• FTP Backup
• External Backup
• One Touch Backup

System Administration

• Log Type: System Log, Connection Log, File Access Log
• Real-time Online User Monitor
• Real-time System Monitor
• Network Recycle Bin
• User Quota
• Virtual Drive (ISO Mounting, Maximum 16)
• UPS Support

Access Control

• Maximum Number of Users: 4096
• Maximum Number of Groups: 512
• Maximum Number of Shared Folders: 512
• Maximum Number of Concurrent Connections: 512
• Supports Windows Active Directory

Security

• AES 256-Bit Folder Encryption
• Firewall: Prevent Unauthorized Access
• Network Defender: Prevent Network Attacks
• Alert Notifications: E-mail, SMS
• Encrypted Connections: HTTPS, FTP over SSL/TLS, SSH, SFTP, Rsync over SSH

File Explorer

• Web-based File Management
• ISO File Mountin
• Share Links

Surveillance Center

• Live Monitoring (4 Free Channels)
• Multiple Channel Playback with Audio
• Supported Browsers: Internet Explorer, Chrome, FireFox (Windows only)
• Event Notification

iTunes Server

• For iTunes on Mac & Windows
• Supports AirPlay
• Supports iOS Remote Pairing
• Supported Audio Formats: AIF3, M4A (AAC & Apple Lossless), M4P, M4R, MP3, WAV3
• Supported Video Formats: M4V, MOV, MP4
• Supported Playlist Formats: M3U, WPL

Download Center

• Supports BT(Torrent & Magnet Link), HTTP and FTP Downloads
• Torrent Search
• Choose Files Before a BT Task Starts
• Customizable Download Schedule
• Bandwidth Control
• RSS Subscription and Automatic Downloading
• ASUSTOR Download Assistant for Windows & Mac
• AiDownload for iOS & Android with Push Notification
• Smart Download Function

Boxee

• Play All Media Content Stored on NAS
• Video Output via HDMI
• TV Shows, Movies, Apps and More
• ASUSTOR Customized Features
• AiRemote Mobile App for iOS & Android

UPnP Media Server

• Supports PS3 and other Digital Media Player Capable Devices
• Supports On-The-Fly Transcoding for Most RAW Images and Audio (OGG, FLAC)
• Supported Image Formats: BMP, GIF, ICO, JPG, PNG, PSD, TIF, RAW Image (3FR, ARW, CR2, CRW, DCR, DNG, ERF, KDC, MEF, MOS, MRW, NEF, NRW, ORF, PEF, PPM, RAF, RAW, RW2, SR2, X3F)
• Supported Audio Formats: 3GP, AAC, AC3, AIFC, AIFF, AMR, APE, AU, AWB, FLAC1, M4A, M4R, MP2, MP3, OGG Vorbis1, PCM, WAV, WMA
• Supported Video Formats: 3GP, 3G2, ASF, AVI, DAT, FLV, ISO, M2T, M2V, M2TS, M4V, MKV, MPv4, MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4, MTS, MOV, QT, SWF, TP, TRP, TS, VOB, WMV, RMVB, VDR, MPE

Besides the core features available in the standard software setup, additional capabilities are available in the form of Apps. There are currently 91 choices on the ASUSTOR App Central Website, although some of those are items we've discussed already, like Boxee.

ASUSTOR AS-604T NAS Server Setup

The first thing you need to do with most NAS devices is discover them on your network and set them up. Most NAS vendors bundle a small, lightweight "finder" application with their products that has some system utilities included. The ASUSTOR Control Center provides Device Discovery, Open, Connect, Configuration, and Startup/Shutdown functions, all before you log in to the full monitoring & control applications via the web browser. There are a number of sub-menus that you go through during initial setup; once you do that, the setup wizard is still available in case you get forget your password or need to reconfigure the NAS. Otherwise, just use your browser and login to the IP address that the NAS is configured to; the default is 169.254.1.2.

Once the initial setup is complete, you need to log in to the main admin application, which ASUSTOR calls the ASUSTOR Data Master (ADM) Operating System. The default main screen presents you with several large icons:

• Access Control
• Activity Monitor
• APP Central
• Backup & Restore
• External Devices
• File Explorer
• Services
• Settings
• Storage manager
• System Information
• Online Help

Each of these icons spawns a new window, much like any app would do. One improvement that ASUSTOR implemented in their software is multi-tasking. Most other NAS software only allows you access to one function at a time, usually through a hierarchical menu structure. ADM operates more like a modern GUI, where you can leave open or minimize a window that is running a specific task for you, and then open another one to start performing a different task. Windows that are minimized slide up to the top bar of the main window, just like the System Tray in Windows except it's at the top of the screen.

One of the critical aspects of setting up a NAS is the networking configuration. It's so easy to get it wrong and accidentally shut down access, that ASUSTOR includes tools in their setup wizard application, which you can still access after you inadvertently locked yourself out. If you get it completely out of whack, it's still possible to recover by using the system reset button, which can be accessed through a small hole in the rear panel. Once you're inside, this screen lets you change global settings and individual settings for each of the Ethernet ports available on the system. IPv4 and IPv6 are both accommodated and a default port can be selected. The two integral ports on the AS-640T are labeled "LAN1" and "LAN2"; and I'm happy to say that the ports on the back panel are physically labeled as well. That's been a pet peeve of mine for a while, devices having two network ports and no identifying marks on the panel. On the ASUSTOR unit, even the LED indicators on the front panel are marked 1 & 2. Sometimes it's the small things that matter....

