Asustor NAS ASUSTOR AS104T 0/4HDD, 80-AS1104T00-MA-

 

This is going to be a long one so if you’re just looking for the TL;DR, here it is: I can recommend the AS1102T for home/home office use as long as you don’t need to restrict individual service access (e.g. FTP, SSH) to specific users and/or groups. It has some issues mind you, as well as some quirks that seem like the OS team just can’t be bothered to address but at this price point, you could do a lot worse (looking at you Synology).

Before I even get into the detailed review I have to get this off of my chest. Using a NAS as a long-term backup device, unless it’s under lock-and-key and protected by a fire suppression system, is a terrible backup plan! A NAS is a device that is purpose-built for multi-client access to shared data and the purpose of RAID is to improve performance and/or uptime. RAID is not now nor has it ever been about disaster recovery.

If you use a NAS that’s sitting on your desk, in a closet, on a shelf, under the sink or whatever corner you might have stuffed it into, you need to have a copy (preferably tertiary) of your important data — this applies whether using a NAS or not — stored either offsite, “in the cloud” or at minimum, in a composite safe. I know this all comes across as bit (or a lot) preachy but my thoughts on the Asustor AS1102T are from the perspective of someone who isn’t overly concerned with the resiliency of a NAS since it isn’t a part of my backup strategy.

Now for the actual review…

The Asustor AS1102T is a competent little NAS that’s a good fit for home/home office use. As someone who spent many years working with enterprise level NAS/SAN hardware, I was surprised at how feature-rich a device at this price point could be. Support for Active Directory, iSCSI and robust email and SMS alerting was completely unexpected but very welcome. The basics are there as well – access control via users and groups and support for numerous protocols that will allow for integration into just about any environment.

One limitation however, is that you cannot restrict individual service access (e.g. FTP, SSH) to specific users and/or groups. I had hoped to enable FTP for a single user with limited permissions to an isolated “drop” folder and open the necessary ports for internet accessibility. Unfortunately this isn’t a possibility and enabling FTP would mean that if your Admin credentials are compromised, a nefarious individual could gain access to the entire contents of your NAS directly over the internet. If the Admin and other users could be restricted from access via FTP, an attacker with stolen credentials couldn’t access anything of importance over the internet – assuming you haven’t enabled EZ-Connect, exposed the Admin UI ports or done something else galactically stupid.

From a usability perspective, I found the UI to be well organized, aesthetically pleasing and fairly responsive. Features and settings are mostly where you’d expect them and overall, it’s quite intuitive – also quite enjoyable to work with. Initializing the device at first boot can be super simple or in the case of one of my devices (I have two), a bit of pain. The AS1102T will want you to update its firmware/OS as a first order of business — which you should absolutely do — but I only had a 67% success rate with the automatic process, which repeatedly failed on my second device. No I’m not bad at math, my “second” device had to be replaced so two out of the three units I initialized succeeded and one failed.

The issue was resolved simply by downloading the latest firmware package from Asustor via web browser and updating manually but if I only had one of these devices it would have been a terrible first impression. During the process, Asustor will do its best to protect you from making dumb decisions that could compromise the security of your data and you absolutely should follow their advice. A lot of noise has been made about the Deadlock ransomware attack and while Asustor, QNAP and potentially others undoubtedly bear some responsibility, so does any user who doesn’t protect their important, sensitive and/or valuable data from the internet. Overall it’s a fairly smooth affair however, and you should be up and running in a matter of minutes, even when using the “custom” option.

On the performance front, it’s mostly good news but there are a couple of caveats. The AS1102T is equipped with a 2.5Gb ethernet port, which I cannot test to its maximum capabilities since 2.5GbE compatible networking gear is mostly overpriced consumer-grade plastic crap that I avoid almost entirely. Don’t get me wrong, consumer grade gear has its uses — like a wireless AP for guest access that’s sitting in your DMZ, or an inexpensive Asustor NAS to run Plex on perhaps? — but I wouldn’t trust it in my network infrastructure.

Professional and Enterprise grade 2.5GbE gear does exist and is starting to proliferate, but it can be hard to procure and doesn’t have a great value prop as compared to 10GbE. It’s highly unlikely that I’ll ever move to 2.5GbE as 10GbE gear continues to become more ubiquitous and less cost prohibitive. With that in mind I consider the 2.5GbE capabilities a non-factor in my performance evaluation and am reporting strictly on 1GbE performance. If anything, I actually consider 2.5GbE connectivity a negative since it likely added a few dollars to the price and is at the moment, useless in my opinion.

Sustained transfer rates are right where I expect them at ~900Mb/s and the AS1102T has no trouble maintaining this level of performance even under fairly heavy load. Random access and general responsiveness is very good as well – much better than expected actually. Prior to introducing NAS devices into my home/home office network, I filled their role with a more old-school file server solution. I was expecting a drop in performance when moving to a relatively low-power device from a full-fat server with an 8C/16T CPU and 64GB RAM but to my surprise and delight, there was little to none.

