*Note* - Fairplay to @ASUSTORTV , after my criticism of the system not arriving with M.2 SSD Heatsinks, they have produced a test video showing compelling evidence that the PCIe Gen 3x1 slots are not able to generate enough heat on a x1 speed each. I will be conducting sustained tests later on that factor in spiked use, but I have to hand it to them, it is a great response and makes a solid case. You can find their video here - ruclips.net/video/Vr__5B3oGtM/видео.html
17:07 The heatsinks for the SoC are under the motherboard. Heatsinks for the SSDs if preferred, are sold separately. They're the same heatsinks as the AS-T10G3. During testing, we could not cause SSDs to overheat in our NAS. This isn't to say that some SSDs in the future might need heatsinks due to their design, we wanted to keep the NAS flexible to take almost any SSD while giving people the option to add SSDs later on and not pass those costs onto people who might not need them. Remember, the PCIe lanes are limited to x1 to match with the 10GbE and provide a higher quantity without much sacrifice in real world performance. Since they're x1, they're not being fully throttled sequentially and thus, run cooler.
15:41 The problem with the claim that the SSDs aren't able to stretch their legs is that, practically, no copper-based network solution is going to allow 40 Gbps on PCIe 3.0 x4. We'd have to buy a 40GbE controller, add heatsinks for the cooling, tell everyone to upgrade their PCs with QSFP+ 40GbE cards, tell everyone to buy expensive 40GbE switches for their network etc... PCIe 3.0 x1 perfectly matches with a 10GbE port, and to be honest, as a NAS user myself, very few actually do much internal transferring to make x4 sockets worthwhile. 99/100 interactions are through the NIC, the main entry point, and SSDs provide unbelievably superior random I/O performance, which helps with, actions that require HUGE amounts of small files, like video editing, audio editing, photo transfers and more. Such actions will not even saturate Gigabit, but will be substantially faster, orders of magnitude faster than regular hard drives. 10GbE helps balance it out.
@ASUSTORTV A couple of n00b PCIe-related Qs here: 1. Isn't 3.0 x1 slightly slower than 10GbE's theoretical max throughput? 2. N5105 has 8 3.0 lanes. How do you stick 12 NVMe drive slots and a 10GbE controller on top of that? What am I missing here?
I got a Flashstor 6 and installed all six SSDs. The Storage Manager shows "M.2-1" to "M.2-6", but I couldn't find the info showing which one corresponds to which physical drive. Is there a map or picture or something online that can tell me the link between "M.2-1" and its physical location? Thank you very much in advance!
11:11 If we shoved an i3 in there, it'd cook itself. We want our customers to have their cake and eat it too. An i3 would still not support ECC either. The profile just won't physically support a Xeon.
What about the new N series? Looks pretty low power and kinda fit for this form factor? PS. it looks theres plenty of room to host a large heatsink, would probablt fit 35W cpu if sacrifice a bit of noise probably
@@bits2646 We plan these things well in advance. We aren't that big to get the super secret far away advance stuff from Intel or AMD. If we swap BGA design during development, we have to retest everything. And we don't want to deal with bugs or unforeseen issues that can cause data loss. We need to be careful to maintain our trust we have with our customers. Also. We really wanted to make this quiet. Otherwise it defeats one of the purposes of an SSD NAS.
i just purchased one for a friend as a gift. 12 2tb samsung 980s installed, just because. the ssds seem to run at about 50 ish degrees and it remains quiet. i’ve gotten heatsinks and i’ll test that out later once i’ve installed them. if i had one criticism, it’s the plastic case. i would have preferred aluminum as it would be more durable for the long term. overall, a lovely device i will be recommending to people.
I hope you do a followup on this device with a recomended ssd choice and tests. The hdmi output is also interesting. How well would that work vs. Accessing media on the network.
Is there any drawback to connecting the NAS to a Mac Studio with SSD for the 10G speed and the rest of the computers on the network via ethernet? Do you get the same functionality in terms of storage and apps? Looking at 6-bay unit.
I've recently found your site and your reviews here. Great job! I'd like to know if this would support having a SSD pool to have a PS 5 access it for game storage. Not sure how a PS5 would deal with NAS storage for game content.Any thoughts?