A Link Aggregation pull-down menu allows the two ports to be linked together and configured for a variety of protocols: Round-Robin, Active-Backup, XOR, Broadcast, 802.3ad, Adaptive Transmit Load balancing, or Adaptive Load balancing. The two ports on the AS-604T are easily linked and unlinked, by using these tools. All testing in this review was done with single port connections, to keep the playing field level. I have had very mixed results so far using LACP on a variety of NAS products; it's not a simple plug-and-play way to double your throughput, that's for sure. I've had some excellent results with 10GbE connections, though.

Let's look at the RAID expansion and Migration process a little. The Storage Manager is the application you use to configure the disk volumes. Our testing protocol at Benchmark Reviews uses both single disk and RAID 5 storage configurations. Besides the raw test scores we get from those setups, it also allows us to go through the RAID Migration process to see how well that works. Plenty of people start small when they get a new NAS, and expand the capacity later. After I added the remaining three disks to the system, I was presented with the choice of RAID 1, 5, 6, or 10 and I chose RAID 5 from the pick list. The AS-604T performed this in two steps - first it created a RAID 1 volume and then it migrated that volume from RAID 1 to RAID 5. All together, the process took about 16 hours to 'synchronize' all the disks. I've definitely gotten spoiled by the systems I've tested recently, that used pools to manage disk configurations. On those systems, I was able to make this same transition in a few minutes. Starting from scratch with all four disks installed during the initial setup would have shaved quite a few hours off this procedure, I believe.

Ok, if you've been following along this far, there's not much more I can show you except how fast it is. So let's get down to some benchmarking, and compare it to a variety of other NAS products that we've looked at in the recent past.

Network Terminology

Benchmark Reviews primarily uses metric data measurement for testing storage products, for anyone who is interested in learning the relevant history of this sore spot in the industry, I've included a small explanation below:

The basic unit data measurement is called a bit (one single binary digit). Computers use these bits, which are composed of ones and zeros, to communicate their contents. All files are stored as binary files, and translated into working files by the Operating System. This two number system is called a "binary number system". In comparison, the decimal number system has ten unique digits consisting of zero through nine. Essentially it boils down to differences between binary and metric measurements, because testing is deeply impacted without carefully separating the two. For example, the difference between the transfer time of a one-Gigabyte (1000 Megabytes) file is going to be significantly better than a true binary Gigabyte (referred to as a Gibibyte) that contains 1024 Megabytes. The larger the file used for data transfer, the bigger the difference will be.

Have you ever wondered why your 500 GB hard drive only has about 488 GB once it has been formatted? Most Operating Systems utilize the binary number system to express file data size, however the prefixes for the multiples are based on the metric system. So even though a metric "Kilo" equals 1,000, a binary "Kilo" equals 1,024. Are you confused yet? Don't be surprised, because even the most tech savvy people often mistake the two. Plainly put, the Kilobyte is expressed as 1000 bytes, but it is really comprised of 1,024 bytes.

Most network engineers are not fully aware that the IEC changed the way we calculate and name data chunks when they published the new International Standards back in December 1998. The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) removed the old metric prefixes for multiples in binary code with new prefixes for binary multiples made up of only the first two letters of the metric prefixes and adding the first two letters of the word "binary". For example, instead of Megabyte (MB) or Gigabyte (GB), the new terms would be Mebibyte (MiB) or Gibibyte (GiB). While this is the new official IEC International Standard, it has not been widely adopted yet because it is either still unknown by institutions or not commonly used.

NAS Testing Methodology

All the NAS devices we test cannot accommodate all the different disk configurations, so our current test protocol has been based on two of the most popular setups: a basic (single) disk and RAID-5 configurations. Most NAS products that can support RAID 5 go beyond the minimum number of drive bays, to a total of four, so that is the number of drives that I typically use to test with, even though I could get by with only three. I connected the AS-604T NAS directly to an Intel X520-T2 10Gbps Ethernet NIC in the test-bench system, with ten-foot CAT6 patch cables. I set up static IP addresses on the host PC that were consistent with the default address of the ASUSTOR unit and we were in business.

With the networking taken care of, the next potential bottleneck that needed attention is the disk system on the host PC. In previous tests, I relied on the third generation OCZ Agility SSD, which is good for at least 500 MB/s, input or output, on the appropriate Intel Platform Controller Hub. I decided it was time to bypass the SSD on the test rig and install a RAM Disk. There are at least a dozen products on the market that will create and manage a RAM Disk on Windows systems; I chose RAMDisk v3.5.1 from Dataram based on performance tests in several reviews (we read 'em, too....) and its reasonable cost structure. I assigned 10GB of space to the RAM Disk, in order to replicate the test protocol I've been using for all my NAS testing. One other trick was necessary to get the RAM Disk to transfer files larger than 2GB. I had to use the "Convert" utility in Windows to make the RAM Disk into an NTFS volume. Then I was able to perform the file transfers with 10GB files, no problem. If you want to avoid this extra step, be sure to look for a RAM Disk product that directly supports the NTFS file system.

