Asustor AS7008T 8-bay Intel Haswell SMB NAS Review
by Ganesh T S on November 30, 2014 5:05 PM ESTSetup Impressions and Platform Analysis
The setup process of the Asustor AS-304T was covered briefly in our detailed review. The process for the AS-7008T was very similar. Before going into that, let us take a look at what we get with the NAS package.
Asustor provides two RJ-45 cables, a US power cord, screws for both 2.5" and 3.5" drive installations. There is also an installation CD supplied with the unit, though we had no reason to use it in the setup process. The unit got a DHCP address after booting up even in diskless mode. Accessing the web UI enables the user to get started with a ste-by-step guide. A firmware update check is processed as soon as the initial setup is done.
The initial login screen allows users to take a tour of the major features of the ADM OS. The standard storage manager allows users to have a look at the various disks and volumes currently in the unit, along with the configured iSCSI LUNs and targets. Access control enables configuration of users, groups, shared folders and related permissions. While adding a shared folder, it is possible to set up encryption parameters. Beyond Access Control, we have Services as the next major configuration aspect. Some of the services such as CIFS are enabled by default. For our evaluation, we enabled CIFS, NFS and iSCSI, while ensuring that AFP was disabled. Enabling NFS service also enables a NFS privileges tab in the shared folders subsection of the Access Control section.
The other sections that we didn't pay too much attention during the review process were the App Central, Backup & Restore and Cloud Connect for external access. With the help of an Asustor ID, it is possible to have relay access to the NAS over the Internet. Ports can also be opened for direct access. App Central requires an Asustor ID for access. Enabling sideloading of apps would be a nice feature, but this currently doesn't seem to be possible.
Enabling SSH access allows more insight into the internal platform of the unit. We find that ADM 2.3 is based on Linux kernel version 3.12.20. The unit runs with 2 GB of RAM, with 256 MB reserved (the rest is available to ADM and apps). The motherboard sports an 8 series chipset (likely to be Q87).
The giveaway is the presence of a 6-port SATA controller. We still need to account for the 2 internal SATA ports and 2 eSATA ports. These seem to be fulfilled by the ASMedia ASM1062 PCIe x1 to 2x SATA III bridge chips. Interestingly, the platform utilizes Broadcom's NetLink BCM57781 Gigabit Ethernet transceivers (PCIe 2.0 x1 to 1Gbps Ethernet) for the network ports. The PCIe lanes for the expansion slot appear to be right out of the CPU rather than the PCH. The DRAM slots are SO-DIMM and run at 1600 MHz.
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buxe2quec - Monday, December 1, 2014 - link
I have a ZFS-based home-server that acts as NAS with also mail server, IMAP server (not to have mail on each client, less stuff to backup), and so on. I use a Xeon E3-1220 with 32 GB RAM and RAID10 (4x3TB).I used OmniOS (based on ilumos, a Solaris derivative) as operating system.
I would like to perform tests like the ones of this review to compare my home-built system with standard offerings (i know what I get with ZFS, I would like to know how much performances I lose), and also to compare the performances of a ZFS-based server with standard offerings that always use Linux mdadm (software RAID).
However with 32 GB (ECC) RAM (overkill, I know) doing reliable tests that are not affected by the (aggresive) ZFS caching is difficult.
Could anyone give me suggestions, or could Anandtech test a similar setup? after all, the product of this review is an i3 that may support (as some other i3 chips do) ECC, it would be a good choice for home-builds, whenever the desired fileystem is ZFS (OmniOS but also FreeNAs, or NAS4free).
Thanks.
PrimozR - Monday, December 1, 2014 - link
Maybe they should test a HP Microserver running FreeNAS?As far as i can see, the Microserver series is by far the best when it comes to a cheap NAS build, if you want to run ZFS. The system with no drives costs 200 €, where you then must add 8 GB of ECC RAM, but you still get under 300 € for an ECC enabled ready made NAS case for 4 drives. Just a Xeon motherboard will cost you 140 € on the low end (for LGA-1150 CPUs, supporting ECC). With the Gen8 Microserver you even get the ability to swap out LGA-1150 CPUs. Gen7 uses AMD's offerings.
buxe2quec - Monday, December 1, 2014 - link
The Gen8 Microserver would make sense, but the Gen7 is too weak and is CPU limited. Concerning the other alternative you mention, keep in mind that Xeons are not the only option: if you can find a ECC-enabled mobo, y i3 with ECC support will do fine at a very low price. Check here for a configuration: https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/ecc-v...Concerning FreeNAS (or NAS4free, they are both good): they may not achieve the full performances for ZFS-related tasks, compared to illumos kernels (like OmniOS or Nexenta), but it would still be interesting.
DanNeely - Monday, December 1, 2014 - link
What does it need a 350W PSU for? None of the tests shown went above 135W. Even adding some margin for more power hungry drives and adding a bit of headroom to avoid efficiency/power quality penalties from running near full load it seems a 175 or 200W PSU would be more than sufficient.KAlmquist - Monday, December 1, 2014 - link
Some hard drives are specified to draw 2 amps on the 12 volt line when spinning up. Multiply 2 amps by 12 volts by 8 disks, and you have the disk drives alone drawing 192 watts while the system is powering up. In theory a user could install a 25 watt PCIe card and plug in USB devices that draw 18.5 watts. Add in power for the CPU and motherboard, and you are getting close to 300 watts.350 watts is overkill, but the cost difference between a 300 watt power supply and a 350 watt power supply is pretty minimal.
DanNeely - Monday, December 1, 2014 - link
That's what staged/sequential powerup is for. Turn your HDDs and USB drives (if you support the higher power USB modes) sequentially instead of all at once. Higher end storage servers have done this for years; I'm not sure how far down the market it's gotten.hjones - Friday, December 19, 2014 - link
If you go to the Asustor website just from the model names alone it makes me think these are re-badged Synology equipment...at the very least they are OEMing some of the technology.The ADM config & management not only looks very similar, albeit differently themed...its even using the same underlying technology - Sencha ExtJS. The app store is remarkably similar too.
Anyone know more about this company? What is their relationship with Synology?
hjones - Friday, December 19, 2014 - link
From Anandtech's own article (http://www.anandtech.com/show/7887/asustor-as304t-..."Asustor, Synology and Thecus were touted as partners building NAS units based on this platform"
jeepcrazy - Wednesday, January 28, 2015 - link
I feel completely ripped off by Asustor. Avoid them at ALL costs. My 608T operated fine for about a month and then the network ports died. Won't take an IP manually or via DHCP. After two weeks of back and forth email (one per day since they respond at 3am) they finally provided an RMA. I sent it to them, they kept it two weeks and sent it back, supposedly with a new main board. It has the EXACT same issue. So incredibly unacceptable for a business class NAS to have such terrible, slow, and ineffective support. If you have an outage, expect ZERO sympathy from Asustor. They have no cross shipment capability and no advance replacement offering. I wish I had bought a Synology or built my own. This cost me 12TB of data.