Some notes about these Asustor FS 67 series NVMe NAS's.... 1. Currently the only 4TB NVMe supported is the WD RED 4TB (WDS400T1R0C-68BDK0) per the Asustor HCL . 2. The NAS will stream DSD (up to quad-DSD) to an attached USB DAC. However, none of the USB DACs listed on Asustor's HCL support DSD.
In your next video, can you please advise the best NVMEs to use based on the throttling of Gen 3 x 1 and how to populate the NAS for best throughput i.e. is 3 NVMEs with Raid 5 the best. Thanks.
Do you have any cpu heat issues? I’ve read on Reddit that some said there is design flaw that the contact of the cpu heatsink isn’t contacted correctly to the CPU
Thank you for the review of this product. I have been giving consideration to it and the form factor along with the SSD's does have an appeal. This would be a home use application that does have SD, HD and 4k movies. There is also a fairly large amount of music files as MP3 and video as well. Other than that, it's all about data and the combined volume is in and around 7TB. Again; home use two users. The question: what Drives of good quality would you recommend? I also understand through reading, the device is RAID capable. Is that part correct? In advance, thank you!
After watching your reviews we have bought the Flashstor 12 for our video editing NAS. Great so far. One of our editing laptops is older and only can support 2.5Gb ethernet adapter speeds due to USB 3.1 Gen 1 bottleneck. If I got a second 2.5Gb adapter is it possible to set it up to get 2x 2.5Gb throughput❓ If so what do I need and how do I set it up❓
I am debating between DIY vs Terramaster F4-423 (currently at $399) vs this unit (Flashtor 6). I’ll be using it for basic storage and remote cloud access (Gdrive GPhotos replacement potentially Home Plex Server). What do you recommend?
Definitely interested but it is quite ‘plasticky’. I would have been keener to buy with a metal chasis, plastic just doesn’t say quality. I am quite keen to see what the competition produces that is similar. Kudos though for kicking off this type of NAS.
So if I understood this right, If I'm still running a 1Gbps switch/router my home network would be the bottleneck not the NAS itself right (with the 6 bay)
14:04 -- "a thousand megs per slot" . . . but assuming that is (or is not) with all six slot filled? For instance, if I make a pool out of three of six slots on FS6706T, then will each slot in such a pool get double that (i.e., 2,000 megs per slot)? With much appreciation. Great video 👍 Kindest regards, friends and neighbours.
Just please someone to tell the manufacturers, to put full size pci slot (or mobile 3070 soldered to the mb) and space for gpu and here you go, the perfect plex server 😍😍😍
Spdif is a no for me. I am getting one of these but will be going Ethernet to my transport to the DAC. This will be replacing my DS220+. Fits and better looking 😊
A better CPU could have gotten Gen4 NVMe speeds, but then it would have doubled the cost and would be marketed towards content creators photo/video editing. With the N5105 and those ports it seems like it's going to be marketed towards Plex media users.🤔
NVME's don't get that hot. This is only needed if you are actually pushing them but 90% of the gen3 x4 NVME's even when using them in high end computing don't need heatsink. A NAS unless the user is pushing it with multiple users in an x4 configuration don't need heatsinks. If they are limited by x1 i don't see them even remotely coming close to needing a heatsink. This is another one of those geek things that the higher end users say you need but don't realize that 99% of the people watching their content don't. There are also some studies out there that show they work better when they are warmed up. This is definitely seen when talking immersion cooling.
I'd completely agree with this. I have the Flashtor 6 with 3 X Samsung Evo 970 Plus NVMe drives (notorious for getting hot) and even when pushing 100's of GBs of data across onto them I've only seen them reach a maximum of 52 Deg C (60 Deg C at the controller). That's without any heatsinks. The fan in these Flashtor systems when set to auto usually stays on its lowest speed at around 900 RPM and if heat builds up it can increase and quickly get the temps under control. Heat is certainly not an issue for these drives. Granted I'm only using 3 drives in RAID 5 and the Flashtor only has 2.5Gb LAN so maybe it's a different story in the FS12 when 12 drives are used, but certainly the FS6 is fine. I think Asustor has made a very good system here and I'm certainly happy with it so far.
Seriously considering one of these. M.2 is cheaper than SATA for flash storage. Any other storage appliance offering a good option for flash storage is incredibly expensive.