For basic throughput evaluation, the NAS product received one test transfer followed by at least three timed transfers. Each test file was sent to the Western Digital Caviar Black 750GB (WD7502AAEX) hard drives installed in the NAS for a timed NAS write test, and that same file was sent back to the RAM Disk in the test system to perform a NAS read test. Each test was repeated several times, the high and low values were discarded and the average of the remaining results was recorded and charted.

The Read and Write transfer tests were conducted on each NAS appliance using the 1 GB file and then a 10 GB file. A second set of tests are conducted with Jumbo Frame enabled, i.e. the MTU value for all the Ethernet controllers is increased from 1500 to 9000. Most of the NAS products tested to date in the Windows 7 environment have supported the Jumbo Frame configuration. Only the NETGEAR ReadyNAS NV+ v2 uses the 1500 MTU setting by default, and has no user-accessible controls to change that; you'll see that reflected in the charts. I used a single GbE connection for all tests; I have not been able to achieve consistent results with various units using the IEEE 802.3ad Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) mode.

I also ran the Intel NAS Performance Toolkit (NASPT) version 1.7.1, which was originally designed to run on a Windows XP client. People smarter than me have figured out how to run it under Windows 7, including the 64-bit version that is used more often than the 32-bit version these days. NASPT brings an important perspective to our test protocol, as it is designed to measure the performance of a NAS system as viewed from the end user's perspective. Benchmarks like ATTO use Direct I/O Access to accurately measure disk performance with minimal influence from the OS and the host platform. This provides important, objective data that can be used to measure raw, physical performance. While it's critical to measure the base performance, it's also important to quantify what you can expect using real-world applications, and that's exactly what NASPT does. One of the disadvantages of NASPT is that it is influenced by the amount of memory installed on the client, and it was designed for systems that had 2-4 GB of RAM. Consequently, two of the tests give unrealistic results, because they are measuring the speed of the buffer on the client, instead of the actual NAS performance. For that reason, we will ignore the results for "HD Video Record" and "File Copy to NAS". I'm also not going to pay too much attention to the "Content Creation" test, as it is too heavily focused on computing tasks that aren't really handled by the NAS.

Benchmark Reviews also measures NAS performance using some throughput tests that are traditionally used for internal drives. The ATTO Disk Benchmark program is widely recognized and offers a comprehensive set of test variables to work with. In terms of disk performance, it measures transfer rates at various intervals for a user-specified length and then reports read and write speeds for these spot-tests. CrystalDiskMark 3.0 is another file transfer and operational bandwidth benchmark tool from Crystal Dew World that offers performance transfer speed results using sequential, 512KB random, and 4KB random samples. Benchmark Reviews uses CrystalDiskMark to illustrate operational IOPS performance with multiple threads, which allows us to determine operational bandwidth under heavy load. The sequential file transfer test is the most relevant on for NAS products, and that's the one we report on, although I tend to run the full test suite just in case I need the data at a later date.

We are continuing our NAS testing with the exclusive use of Windows 7 as the testing platform for the host system. The performance differences between Win7 and XP are huge, as we documented in our QNAP TS-259 Pro review back in 2010. The adoption rate for Win 7 has been very high, and Benchmark Reviews has been using Win 7 in all of our other testing for some time now. It was definitely time to make the jump for NAS products.

NAS Comparison Products

• EonNAS 1100 NAS Network Storage Server
• EonNAS 850X NAS Network Storage Server
• Thecus N5550 4-Bay SATA NAS Server
• Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ v2 Gigabit 4-bay SATA NAS Server
• QNAP TS-879U-RP Gigabit 8-bay SATA NAS Server
• QNAP TS-219P+ Gigabit 2-Bay SATA NAS server
• QNAP TS-259 Pro Gigabit 2-Bay SATA NAS server
• QNAP TS-659 Pro II Gigabit 6-Bay SATA NAS server
• QNAP TS-419P II Gigabit 4-bay SATA NAS Server

Support Equipment

• (4) Western Digital Caviar Black WD7502AAEX 750GB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5"
• Intel E10G42BT, X520-T2, 10Gbps Ethernet NIC, PCIe 2.0 x8, 2x CAT6a
• Dataram RAMDisk v3.5.1.130R22
• Intel NAS Performance Toolkit (NASPT) version 1.7.1
• ATTO Disk Benchmark v2.47
• CrystalDiskMark 3.0
• 10-Foot Category-6 Solid Copper Shielded Twisted Pair Patch Cable
• 1 metric Gigabyte Test File (1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes)
• 10 metric Gigabyte Test File (10 GB = 10,000,000,000 bytes

Test System

• Motherboard: MSI Z68-Express Z68A-GD80 (1.23.1108 BIOS)
• System Memory: 4x 4GB Corsair Vengeance LP DDR3 1600MHz (9-9-9-24)
• Processor: Intel Core i5-2500K Sandy Bridge 3.3GHz (BX80623I52500K)
• CPU Cooler: Thermalright Venomous-X (Delta AFB1212SHE PWM Fan)
• Video: Intel HD Graphics 3000
• Drive 1: OCZ Agility3 SSD 120GB (AGT3-25SAT3-120G)
• Optical Drive: Sony NEC Optiarc DVD (AD-7190A-OB 20X)
• Enclosure: Lian Li Armorsuit PC-P50R
• PSU: Corsair CMPSU-750TX ATX12V V2.2 750Watt
• Monitor: SOYO 24"; Widescreen LCD Monitor (DYLM24E6) 1920X1200
• Operating System: Windows 7 Ultimate Version 6.1 (Build 7600)

