Maybe I don't understand but what are you getting for your $1500 over building your own NAS with equivalent/better hardware?
I understand the whole off-the-shelf and it just works aspect is worth a bit but $1500 seems extortionately high for what is essential just hot-swap bays on top of anything you could build yourself.
I agree, I have my NAS, rackmount case (no hot swap sadly), and 5 2tb drives for a total of about $1000.00. (Drives were purchased at a slight premium to what they can be had for now).
Here we go again. Not everyone wants to spend the time to research, build and install their own NAS. Having a single point of contact for support and software updates is also worth the $$ to some people and especially businesses.
That being said, I do think the Asus is overpriced compared to a Synology, even taking into consideration the Haswell hardware.
I don't disagree at all with that, there certainly is (as evidenced by the expanding options by various companies) a market for a one-stop, plug in the drives, connect the ethernet cable and power it up units. People are even willing to pay a premium for such a device in a space efficient package.
However, any decent tech guy should be able to put together a decent simple Linux-based box (which is what FreeNAS is based off of) for file servicing. These days, with the hardware which is available, the bar to putting together something small, or large, power efficient, and rock solid is much lower and much less expensive than many people realize.
Yes, I know it's based off of FreeBSD... technicalities... :) I guess I should have, since I was just using a basic generalization of the type of OS, that it was 'based of *nix' since they share very similar underpinnings.
I don't think anyone is disputing that SOME premium is justified by the value of a pre-built, supported machine. The question seems to revolve around how MUCH premium is justified, especially in larger NAS boxes like this one.
Having recently built a media server with virtually identical specs, I can say that with Asustor you're paying a 200% markup for the convenience of pre-built and support. Which seems a bit steep, especially from Asustor, which doesn't have the brand cachet of Synology.
Holy crap $1500?! subtracting i3-4330, GA-H97N, 2GB RAM, a 2x SATA3 PCIe controller, some usb stick for the os & a psu thats over $1100 just for the case & that custom operating system... to which i can only say: apple would be twice as rich if it had such margins...
We have not had the best run with the Asustor NAS devices - seem to have some bugs they need to sort out - We have found that even as backup targets they do bizarre things like stop sharing the folders via CIFS/SMB. (log in and reshare, problem solved) We expect a NAS to run for months/years without issues, and sadly this had not been the case for these units.
I have to agree. When you build a NAS, it needs to be rock-solid, always on, and always available. Oh, and reliable disks help too. I have a FreeNAS 7 based system in my basement (Rack-mounted, Gigabyte board, Phenom II x 2 processor, 4gb ram, 5x2tb drives in RAID5) and it has been restarted maybe a half dozen times in as many years - most of those being deliberate power-downs for reconfigurations of the hardware (ram upgrades/chassis swap/1 drive replacement & rebuild) and it has been probably the most reliable OS I've ever dealt with.
Considering FreeNAS is a free, open source project, I would think that the people at Asustor would be able to come at least as close.
mine is i7-920 with 8 GB ram not ECC but never had stability issues its both CPU and ram underclocked as well (only 1 of the 3 ram slot works got the mobo for like £40-50 when i was doing folding@home with 3x9800GX2 ) 6 HDDs gets rebooted for updates every so 3-6 months (running 2003 server (the XP x64 based one) the later versions of MS server (vista at the time it was Built so been running for long time) was giving me issues with network performance
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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Lycoming360 - Sunday, November 30, 2014 - link
I'd love to have that rebuild speed in my Synology unit. But, you certainly do pay for that speed!Jcowley - Sunday, November 30, 2014 - link
Maybe I don't understand but what are you getting for your $1500 over building your own NAS with equivalent/better hardware?I understand the whole off-the-shelf and it just works aspect is worth a bit but $1500 seems extortionately high for what is essential just hot-swap bays on top of anything you could build yourself.
bill.rookard - Sunday, November 30, 2014 - link
I agree, I have my NAS, rackmount case (no hot swap sadly), and 5 2tb drives for a total of about $1000.00. (Drives were purchased at a slight premium to what they can be had for now).DigitalFreak - Monday, December 1, 2014 - link
Here we go again. Not everyone wants to spend the time to research, build and install their own NAS. Having a single point of contact for support and software updates is also worth the $$ to some people and especially businesses.That being said, I do think the Asus is overpriced compared to a Synology, even taking into consideration the Haswell hardware.
bill.rookard - Monday, December 1, 2014 - link
I don't disagree at all with that, there certainly is (as evidenced by the expanding options by various companies) a market for a one-stop, plug in the drives, connect the ethernet cable and power it up units. People are even willing to pay a premium for such a device in a space efficient package.However, any decent tech guy should be able to put together a decent simple Linux-based box (which is what FreeNAS is based off of) for file servicing. These days, with the hardware which is available, the bar to putting together something small, or large, power efficient, and rock solid is much lower and much less expensive than many people realize.