The product shows registered, but the website says it's not, so I can't open a ticket. I leave voice messages with Asustor and they don't return my calls. I'm kind of stuck and not happy with their support. The 12 bay unit is displaying errors when I scrub and sometimes says the resource is not available. I don't have these kinds of issues with NAS units from other brands. I've never had to contact the manufacturer for the other NAS units I have. Disappointing.
The US based tech support never returned my calls. I ended up calling Taiwan. It looks like in order to open a ticket you have to do a search. I was getting errors and lost data with Raid 0. They said to use raid 5 which slows down the unit a great deal. The fastest sustained I can get with Raid 5 is 600MB. I was getting 1GB for 3 minutes then 875MB with RAID 0. I'd say this device is good for size, portability, and power, and it's a good value if you want to run solid state media. If you want better performance a NAS with 6 spinning drives or more in it will give much better performance with solid 1GB reads and writes.
Hmm. Need something like this but with ZFS and encryption capabilities. I guess that would need a stronger CPU. I don't really care about the external bottleneck, even 1 Gb is more than enough for what I need. I do care about the dimensions, noise, and power consumption, which far outweigh the network limits. Can you boot a TrueNAS on this or is the system drive vendor-locked?
From a cursory look at the relevant ArsTechnica forums, you do not want to go ZFS w/o AES-NI support in your CPU but when you have it, it's fairly smooth sailing. N5105 here does have such support.
I bought one of these and decided to go for the Flashstor 6 version. I simply couldn't justify the jump in price between the FS6 to FS12 for an extra 6 drive slots and the 10Gb LAN. For me the FS6 is plenty fast enough. The reason I decided on one of these as they are almost silent (the fan is really very quiet) and use barely any power. In sleep mode they make no noise at all and use literally nothing (less than 1 watt). But the main reason is they wake up from sleep in less than 2 seconds vs my Synology NAS which takes sone 40+ seconds to wake all the drives up and come to life. Mine is not accessible online and i only access it via VPN so my data remains safe and its plenty fast enough for moving files around my network vs my Synology with its limited 1Gb LAN ports (why Synology). The only slight issue i have is with regards to the NVMe drives. Because there is limited compatibility listed on the Asustor site for these i thought I'd try just a couple of Samsung Evo 970 Plus 2TB drives to start with and if tgey worked ok I'd add more. I bought two and set them up as RAID 1 and everything worked fine. I then thought id add another and change to RAID 5, so i got another 2TB exact same drive bought only 2 days later (all bought from Amazon). It set up as RAID 5 fine and seemed all ok but the 3rd drive seemed to be considerably hotter than the previous two. Also i noticed the 3rd drive was showing as having "ERROR INFORMATION LOG ENTRIES" when i checked that drive in the NVMe SSD status log. I assumed that drive might be faulty so RMA'd it. But the replacement was exactly the same. So i completely deleted the volume and set all 3 drives up a fresh as RAID 5. But that 3rd drive is still getting the ERROR INFORMATION LOG ENTRIES which is odd. The initial two drives don't have them and they are exactly the same drives. Ive tried swapping drive slots etc but that 3rd drive just seems different. The only physical difference is the first two drives were manufactured date of 2022 but the 3rd (and replacement 4th drive) are manufactured dated 2023 so presumably newer firmware. Any ideas what these ERROR INFORMATION LOG ENTRIES are and are they a reason for concern? Why does this 2023 drive have them but not the 1st two drives? @Asustor TV Apart from that issue im loving the system and its a great price too for such a silent, low powered (energy wise) and rapid system)
Forgot to add...... I only see these ERROR INFORMATION LOG ENTRIES increase each time the system boots or wakes up from sleep. During normal use it doesn't have any errors increasing. Just when it boots or wakes up I see another one of two entries. I've just no way of knowing what they are, but it's only related to that one newer 2023 drive. Any thoughts?
All I can really tell you is to use compatible SSDs that we have validated. We constantly add new ones all the time to our list, but this depends on receiving the drives from the various manufacturers, testing them, solving bugs, trying different SSD firmware updates and validating those or dealing with kernel issues. There isn't much I can do except say to use compatible drives at this moment in time.
@@ASUSTOR_YT I'm very excited about this unit, but that compatibility list is very short. I find none under "Hard Disk" that includes many SSDs. Under "M.2 SSD" I can filter to "FS 67" and I see a hand full (only a single high priced 4TB). Am I missing something? I'd like to see the Crucial drives used in the "ServerTheHome" youtube channel where he shows 12x Crucial P3 Plus 4TB.