1GB Single-Disk Test Results

The bottom line for any storage device is the combination of capacity and transfer speed. For a network attached storage server, the differences are all about the infrastructure that is placed around the basic HDD array. Since capacity is something that's easy to define and measure, the real question for any NAS product is how fast will it Read and Write data. For this reason, Benchmark Reviews primarily measures NAS performance as the bandwidth achieved during a file transfer test. The first tests we perform utilize a single 1GB (1000 megabytes / 1,000,000,000 bytes) file in a transfer to and from the NAS.

With all the NAS units operating in single disk mode, many of the units have broadly similar performance, but there's still an almost 2:1 ratio between the fastest and slowest test results. The differences are mostly down to CPU performance and system architecture in this test. The ASUSTOR AS-604T comes very close to knocking off the top performer in this test, the QNAP TS-879U-RP. I'll call it a tie, which is an excellent result, considering that the QNAP has an Intel Core i3 CPU that's much more powerful than most of the other CPUs in play here, including the D2700 Atom in the AS-604T. The rest of the QNAP units run in the mid-80 MB/s range, with not too much difference between Atom-based and Marvell-based models. The Thecus N5550 slots in at third place, and the EonNAS 850X comes out in fourth. As we mentioned in our EonNAS reviews, their data integrity features take away a good sized chunk out of their read/write performance. Most people who buy a 4-bay NAS don't care too much about single disk performance, but it's useful to get an understanding of any possible issues with the basic design of the system. It definitely looks like the ASUSTOR architecture can hold its own in Read performance; let's look at Write performance next.

Moving on to the 1 GB write bandwidth test, the 850X, TS-879U-RP, and N5550 are all basically tied for top honors, with a combined throughput of about 230MB/s. Just fractionally below those three, the AS-640T posts very good numbers again, with a combined rate of about 212 MB/s. The write speeds of the other models follow along with the pricing of the units and the processing power of their installed CPU. In general, the Intel Atom-based models are performing better than the Marvell-based units. The AS-604T and the Thecus both benefit from the Intel ICH10R controller though, which helps them stand head and shoulders above the other Atom-powered models in the mix.

Next up is 10 GB (1000 metric megabytes / 10,000,000,000 bytes) file transfer testing. Using the single-disk configuration in each NAS, and a Gigabit Ethernet connection, network throughput will be put to the test, and the effect of any system or hardware caches will be minimized.

10GB Single-Disk Test Results

Examining 10GB basic file transfer speeds, The ASUSTOR AS-604T racks up its first outright win. Later in this section I'll show you another measurement that demonstrates this exemplary Read performance. For now, just know that the AS-604T excels at sequential Read tasks. The mid-range QNAP models all got a boost, compared to the 1 GB file transfers. Their read speed went up by approximately 10 MB/s, to a combined average of 95 MB/s. The TS-879U-RP and the Thecus N5550 only pick up a few extra MB/s. Clearly none of these units were bothered by handling very large files. Later in our testing, we will look at some other NAS test protocols that feature small file sizes, which is a common situation for backup applications. Once again, you get none of the advantages of redundancy with a single disk or JBOD configuration, and most NAS users will go for one of the RAID configurations. These figures are not precisely what the average user will experience; those will be seen later in our RAID 5 tests.

In our 10GB write performance tests, the performance of all the NAS units is similar to their showing with the smaller sized, 1 GB file. The ASUSTOR AS-604T comes in a hair behind the same top three performers that ruled the 1GB Read test. The actual results are also pretty much the same, not just the rankings. The combined Read scores for the AS-604T vary by less than 0.2% between the 1GB and the 10GB benchmarks. It definitely looks like the newer Atom-based models have a clear advantage in Write tests, over the older Atoms and the Marvell ARM-based models.

In general, write performance tends to show up any weaknesses in the device architecture, especially when RAID is employed. There are some exceptions, but the AS-604T provides a very clear example. Here's the throughput chart from the NIC on the host PC, and you can see that the Read test is using every last bit of bandwidth that the GbE connection can give it. Seriously, this is the absolute performance limit for a NAS that relies on a single GbE connection to transport data back and forth across the network. The Write test is stressing some other part of the signal chain, and one or more components in that chain are struggling to keep up, so the throughput results are somewhat below the theoretical limit for a GbE NAS.

Next we're going to look at RAID 5 performance, where the ASUSTOR AS-604T will have to compete with some heavy-duty challengers in the QNAP product line. Since the QNAP TS-259 Pro and TS-219P+ don't support the RAID5 configuration that we normally use to test large format NAS products, we won't be including their results in this next comparison.