All of my performance observations go out the window when ClamAV is actively scanning however. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not accusing ClamAV or the AS1102T of any wrongdoing here. Malware scanning can eat up resources and 1GB of RAM gets consumed rather quickly – Media Mode disabled, more on that later. In general it isn’t too intrusive and the NAS will continue to operate acceptably, until it doesn’t. After grinding on a weekly scan for more than 24 hours, the NAS began to get progressively more sluggish until it was almost completely unresponsive. After several failed attempts to open the Admin UI I was finally able to do so and stop the Clamscan process, which immediately resolved the issue.

I run ClamAV on both of my Linux machines and have never had any issues but they also have much more capable CPUs and a minimum of 32GB RAM, so it’s really not a fair comparison. The lesson learned here is that you’ll need to be more selective about where you point ClamAV for its scans. If you have a large Plex library with preview thumbnails enabled, you’re going to have a bad time unless you exclude the “Plex Media Server” folder or at least selective sub-folders that can easily contain hundreds-of-thousands of files for a malware scanner to chew on. It could be argued that scanning for malware on a NAS/SAN is unnecessary/redundant if you are adhering to best practices elsewhere and I generally agree with that sentiment. Regardless, I appreciate that the option is available and even with its caveats, consider it a benefit overall.

The last thing I want to cover is my experience with having to replace one of my units after completely setting it up. This includes configuring system options, users/groups/shares, transferring many TB of data, building Plex libraries, etc. During the entirety of the setup process, the AS1102T unit in question was in another area of my home and completely out of earshot. After I had it ready for deployment, I discovered that the fan was defective (it was making unhealthy noises) and requested a replacement from Amazon. In preparation I researched the process of migrating drives to a new device and discovered that it should be quite simple – just insert the old drive(s) into the new unit and let the magic happen.

I received a new unit the next day without issue (thanks Amazon!) and proceeded to transfer the drive from old unit to new; inserting it into bay-2, which is where it was in the original unit. Why bay-2 and not bay-1? Because it was plainly obvious based upon the internal layout and fan placement that thermals would be better for a single-drive system if bay-1 was left open. Why single-drive? I vaguely touched on this earlier but RAID serves no purpose in my use-case. I have more resilient systems in place for continual backup and a few hours of downtime in the event of drive failure is a non-issue. Alternatively, there would be no performance gain for sequential reads/writes while limited by a 1GbE network and there aren’t enough simultaneous users for seek times to benefit more than trivially. I.E. neither RAID0 nor RAID1 is of any benefit to me.

Upon first boot of the new unit I was greeted not with the friendly sight of my NAS in the same sate as it was before, but a rather unfriendly message that I needed to install a drive in bay-1. What? I had no issue setting up two identical units with a single drive in bay-2 so why now must the drive be in bay-1? I thought that I must be missing something so I referred back to the Asustor documentation and upon closer inspection, discovered a small footnote indicating that, in fact, when transferring drives to a replacement unit, bay-1 must be populated.

I could understand this requirement in certain RAID configurations. I could even understand if as a technical limitation of the hardware/firmware/OS, that bay-1 had to be populated for the device to function. What I do not accept is that a single-drive configuration can be initialized and operate perfectly from bay-2 but cannot be moved to bay-2 in a replacement unit. This screams of an OS team that simply can’t be bothered to remove a restriction that perhaps applied to outmoded hardware. There is absolutely no valid reason that the new unit couldn’t run from bay-2 when an identical device was able to do so.

So why am I so hung up on this? Because having the drive in bay-1 causes a 2C average temperature increase of the drive and a 5C average increase of the CPU! In order to confirm that this wasn’t just silicon variance I reinitialized the new unit with a spare drive in bay-2 and sure enough, the CPU temp dropped by ~5C. Granted, even the elevated temps are well below anything I would consider concerning but the fact is that heat = degradation regardless of how minor. I ended up running the drive in bay-1 rather than starting over, mainly because I felt that a little bit of extra heat was the lesser of two evils as compared to the extra wear on the drive caused by repopulating it. The fact of the matter is that neither option is optimal and this silly restriction shouldn’t exist.

This review is already too long and there several are other topics I could get into but won’t. Before I wrap it up however, I want to briefly touch on Media Mode. Simply put: turn it off unless you are using media services that directly benefit from it – Plex does not. Otherwise, you’ll just be robbing Plex and other processes of valuable RAM for no benefit.

Okay I’m done. My verdict? Well, you already know since I gave it away the top! If the 4-star rating seems high based on some of my criticisms, let me clarify that I do feel the good far outweighs the bad here. The AS1102T capably performs its intended function of a home/home office NAS and does it at a very competitive price point.