@@windfire5380 Hey there! Our NAS is not restricted to the SSDs in the compatibility list. The compatibility list is only for SSDs we have had the opportunity to test and verify. There are far more SSD vendors than hard drive vendors and we are working hard with our partners as well as find new partners to add new SSDs all the time! An SSD not on our compatibility list may work and 9/10 times it probably will. It's the outliers we have to worry about. If Servethehome's SSDs work, buy them and feel free to send a report to us on your experience! If buying unverified SSDs, just make sure you buy from a dealer with a good return policy. Thanks!
I think the worst Problem is realy the CPU. If Asus has used something like an AMD V1500B or an R2314 with 15 Watts but 16 PCIE 3.0 lanes, they could use 4 lanes for the NIC's and USB which would be enough to even saturate a dual 10gbit NIC and 2 10gbit USB 3.2 Ports at the same time. That the NVME only run at 1GB/s or 2GB/s at the Store 6 wouldn't be the problem. But with intel there are no efficient 16 lanes processors, so you have to go AMD which is notorious problematic at providing embedded Prozessors, Synology has some around.
Probably a great review video, but I have to say that I don't understand point #1. I could puke looking at this device, and I wouldn't even want to put it into a closed cabinet. It's a great device in terms of functionality and price, I'd definitely want to see more of these on the market, but the design really rubs me the wrong way.
I saw your review of the Asustor Flashstor 12 Pro NVMe NAS and liked it, but I think there is missing information, such as: The type of memory used, is it ECC? Do we need to buy heat sinks for the M.2 drives? What is the type of the PCI lane connection, is it 3.1 or higher? Best budget that i found in Portugal was: Nome Marca unidade Preço Totais Preço Final ASUSTOR 12-Bay M.2 FLASHSTOR 12 PRO Asus 1 898,90 € 898,90 € Samsung 2TB SSD 970 EVO PLUS M2 PCIe - MZ-V7S2T0BW Samsung 12 113,58 € 1 362,96 € 2 333,90 € Samsung 2TB 980 Pro NVMe - MZ-V8P2T0BW Samsung 12 143,82 € 1 725,84 € 2 696,78 € Memória RAM Kingston 16GB 2666MHz DDR4 Non-ECC CL19 SODIMM - KVR26S19S8/16 Kingston 2 36,02 € 72,04 € Just for reference. Thank you for your attention. Keep up the good work. Best regards.
Thanks for you comment and feedback bud. I should add, that the full/massive review that I said in this videos introduction was taking longer is now LIVE, and be found here - ruclips.net/video/uV_Qp75rWcw/видео.html It does cover a number of your follow up Qs. Have a great week
N5105 - Max # of PCI Express Lanes = 8 - Each NVME = Capable of 4 lanes. Whats the point of running NVME? May as well use SATA SSD's. Now does anyone (at home) have the capability to run 60Gb/s (12x5Gb/s) networking. Nope. But..... Thinking outside the box and allowing for smb multi channel. maybe a third edition 12 bay, a 'proper' processor, with 4 10Gb/s SFP+ on the back and we might have some serious sales. There are definitely people out there who have that sort of capability. (like me) 10Gb networking for home is a sensible price currently with mikrotik but 25/40/100 is still going to be real pricey until corporate entities start rolling this stuff to the pre-loved market
The 1GBps per drive comment isn't exactly accurate. Due to the CPU only having 8 PCIe lanes, they're using ASMedia PCIe MUX chips to share all of the PCIe bandwidth. In a RAID6 array with all 12 bays populated with 2TB Intel 670Ps, I haven't seen more than around 3100 MB/s reads and 840 MB/s writes.
Let's all face facts - if you're expecting to fill a 10Gbps link with traffic all the time, or want/need a 25Gbps or 40Gbps+ link, you're not looking at Asustor. You're looking at professional solutions. My potential use for this is in long-term NAS storage, not performant storage. Meaning, I want to have 12x4TB disks in RAID 6, and load them with Plex data, and let them sit there. For over a decade. And be reliable. Something spinners can't really nod their head at. With RAID 6 NVME drives, I would expect easily 10+ years of use - I'd expect that the CPU or memory may suffer a defect long before the drives die. The only thing I wish the 12 bay unit had would be dual 10Gbps ports - not for throughput (and I'm sure some people would scream about that) but for redundancy, so that if I do a switch upgrade and it reloads, nothing is interrupted from a file mount perspective.