NAS Comparison Products

• EonNAS 1100 NAS Network Storage Server
• EonNAS 850X NAS Network Storage Server
• Thecus N5550 4-Bay SATA NAS Server
• Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ v2 Gigabit 4-bay SATA NAS Server
• QNAP TS-879U-RP Gigabit 8-bay SATA NAS Server
• QNAP TS-219P+ Gigabit 2-Bay SATA NAS server
• QNAP TS-259 Pro Gigabit 2-Bay SATA NAS server
• QNAP TS-659 Pro II Gigabit 6-Bay SATA NAS server
• QNAP TS-419P II Gigabit 4-bay SATA NAS Server

1GB RAID 5 Test Results

If you've got more than three HDD spindle to put in play, it makes sense to use one of the more advanced RAID configurations. RAID 5 is one of the most popular setups, primarily due to the balance it exhibits between capacity and redundancy. Not surprisingly, most NAS units that can support more than three HDDs also support RAID 5, so it makes sense to use it for test purposes. Most NAS products that can support RAID 5 go beyond the minimum number of drive bays, to a total of four, so that is the number of drives that I typically use to test with, even though I could get by with only three.

The results for RAID 5 Read testing show the ASUSTOR AS-604T running ahead of all the other units we've tested, racking up an impressive 119.0 MB/s read speed with 1 GB files and Jumbo Frames enabled. That's quite a feat, as the mighty TS-879U-RP uses its Intel Core i3 CPU to good advantage, and the ASUSTOR AS-604T does its thing with only a Dual-Core Intel Atom. All of these NAS platforms do a credible job here, though. None of them would do a poor job in a typical READ scenario; it's typically the Write performance that separates the men from the not-so-men.

The 1 GB RAID 5 disk write test shows more clearly the strain that this particular RAID configuration puts on the NAS infrastructure. It's well known that RAID 5 write performance can be a weak point, with all the computation overhead involved and the extra parity bits that need to be calculated and written to each of the drives. The only way to overcome that is with raw computational horsepower, which is why the ARM-based models lag way behind both the Intel Atom and Core i3 units. The ASUSTOR AS-604T puts in a good performance, just slightly behind the usual group of three heavyweights at the front. The top performer is the QNAP TS-879U-RP, and it writes this particular data set to disk about 15% faster than the AS-604T. The Marvell-based NAS devices just can't compete at the same level here. It's an inescapable fact that the simplest assignment any NAS can perform is basic backup duty, and in order to do that task well, you need to buy the most powerful system to effectively reap the benefits of a multi-disk array. Don't scrimp on the NAS platform if you can help it.

Next up is 10 GB (1000 metric megabytes / 10,000,000,000 bytes) file transfer testing. Using the 4-disk RAID 5 configuration in each NAS, and a single Gigabit connection, network throughput will be put to the test, and the effect of any system or hardware caches will be minimized.

10GB RAID 5 Test Results

Looking at read tests with a single 10GB file, the ASUSTOR AS-604T still sits at the top of the performance ladder, with a read speed that's more than 5% faster than the next highest performing unit. The results still generally favor the more expensive models, even though the AS-604T upsets that theory. Then you have the NAS units with ZFS operating systems, which run slower than the Linux-based boxes, at least when comparing similar hardware. It's not a 1:1 ratio of improvement with higher cost anymore; the market has gotten more complex than that. The bigger issue is this: in order to do substantially better than this, you have to upgrade the network connection; GbE is only good for 125 MB/s on a theoretical basis, and several of these models are banging up against that ceiling.

Looking at Write tests with a single 10GB file, the results are not all that different from the 1 GB tests. The ASUSTOR AS-604T runs at exactly the same average speed; the results for both 1500 MTU and Jumbo Frame results are identical. The ASUSTOR AS-604T has to work a little harder than the models with an i3, but the CPU load didn't really get much higher than 50% during RAID 5 testing. The Marvell-based units always had the CPU maxed out in Write activity, and it really hurts the RAID performance. The other thing that makes a difference is the presence of a dedicated RAID controller like the ICH10R chip that is found in the ASUSTOR and the Thecus. It takes a significant load off the CPU, and its architecture and instruction set is optimized for HDD I/O.

All in all, my impression of these test results is that the ASUSTOR AS-604T is an excellent performer that exceeded my expectations. The marketing materials for this model have been a bit imprecise about the CPU specifications, perhaps because ASUSTOR thought people wouldn't believe the performance they achieved with an Atom Dual-Core. The Read performance was brilliant, and the Write performance was fully competitive. I'm a believer now.

NAS Comparison Products

• EonNAS 1100 NAS Network Storage Server
• EonNAS 850X NAS Network Storage Server
• Thecus N5550 4-Bay SATA NAS Server
• Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ v2 Gigabit 4-bay SATA NAS Server
• QNAP TS-879U-RP Gigabit 8-bay SATA NAS Server
• QNAP TS-659 Pro II Gigabit 6-Bay SATA NAS server
• QNAP TS-419P II Gigabit 4-bay SATA NAS Server

Intel NASPT Test Results

NASPT brings an important perspective to our test protocol, as it is designed to measure the performance of a NAS system, as viewed from the end user's perspective. Benchmarks like ATTO use Direct I/O Access to accurately measure disk performance with minimal influence from the OS and the host platform. This provides important, objective data that can be used to measure raw, physical performance. While it's critical to measure the base performance, it's also important to quantify what you can expect using real-world applications, and that's exactly what NASPT does. In keeping with the real-world scenario, I only run these tests on the RAID 5 configurations, since that is what most users with a mid-size NAS are going to use. It just doesn't make sense to run realistic test scenarios on unrealistic hardware configurations.

