Cheap Home NAS – Asustor AS1102T & AS3304T Review
Thanks to a sharp rise in the number of people using cloud storage options like Apple’s iCloud, Google Drive or even a backup solution like Backblaze, having your own NAS at home really isn’t all that necessary for a whole lot of people. But, for the small subset that want fast, local access to their data, or want to run their own basic servers for something like Plex, these two options from Asustor are one of the cheapest ways to do just that.
This big one is the AS3304T, a 4 bay NAS that uses slide-out drive sleds. These are “toolless” as to install a standard 3.5” HDD you just unclip the two plastic rails on the side, place your drive in with the ports sticking out away from the handle, then clip the sides back in and slot the drive into the NAS. You will need a screwdriver if you want to install a 2.5” drive like an SSD, but it’s fairly easy to do so no big deal.
This unit comes fitted with a quad core ARM CPU, specifically a Realtek RTD1296 which runs at just 1.4GHz. It’s based on an ARM Cortex A53 core, a design from 2012 making this as old as AMD’s Bulldozer FX CPUs! As you might expect, it’s not exactly the fastest chip in the world, and it’s not helped a great deal by the just 2GB of DDR4 RAM they’ve soldered to the board for it. For the price tag though, this configuration is very common so it’s not a big deal.
You do get a 2.5Gbps ethernet port on the back, which does require both your devices and your router or switch to run at 2.5Gbps or higher for that to be effective but it is a nice bonus to have that I can’t say I’ve seen on all that many NAS units like this. You do also get 3 USB 3 ports, two on the back and one on the front which is paired with a copy button that when a drive is attached and the button pressed will automatically copy everything on the drive to your array inside. And of course you’ve got a load of activity LEDs on the front to let you know what’s going on, including one for each drive bay.
As for the smaller one, this is the AS1102T and despite it’s different model name it’s basically the same NAS with two key differences. This is a 2 bay NAS that you remove the side cover then use little thumb screws to hold drives in place. That means this only fits 3.5” drives unlike the 3304 which can fit either. The other difference is not in the CPU but the RAM, as this only comes with 1GB and is also non-upgradable. It still features a 2.5Gbps ethernet port on the back, and a couple USB 3 ports although only 2 this time and no copy button.
So that’s a brief look at the hardware, let’s have a peek at the software side. As with most NAS units like this, they both offer a web interface that’s designed to look like a virtual desktop. You’ve got a taskbar up at the top which includes an activity monitor, and a grid of “apps”, both ones that come as part of the OS like the app store, settings and file manager, and any apps you install from the store like Plex.
The app store offers the usual selection of download managers, web hosting servers, surveillance camera controllers and media apps like Plex. While you can install whatever you like, with these units in particular thanks to their CPU being a little on the weaker side you’ll struggle to run all that much at once. It can just about handle plex but even playing back a 480p film had the CPU pinned at up to 90% utilisation and that’s with a fairly long initial load time. While I expect with enough time to pre-load the content it should handle 1080p content fine, but I’d call it’s claim of “4K stream transcoding” dubious at best.
One thing these units, especially the larger 4 bay option, seem to be missing is some I suppose more advanced storage management features. While you can set your volume up as either a JBOD or a RAID 0, 1, 5, 6 or 10 array, there doesn’t seem to be an option for SSD caching which could help make use of the 2.5Gbps connection. There also doesn’t seem to be much in the way of options for things like RAID scrubbing or volume checking.
I should also mention that while I’ve mostly been speaking about the 3304T, the 1102T actually performs very similarly. I generally pins the CPU slightly higher while streaming and while it was still fast enough to not have the content buffer, it was noticeably slower to play back or even load chunks of content. For higher resolution, higher bitrate content this may struggle especially with such little RAM.
I think that brings us nicely onto the pros and cons. The main pros for both of these are their price. The 2 bay unit sells for around £150 without drives, and the 4 bay is more like £330, but when you have a look at what’s available in that price range it’s pretty much all the same RTD1296 CPU, 1 or 2GB of RAM and most don’t have 2.5Gbps ethernet, which can be another pro too. They are also really easy to set up, they’ve even got a one click option where it’ll figure out what it thinks you want and go and do it, or even if you pick the custom route it’s still only a couple clicks. That accessibility is key for this kind of unit that’s aiming for, well, non-power users.
The cons are that the low price tag comes with some tradeoffs, like build and materials quality. Both of these feel a little on the cheap side to touch, and little things like the clips on the side of the 4 bay unit’s drive sleds being so tight it snaps off so hard it literally drew blood from my finger, or that when you go to put those sleds back in unless you are really careful it can not slide in the groove fully and get wedged in.
They are also a little underwhelming in the performance department. I’m used to using (and streaming) from a NAS unit somewhat like these, but one with a now pretty old quad core Intel Celeron and 8GB of RAM, and there’s no comparison. These ones take a good 30 seconds to start playing a clip, and skipping forward past the buffered area requires another 20-30 second wait. My NAS isn’t nearly as slow, it’ll play pretty much anything within a few seconds, and again if you skip forward to outside the buffered area it’ll only be a few seconds for it to click back into place.
Speaking of the CPU power – or lack thereof – I should make it clear that while these units do offer 2.5G LAN, the CPUs are definitely on the slow side so in anything other than ideal conditions (ie not running anything, NAS is otherwise inactive) you’ll struggle to see too much of a benefit from that – especially since you can’t even use an SSD cache here. That is, of course, on top of the assumption that you can even run it at 2.5G. You’ll need a router or switch to support that, plus devices that also support it to reap the full benefits – although before anyone comments there is the side benefit of in theory being able to support multiple users transferring or streaming simultaneously. On a normal NAS I’d agree, but on these like I said the CPU just isn’t all that powerful so I’d expect that to be a more limiting factor than the network port bandwidth.
So, should you buy either of these? For the price, it’s pretty hard to argue. Yes, they are far from being ‘powerful’, and yes 99% of people that buy these will never use them at 2.5G, but if you want a local copy of your data, or want to host your own plex server at home, then these definitely aren’t bad. If you are more of a power user and don’t mind a bit more hassle, building your own NAS with old or cheap hardware isn’t a bad shout either, but if you are happy to build one yourself you probably aren’t in the market for something like this in the first place.
-
TechteamGB Score