They are actually very quiet systems and barely noticeable. I have the FS6 and the fan when set to auto usually runs just under 900rpm, you can barely hear it. They also use very little power too and when they go to sleep the fan completely stops so the system is silent.
When I hear you referring to these units as "cheap" or "affordable", I have to wonder if it's me who's living on another planet, or you. I think they are horrendously priced. Perhaps you are thinking of their use by large companies? But just saying they're less horrendous than some of their competitors doesn't make; them affordable for a lot of us.
Wait… Let's nip this in the bud, shall we. Making no apology, this is a ha'p'orth o' tar situation, though in NAS terms we are talking more leaky coracle than creaky man-o'-war. More than that, here is an offstage exercise in elephant wallpapering. Having said that, I do agree pretty much with mostly all you've said in your pros and cons presentation, and with ASUSTOR TV clarifications and rejoinders - but! It's one thing to announce that the Flashstor is populated exclusively with NVMe cards, whilst waving the like to your ear. I can't fault your delivery. It's priceless. NVMe cards are silent as a dead parrot, of course. But the so called bad boy Flashstor NAS - with a manufacturer stated Operation Noise Level of 18.7 dB due to the built-in active cooling fan - is, well, audible. Not just audible, but with a strangely metallic, nay, ironic quality to the noise it produces. Very quiet, and barely noticeable, are relative euphemisms, like almost silent, not useful in translation. Every ear hears what it will. An acceptable level of noise depends subjectively on individual use case scenarios. I suspect the majority of any gathered assembly will be quite comfortable agreeing to differ on the intrusiveness, or otherwise, of a quiet device. Should you buy it? On a promise it never makes and doesn't need to keep? See below. Even if you convince yourself to overlook the inclusion of a fan in the specification you won't be spared the morning after. Remove the fan, or if it stops working of its own accord, and there is a series of loud beeps to alert all those within earshot. No secret. It insists functionally on being present and correct, and, as I may have indicated, it is noisy. It oughtn't be, but it is. Thanks to two significant factors: a) aerodynamics, that is diameter/rotational speed/blade design, and in particular b) dual ball bearings. I suggest a line be drawn at the apparently casual use of the word silent since it means something entirely different, by varying degree indicative of subjective experience of noise level, to the word quiet. (Aside - You might want to call the latter virtual silence. Mmmm, a bit 70's. How about artificial silence. Ah, yes, now that's modern. Of course, it still means categorically not silent in any way whatsoever, rather of questionable value, a compensatory poor substitute for the real thing. Who cares.) If you require silence, as in Solid State Drive, and wish to eliminate noise, as in Hard Disk Drive, then buying this machine is a straight forward mistake. Silent running is statedly not a design goal of Asustor for the Flashstor. That being the case, what exactly is the unique selling point of it? The case is sturdy, but looks ridiculous and those are fake exhausts on the front, whatever Robbie told you. If the proprietor also spreads the idea that its firmware potentially is written to deny service to those seeking to install other operating systems or scupper rival investment groups' memory modules then at best it is an impressive marketing exercise. Impressive as in pressurised sales loosening your grip on reality and in turn making a big dent in your paltry bitcoin collection. So keep your eye on the pea. Let's go. Highly desirable, a silent domestic NAS device is a simple and clear objective concept. A design goal. Not a missed target. Not an Asustor. Not even a Flashstor. Not yet, anyway. "We really wanted to make this quiet. Otherwise it defeats one of the purposes of an SSD NAS." ASUSTOR TV on Flashstor thermal design. There it is again. That word. Quiet. Which means a degree of noisy as opposed to silent, which still means no noise. My DS415+, admittedly with Noctua fans, is quiet. The reason for upgrading the fans is to eliminate the metallic grinding sound of ball bearings, to make the fans mostly tolerable. But it isn't silent with four WD Red 3TB HDD. The escaping chronic fixed level mechanical grinding sound, more than the lively seek chatter, is a depressive ergonomic that is unnatural to the ear and a factor in long term hearing loss. That's why most sysops tend to not live in the server room, or for that matter the plant room, or indeed the belfry. What? Away then, with those naughty hard disks and their moving parts. "We really wanted to make this quiet." Really. If by quiet you mean to some extent noisy, you succeeded. You didn't. You did otherwise. Strange, but true. In doing so, as vouchsafed, you defeated