One of the disadvantages of NASPT is that it is influenced by the amount of memory installed on the client, and it was designed for systems that had 2-4 GB of RAM. Consequently, two of the tests give unrealistic results with modern systems, because they are measuring the speed of the buffer on the client, instead of the actual NAS performance. For that reason, we will completely ignore the results for "HD Video Record" and "File Copy to NAS". Shown here is a batch run of 5 cycles through the tests, which turned out to be a bit slower than the individual runs. There seemed to be some wrinkles in the batch testing that don't show up on individual test runs, which is a bit of a pain, to be honest. The numbers in the chart below are an average of five separate runs, which I believe are more accurate than results from a consolidated batch run.

With a single, basic GbE interface in place, the results look somewhat similar to the first set of data I have from this test. No individual test gets very far past the ~ 120 MB/s theoretical barrier, but several of them are in the 70-90 MB/s range. Some of the tests have very low transfer rates, and that's due to the nature of the test. The Content Creation test for example, simulates a user creating a web page, accessing multiple sources for the content. The Directory Copy tests use several hundred directories and several thousand files to test a typical backup and restore scenario. That's one of the most real-world types of test, and it's useful for all of us to have a standard set of test data to use, because my directory of 1,000 random small files is never going to be the same as your directory of 1,000 random small files.

To summarize things, here are consolidated charts of the "Fast" NASPT tests, the "Medium-Speed" tests, and finally the "Slow" ones. First, the tests with relatively fast transfer rates. The ASUSTOR AS-604T aces all three of the HD Video Playback trials. With 4x Video, the AS-604T hits a high of 121.4 MB/s, which is close to the theoretical limit for a single GbE connection. All of these units were all tested with a normal, GbE network connection, in order to eliminate network connectivity as a variable. Running the TS-879U-RP or 850X with one or more 10GbE interfaces would radically change the results. Of course, that option is only available if you throw another couple of thousands of dollars towards the solution, so we'll continue to compare apples to apples here. These three benchmarks are essentially all sequential Read tests, so the star performance of the ASUSTOR shouldn't really be surprising.

The Medium-Speed tests are a bit of a mixed bag, with a rivalry developing between the TS-879U-RP and the ASUSTOR AS-604T. The Thecus N5550 and the EonNAS 850X have to duke it out for third place in this grouping. The mixture of Reads and Writes is what makes this set of charts all topsy-turvy. Add in the fact that the Office Productivity and the File transfer tests use a bunch of smaller files, so that you no longer have the simplicity of sequential transfers with big, dense files, and you get a mixed bag. Such is reality though, for a large number of potential users. That's why this test suite is so important, because it measures performance with real-world data.

The "Slow" tests generally are slow because the file transfers are done with data sets that contain a bunch of small files of irregular size. In addition, the Directory Copy tests are accessing the file system index much more heavily than in the other tests. This adds a unique component that could be critically important for some users. The Directory Copy To NAS and Directory Copy From NAS results show consistent results for the two top contenders, the EonNAS 850X and the ASUSTOR AS-640T. The Thecus N5550 does a massive flip-flop on performance for these two tests though. I can't explain how or why there is such a reversal of fortune in the Directory Copy results, but this is a good demonstration of why it pays to look closely at your potential use cases when shopping for any H/W or S/W solution. The Photo Album test is a bunch of small files again, of varying sizes, arranged in a complex directory structure. This is a very common type of data set, and these results show the N5550 providing the best performance with this kind of data, even though the overall transfer speeds are quite low.

The NASPT benchmark shows that the ASUSTOR AS-604T generally excels at real world tasks. Beyond the simple sequential results that are easy to measure and very consistent, is a world of data that is immeasurably complex in its variations. The Intel NASPT suite is one of the few that challenges NAS devices with realistic data sets. The results can be a bit messy to interpret, but they provide the greatest potential insight into NAS performance of any commonly used benchmark.

NAS Comparison Products

• EonNAS 1100 NAS Network Storage Server
• EonNAS 850X NAS Network Storage Server
• Thecus N5550 4-Bay SATA NAS Server
• Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ v2 Gigabit 4-bay SATA NAS Server
• QNAP TS-879U-RP Gigabit 8-bay SATA NAS Server

Non-Traditional NAS Test Results

In addition to measuring simple timed transfers, to determine how fast it will read and write contiguous blocks of data, Benchmark Reviews was also able to measures NAS performance using some tests that are traditionally used for internal drives. By mapping the ASUSTOR AS-604T as a local drive, some of our favorite HDD/SSD benchmarking tools worked just fine. Just like the NASPT test suite, I only run these tests on the RAID 5 configuration, as that is the most realistic scenario for a system like this. Some NAS products don't work too well with this type of test program; even though they may have the ability to map the NAS device to a drive letter, they're still not treated like local drives by the Operating System. I didn't have that problem with the ASUSTOR AS-604T, so let's look at some results...

