ASUSTOR Lockerstor NAS Drive 0TB 8 Bay HDD Storage,AS6508T

Having worked with several different Networked and NAS devices over the years, both at home and work, I decided to replace my very old home Buffalo NAS. After reading a few reviews on home NAS's, it came down to what I wanted to do with it, in terms of hardware, software and upgradability. As the usual suspects, Synology and Qnap where also in the running, however, I went for another NAS I haven't used before, the Asustor Lockerstor 4 AS6604T.This is really a business NAS, rather than a home NAS, but it ticked all the right boxes for me, cheaper that Synolgy or Qnap for roughly the same specs. I installed 8GB ram in the AS6604T, rather than the standard 4GB, it also accepts a large selection of differrent compatible drives, has Dual M.2 NVMe SSD ports for fast caching, more specially 2.5 GbE ports with up to 5 Gbps under Link Aggregation, since my home computer came with a 2.5 Gbps port, this is a nice bonus for me.The Asustore software is available through it's App Central and has a load of applications, although it's still not quiet as polished as the Synology or Qnap applications, it is, however, catching up fast.For newbies using the NAS for the first time, you can install the OS and setup the NAS by running the default easy installer, it'll do all the install work for you, for the experienced user who wants control, you can manually install the OS.I install 4 x 4TB Seagate Ironwolf NAS hard drives, you'll need a screw-driver to install these, but it shouldn't be a problem, install went smoothly, and is set at RAID 5.I've had the system running for a few days now, no errors to report and I'm very happy with it, I'm glad I got this NAS, it is doing everything I needed it to do for a good price. Time to retire the old home Buffalo NAS.Yashi

This is a solid piece of kit.The good:* Great hardware for the price vs competitors.* ADM is a decent NAS OS overall.* Supports Docker and Portainer.* Supports Virtual Box VMs.* Allows installation of other OSs.* 4x NVMEs allows for wide setup options.* The front display is useful for in-place troubleshooting.* The HDMI port is also useful for troubleshooting on a faulty network.* Dual 2.5G ethernet ports as standard.* Supports Adaptive Link Aggregation for switches without native Link Aggregation support.* RAID performance is solid.The bad:* Only a single USB port in the back.* Only a single USB port in the front.* No official USB Hub support, so can't (officially) plug in multiple devices in the back nor the front.* The built-in media web apps are useless due to lack of some important codecs.* The built-in folder sync app is poorly designed, and not a candidate replacement for Nextcloud.* The mobile apps are better but still passable.* No built-in support for encrypted backups to non-MyArchive external devices.* No built-in support for Bitlocker encrypted devices.* No built-in support for local-encrypted cloud backups.* File names in encrypted shares are limited to 143 characters, same as competitors.* No way to control RAID rebuild speed via ADM, though can be controlled via SSH.As a home office NAS, this is performing its duties well, and the caveats are manageable for this role. The poor built-in encryption support is a nuisance but this is a general issue with NAS devices at this price point. It can be hacked in via a few packages and some duct tape.Home-only users looking for a competent 4K media experience should look into other devices first due to the spotty codec support.

As an IT professional, I am utterly impressed!I tried the other brands at great cost with flaky software and rubbish errors, crap support ,this product is simple to use and if you are skilled, even better. As for support I havent needed it, it just works.I havent got time to go into detail, but as the Company Director, I highly suggest you buy this first.

I wanted a 6-bay NAS so the release notification email from Asustor came at the right moment. I compared the Lockerstor 6 Gen 2's specs with the similarly priced Synology DS1621+ and QNAP TS-673A. The DS1621+ lost out on its CPU and 1Gb/s network ports. The TS-673A nearly won as it has two standard PCIe slots for expansion and two NVMe slots for cache but, at 14 litres, it's 40% larger than the Lockerstor 6 which is a very compact 10 litres (the DS1621+ is 11 litres). The major downside of the Lockerstor 6 is that, if you want 10Gb/s LAN speeds, you're forced to use Asustor's dedicated 10Gb/s card which isn't available in this country yet and you have to give up all the NVMe slots to make room for it. The other problem is that the compatibility list hasn't been updated yet so you're guessing if you want to upgrade the RAM. The 8GB Crucial SODIMM I had didn't work but the 16GB Samsung left over from a laptop upgrade did.Installation went smoothly enough with six 6TB IronWolf drives in RAID10. These took almost 24 hours to initialise then another 17 hours to copy 12TB of data across (would have been 10 hours with a 10Gb/s card). The overall performance is excellent as expected and I expect the CPU will handle any apps I throw at it. The whole thing is very quiet, even when the disk are working. I've only had it for a week so it's early days yet but I don't think I'll regret my purchase, apart from the niggles noted above. It's well worth considering if you're after a six-bay NAS but do give the TS-673A careful consideration too.