Asustor AS-604T review

The Asustor AS-604T is a four-bay network-attached storage enclosure that provides up to 16GBs of storage space, data protection and many connection ports, as well as a wonderfully easy user interface. You can even download third-party apps to provide extra functions specific to your business.

Installing hard disks in the AS-604T is a simple affair. Unusually, the AS-604 T lets you initialise the hard disks without the need to find it on your network with a PC-based utility; you can do it simply with the NAS’s two-line LCD display and some buttons.

The AS-604T’s built-in menu also has a one-touch backup option that’ll copy the contents of any drive plugged into the USB3 port on the front to the NAS’s internal storage, lets you view the IP address and subnet mask of its network connection, see how large its storage volume is and change its network name and network connection settings.

As well as the USB3 port on the front, the AS-604T has five rear USB ports, two eSATA ports and a HDMI port. It’s equipped with a 2.13GHz dual-core Intel Atom processor and 1GB of DDR3 RAM, which is expandable to 3GB. Two Ethernet ports can be used for failover and load-balancing.

Asustor is comparatively new to the NAS market, but we were pleased to find that the NAS’s web interface compares well to those of top-flight rivals such as Synology and QNAP. If you connect to it via a web browser you see a neat screen of colourful and clearly labelled icons. These icons open windows when clicked that you can then drag around as you can in Windows or Mac OS. A handy search tool at the top right of the interface makes it easy to find anything that isn’t immediately apparent.

The Asustor AS-604T’s web interface is easy on the eye and easy to use

It’s easy to find everything you need, from the NAS’s own file manager to backup settings and configuration options for external devices connected to the eSATA and USB ports, such as external hard disks, printers, wireless adaptors and the communication interface for an uninterruptable power supply (UPS).

As with all the best NAS manufacturers, Asustor has created an app centre from which you can add extra features to the AS-604T. There’s a wide selection available, including Dolphin, which is an open-source social network that could serve as an alternative to your office intranet. You can even install ticketing systems to track support issues. There are many multimedia applications, including a Boxee server that lets you use the AS-604T as a media player via the HDMI port on the back. You can control the media server by either using a mouse and keyboard connected to the NAS or installing an app to your Android or iOS device.

When you connect to the NAS’s web interface it checks online for firmware updates automatically. There’s also a helpful pop-up that guides you through the key features and settings of the interface. These include Asustor Cloud Connect, which lets you use the AS-604T as a personal cloud server. The clear onscreen instructions ease the process of setting up the cloud server.

The NAS defaults to a RAID 5 volume, which we regard to be the ideal compromise between capacity and redundancy for a four-disk array. If one drive fails in a RAID 5 array your data will still be safe and the lost drive can be reconstructed on a new disk. However, if more drives fail, you will lose data.

We tested the NAS using four 3TB Western Digital Red hard disks, which gave us 8.11TB of capacity when formatted as a RAID 5 volume. The AS-604T’s Atom processor makes the AS-604T more powerful than many rivals. This not only means it runs apps more easily, it also leads to improved transfer speeds.

We tested transfer speeds to both a Windows share on the AS-604T and an iSCSI target. While a shared folder can be accessed by many users, an iSCSI target is only accessible to a single user. The iSCSI target is mounted on their PC as if it was a local hard disk. Because the user’s computer handles more of the throughput processing, iSCSI targets are faster to access and to write.

In our SMB transfer tests, the AS-604T produced an average large file transfer speed of 88.9MB/s, which is based on a write speed of 96.4MB/s and a read speed of 81.4MB/s. In our always-challenging small file test, the NAS averaged 17.4MB/s, with a write speed of 14.7MB/s and a read speed of 20.1MB/s.

Meanwhile, our iSCSI test achieved a large file throughput of 133.1MB/s write and 92.4MB/s read for an average of 112.8MB/s. When it came to small files, we saw an average of 62.7MB/s, based on 92.9MB/s write and 32.5MB/s read.

The Asustor AS-604T costs £355 excluding VAT, which is a good price for a powerful NAS enclosure with a slick interface. It’s both faster and cheaper than the QNAP TS-469 Pro and compares well against other four-bay NAS enclosures on the market. If you want a fast, well priced and easy to use NAS then you should buy the Asustor AS-604T.