ATTO Disk Benchmark Results

The ATTO Disk Benchmark program is free, and offers a comprehensive set of test variables to work with. In terms of disk performance, it measures interface transfer rates at various intervals for a user-specified length and then reports read and write speeds for these spot-tests. There are some minor improvements made to the 2.46 version of the program that allow for test lengths up to 2GB, but all of our benchmarks are conducted with 256MB total length. ATTO Disk Benchmark requires that an active partition be set on the drive being tested. Please consider the results displayed by this benchmark to be basic bandwidth speed performance indicators.

The ASUSTOR AS-604T turned in a solid performance on ATTO, reaching an average peak Read speed of 117.4 MB/s and an average peak Write speed of 113.9 MB/s. These results are close to the very top tier of NAS performance, and a faster networking connection will be required in order to move much farther beyond this level. With sequential performance like this powering the device, it's no wonder the ASUSTOR AS-604T does so well in some of the other, more structured test scenarios.

It's good to keep in mind that these ATTO tests are not always indicative of real-world performance, due to the sequential access mode used. In most cases, the results are going to be close to the numbers achieved in timed Read and Write tests. They are also going to be way above the results from some of the more challenging tests in the Intel NASPT suite. It's interesting to note that roughly 95% of the maximum performance level was reached by the 32 kB block size. That's a sign of good RAID management, and the high performance hard drives that are used in our testing.

CrystalDiskMark Results

CrystalDiskMark 3.0 is a file transfer and operational bandwidth benchmark tool from Crystal Dew World that offers performance transfer speed results using sequential, 512KB random, and 4KB random samples. For our test results chart below, the 4KB 32-Queue Depth read and write performance was measured using a 1000MB space. CrystalDiskMark requires that an active partition be set on the drive being tested. Benchmark Reviews uses CrystalDiskMark to illustrate operational IOPS performance with multiple threads. In addition to our other tests, this benchmark allows us to determine operational bandwidth under heavy load.

The combination of the ASUSTOR AS-604T and four Western Digital Caviar Black WD7502AAEX 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s generates some excellent numbers in this test. The AS-604T didn't come out on top in either of the Read or Write tests, but the combination of the two scores is right up there with several of the other top performers. It pulls a respectable 68.1 MB/s on sequential Read and 99.9 MB/s average on sequential Write tests. Looking at the 4k tests, they show very low numbers, but that's typical of HDDs, even in a RAID configuration. Increasing the queue depth didn't really help matters, either. That's one of the huge advantages that SSDs bring to the table, is the ability to handle thousand of small data chunks very gracefully. The 512k results for the AS-604T aren't too bad, though.

All in all, these are a respectable set of results for Network Attached Storage. Sure, they're a bit lower than a true local drive connection, directly into the SATA controller on the motherboard. But, for a NAS device mimicking a local HDD, the ASUSTOR AS-604T performs very well.

NAS Server Final Thoughts

My first and solemn duty is to remind everyone that relying on a collection of drives in any RAID configuration for data backup purposes is a huge error. RAID systems provide protection against loss of services, not loss of data. Several examples will illustrate the problem, I hope:

• the drive controller goes bad and corrupts the data on all the drives in the array
• the entire storage device is physically or electrically damaged by external forces
• the entire storage device is lost, stolen, or destroyed
• a single drive in a RAID 5 cluster dies and during the rebuild process, which puts higher stress on the remaining drives, a second drive fails
• floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, etc. (AKA El Niño, Derecho)

All these points lead to the inescapable conclusion that multiple drives in a common system, in a single location do not provide effective and reliable data backup. Throughout this review I've talked about high-availability systems, and the ASUSTOR AS-604T fits that description well, especially when employed in a RAID 5 or RAID 6 configuration. With a single drive failure, your data is still available and accessible. The NAS device stays online the entire time while the failed drive is replaced and the array is rebuilt. That's what RAID systems are designed to do. The inherent redundancy is not meant to serve as a backup file set. Remember, we're not talking about losing data here, we're only talking about the ability to keep working uninterrupted, if one or two drives should fail.

If you look closely at the ATTO Disk Benchmark for the ASUSTOR AS-604T NAS Server, you see another benefit of such a system, even when straddled with obsolete GbE NICs. The full performance of the system is reached at the 32KB chunk size. That means that the system isn't just good at transferring data in a linear, sequential manner, it's good at handling smaller chunks of data too. Take a look at other system and see how well they handle smaller random chunks of data, compared to large sequential chunks, and you'll see how valuable this type of performance is.

In contrast to some Mega-NAS products I've tested recently, the ASUSTOR AS-604T is a product that most readers of Benchmark Reviews would probably contemplate purchasing. The cost of HDDs is coming down, although not to where they were before the Thailand floods, and the total storage needs of a modern household with all the latest high tech goodies is increasing rapidly. Although you can start with one disk and expand/migrate to RAID volumes later, I would recommend beginning with at least two drives, to get some data redundancy right away. Especially if you plan on using your NAS as front line storage, if you can avoid having to restore your data from backups, it's worth it.

The typical home-based network is going to stay on Gigabit Ethernet for awhile, while SMBs are going to start migrating to 10GbE this year. The cost to upgrade switches and routers to 10 GbE is coming down quickly, and anyone who is buying business class or enterprise servers is finally going to be able to improve the transactional throughput of their core systems without breaking the bank. If you're making that kind of investment in IT infrastructure, this article isn't for you. For the rest of us, this 4-bay GbE NAS is sitting in the sweet spot for cost and performance. Its performance is top notch, and the price is still reasonable.