PrimozR - Monday, December 1, 2014 - link
FreeNAS is based off FreeBSD. Still Unix, not Linux though.bill.rookard - Monday, December 1, 2014 - link
Yes, I know it's based off of FreeBSD... technicalities... :) I guess I should have, since I was just using a basic generalization of the type of OS, that it was 'based of *nix' since they share very similar underpinnings.Black Obsidian - Monday, December 1, 2014 - link
I don't think anyone is disputing that SOME premium is justified by the value of a pre-built, supported machine. The question seems to revolve around how MUCH premium is justified, especially in larger NAS boxes like this one.Having recently built a media server with virtually identical specs, I can say that with Asustor you're paying a 200% markup for the convenience of pre-built and support. Which seems a bit steep, especially from Asustor, which doesn't have the brand cachet of Synology.
peterfares - Monday, December 1, 2014 - link
Here we go again. People thinking these insane markups are justifiable.peterfares - Monday, December 1, 2014 - link
I'm sure it makes sense in SOME cases to buy these prebuilts but some people seem to really over-value their time.bernstein - Sunday, November 30, 2014 - link
Holy crap $1500?! subtracting i3-4330, GA-H97N, 2GB RAM, a 2x SATA3 PCIe controller, some usb stick for the os & a psu thats over $1100 just for the case & that custom operating system...to which i can only say: apple would be twice as rich if it had such margins...
tocker - Sunday, November 30, 2014 - link
We have not had the best run with the Asustor NAS devices - seem to have some bugs they need to sort out - We have found that even as backup targets they do bizarre things like stop sharing the folders via CIFS/SMB. (log in and reshare, problem solved)We expect a NAS to run for months/years without issues, and sadly this had not been the case for these units.
bill.rookard - Sunday, November 30, 2014 - link
I have to agree. When you build a NAS, it needs to be rock-solid, always on, and always available. Oh, and reliable disks help too. I have a FreeNAS 7 based system in my basement (Rack-mounted, Gigabyte board, Phenom II x 2 processor, 4gb ram, 5x2tb drives in RAID5) and it has been restarted maybe a half dozen times in as many years - most of those being deliberate power-downs for reconfigurations of the hardware (ram upgrades/chassis swap/1 drive replacement & rebuild) and it has been probably the most reliable OS I've ever dealt with.Considering FreeNAS is a free, open source project, I would think that the people at Asustor would be able to come at least as close.
leexgx - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
mine is i7-920 with 8 GB ram not ECC but never had stability issues its both CPU and ram underclocked as well (only 1 of the 3 ram slot works got the mobo for like £40-50 when i was doing folding@home with 3x9800GX2 ) 6 HDDs gets rebooted for updates every so 3-6 months (running 2003 server (the XP x64 based one) the later versions of MS server (vista at the time it was Built so been running for long time) was giving me issues with network performancemrdude - Sunday, November 30, 2014 - link
>$1500 for an i3 with 2GB of non-ECC RAM and only dual ethernet?That's a steal!
bill.rookard - Sunday, November 30, 2014 - link
No kidding, for $1500.00 it should almost come populated with at least 8x2tb drives.bernstein - Monday, December 1, 2014 - link
not almost... at $1500 it has to come with at least 8x3TB, everthing less is just ripping consumers off...Wkstar - Sunday, November 30, 2014 - link
EMachines came in 1999 and knocked the computer world prices in half. Somebody will come and do the same to NAS.. There prices are crazyKerryl - Monday, December 1, 2014 - link
Don't throw out your tongue...Asustor seems to be lower-priced in the league of i3 NAS. Over $2000 out there for even lower cpu configuration:http://www.amazon.com/QNAP-TS-1079-PRO-10-Bay-iSCS...
http://www.amazon.com/Synology-DiskStation-Diskles...
techticket - Monday, December 1, 2014 - link
at the core-i3 QNAP TS-879-PRO-U cost $2000+ from newegg.....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.