ASUStor AS5004T 4-Bay NAS - Closer Look and Installation
| Article Index |
|---|
| ASUStor AS5004T 4-Bay NAS |
| Closer Look and Installation |
| Specifications and Features |
| Web Interface and Setup |
| General Usage and Final Thoughts |
Drives & Installation:
We pulled out all of the racks and took a look inside of the slick AS5004T's hot-swap bay. The drive racks have a nice smooth plastic rail integrated on a steel frame so they are very rigid - unlike some cheaper racks we've seen on other devices. These racks support both 2.5" and 3.5" drives and we opted to put in four Western Digital 2TB Red drives.
While performance will certainly be faster with other drives - and SSDs, we felt that these drives represent the average users budget and the performance should be pretty solid. While the price of the AS5004T is pretty sweet at ~$459 currently, we double the cost of the unit with these drives. While there may be cheaper drives available (such as WD Green drives) they won't last as long as the Red drives (speaking from experience).
In my experience, Red drives are really solid and many NAS users are using either Western Digital Red drives or Seagate NAS drives. Our goal in this review is to replicate the experience of the average user. While slapping four 1TB SSDs inside would be amazing, the performance wouldn't be comparable to the experience of the average consumer.
ASUStor has some really nice racks and installation is a breeze. There are no sharp edges and everything fits as it should and slides into place like butter.
Software Initialization:
Once the drive are installed successfully, it's time we fire up the unit and go about initializing and installing the software on the drives. This box has some ROM that contains the basic OS, but it will need to be installed on the drives and then the RAID array configured before we can actually use the box. As you can see below, you have a couple of options - 1-Click or Custom. We chose the custom setting so we could customize a few more details as we set up this unit.
Once we specified a few details including how we wanted our disk volume setup, as well as admin password, language, timezone, server name, network features and more - we sat back and waited just a couple of minutes for the magic to take place. At the end of this short time, we were ready to go.
On the next page, we'll cover some of the hardware specifications as well as the software and applications available before we jump in any farther and show more of the web-interface.