So, what conclusions can we draw about this high performance, four-bay ASUSTOR AS-604T NAS server? Click NEXT PAGE to find out, and discuss...

ASUSTOR AS-604T Conclusion

Although the rating and final score mentioned in this conclusion are made to be as objective as possible, please be advised that every author perceives these factors differently at various points in time. As Albert Einstein said, "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." While we each do our best to ensure that all aspects of the product are considered, there are often times unforeseen market conditions and manufacturer changes which occur after publication that could render our rating obsolete. Please do not base any purchase solely on our conclusions, as they represent our product rating for the sample received which may differ from retail versions.

The performance of the ASUSTOR AS-604T is excellent, no question about it. It achieves top-level performance, even when compared to some big-iron solutions that cost significantly more. During timed transfers of 1GB and 10GB files the AS-604T recorded Read speeds of 122 MB/s and Write speeds of 112 MB/s. These are RAID 5 results, and the only ones that really matter, since I suspect 90%+ of all users will choose that operating mode. The Intel Atom D2700 processor inside was never maxed out during these tests, and the 1GB of SDRAM didn't hold the system back in these tests. The balancing act of capacity, speed and cost has to land somewhere, and ASUSTOR put together a well-balanced package that delivers the goods. The USB 3.0 performance is a much needed shot in the arm for interfacing with portable devices. The dual GbE network interfaces are perfectly suitable here, and the Broadcom NICs did an excellent job of keeping the bits flowing smoothly. The NIC throughput was pegged at 99.9% for the entire Read test on several occasions.

The four-bay tower form factor of the ASUSTOR AS-604T allows for the use of a two-line display on the front of the unit, which was handy for system monitoring and for out-of-the-box setup. The status LEDs for each HDD are easy to see. All the controls are easily accessed on the front panel, including the USB connector. The side and top panels are well finished, with a classy brushed metal finish. I'm fine with the absence of a door to cover the front panel from an aesthetic standpoint, although you miss out on the option of having a dust filter mounted there.

The construction quality of the ASUSTOR AS-604T was just right, I thought. Both internally and externally, things were well designed and well put together. The drive trays are very nicely built, and slide in and out smoothly. The outer shell and the inner framework were modern, sturdy designs that fit together well and came apart easily when needed. I appreciate good mechanical design, especially when cost is a factor. When you take away everything that doesn't add value, you can sometimes come up with a very pleasing object. ASUSTOR provides a 2 Year warranty, which is quite reasonable for a complex system that is going to see 24/7 service.

The ASUSTOR AS-604T is targeted to a growing class of NAS users, I think. The expansion of cloud-based services has really opened the public's eyes to the advantages of centralized storage, that's universally accessible. ASUSTOR has all the basics covered in their standard software apps, from cloud-based services to mobile access with both iOS and Android. The ultra low power sleep mode, combined with Wake-on-LAN provides an easy way to reduce operating costs and extend HDD life. The local display capability is a new addition that extends the capabilities of this NAS for media streaming. Lastly, the folder-cased 256-bit encryption is a real bonus for those who want an extra measure of security for their data. Volume-based encryption is a big fail, with unacceptable performance degradation.

As of April 2013 the ASUSTOR AS-604T model was listed for $715 (Amazon | Newegg), and was out of stock at Newegg. Given the number of drive bays you get, the high-end Intel chips inside, the transfer speeds it achieves, the construction quality, and the features it offers, I think that's a very attractive price. ASUSTOR will be releasing a new lower cost line of NAS models with more modest internals, but the AS-604T and its siblings are meant to compete head-on with the best Atom-based products the competition has on offer.

Benchmark Reviews has enjoyed testing a variety of network storage solutions, and with the wide range of products on offer from a number of vendors, anyone in need of a NAS server can find one to fit their current and future needs. The biggest problem is choosing one; that's why we go into so much detail in our reviews, to help you figure out what level of performance and features is right for you. If you need a staggering array of features and 10GbE-class performance, then you need to look elsewhere to meet those needs. If you just need the storage capacity, the high throughput and continuity of service that four bays of RAID 5, 6, or 10 provides, in a small tower package, then the ASUSTOR AS-604T is an excellent candidate for you.

Pros:

+ Very high transfer speeds
+ Local HDMI Display capability
+ Folder-based encryption
+ High quality construction
+ 1GB SDRAM is standard
+ Two USB 3.0 ports (Front & Back)
+ Built-in Firewall & Network Defender
+ Very quiet operation
+ Integrated 250W power supply
+ All the usual support apps available
+ Active Company and Community support

Cons:

- Commercial backup S/W not bundled
- No air filters for HDDs or controller
- No locks on drive trays
- Drive trays and bays not labeled 1,2,3,4

Ratings:

• Performance: 9.50
• Appearance: 9.00
• Construction: 9.25
• Functionality: 9.25
• Value: 9.00

Final Score: 9.20 out of 10.

Excellence Achievement: Benchmark Reviews Golden Tachometer Award.

COMMENT QUESTION: How many drive bays do you require from a NAS server?

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