one of the purposes of an SSD NAS. The distinguishing purpose presumably being to follow through silent (not quiet) solid state disks with a silent (not quiet) solid state chassis. You know. Silent storage. Instead of quiet (to some extent noisy) storage. By design. Quiet and not silent. Why is that? It needn't be that way. Why stop at swapping out the last of those noisy spinning hard disks to do only half a job by leaving in a noisy spinning fan? With respect to the Flashstor, use of the word silent is merely adjectival funny business, or perhaps fanny business. What I mean is this. A useful practical description of an object ought to align itself with the uniformly objective convergence of common experience and yield to independent measurement and verification. Thus, silent is probably a non-starter as there is a ball bearing attached. Unless that fan is off, that is, or running on mag-lev oil bearings below the bar of a gentle draught, which it isn't in this case. Thursday there were two Flashstor 6 in stock on Amazon UK - then there was one. Closer inspection of the design would suggest that Asustor decided wilfully not to render the wannabe silent NAS in fact, silent. The thick plottens. The design includes certain case screw heads, including the fan screws, buried under pressed and recessed hard plastic caps that defy attempts to disassemble. The dimensions of the custom fan itself are suboptimal to sourcing better performing parts. Fan replacement is therefore a factory repair. Good luck with that. One is physically hampered even from modding the Flashstor for peace and quiet. One may be seen but not heard, but one's NAS - not so much. When the Flashtor NAS is up and running, it's tiddly built-in fan is up and running. The ball bearing noise can be heard distinctly and penetratingly across the room. This is not to mention the rushing sound of air. Asustor has almost succeeded with that, although the fan is rather small. In fact the airflow can only be heard if one waves the entire NAS to one's ear or, equally, places one's ear really quite close to it. That is not the major problem. The fan shifts enough air at idle to keep the inner workings from overheating and the airflow often is inaudible depending on the ambient sound of working conditions. Only in the dead of night, when you should be asleep anyway, or if you are fortunate enough to work in library conditions, can this humble rush of air be heard. The poor wee fan has to work the surrounding air a little too vigorously to waft the necessary draught. The sound level is very much like a DS423+ on SSDs, sporting replacement Noctua fans fitted with series resistors. Don't ask me how I know. Don't get me started on those cheap rattly Synology fans in a flimsy case. Why do you think I took in the Flashtor? Desperation. It certainly wasn't for looks. I want to live with my NAS, not to have to listen to it when I require to hear a pin drop. A little more commitment to acoustic performance could easily have resulted in a silent Flashstor. Misanthropic marketing motivated by the boundless wonder of public imagination supposes why produce something good and well-engineered straight off the bat when you can sell it again, and again, and again. To the tune of a waltz. The problem is this. And this is the whole point. Asustor have used, not the cheapest fan design - it demonstrates reasonably good aerodynamics and manufacturing - but cheap enough to suffer from noisy ball bearings. I say suffer, because the sound is remarkably similar to the grinding sound of a spinning hard disk. So here's a paradox for you. The elephant in the room is the Flashtor itself. As a design and marketing concept it is admirable: bold, striking and courageous. However, you could say that its greatest asset is at the same time its inevitable downfall. It is a victim of its own success. It contains the seeds of its own destruction. In other words, its balls. And it's a little fanny. There is only one thing more disheartening than suffering from noisy ball syndrome, and that is foisting your head splitting ailment on sensitive, imaginative types who are trying to manifest (let's be generous) original thinking. That, and the blinding irony of an SSD NAS sounding for all the world like a wheezy old dog of an HDD chassis. Oooh, the bells! The decibels! 12th Gen Intel NUC with a Core i5-1240P 35W TPD in the Akasa Turing passive case with a 2.5" SSD, mSata and NVMe is for real. Silent. Oh, the sheer relief. Obviously, that represents overkill for power in a domestic NAS. Count them. How many cores? But proof of concept beyond doubt by an order of magnitude. The removal of barriers to achieving a silent NAS. How are you going to test the market for silent NAS if you don't release one? I see, you are testing the market for the acceptance of a decoy. As long as that's understood. You can be the best at taking the pea.
When you say heard from across the room, are you talking a doll house? In the dead of night, I cannot hear anything from mine with all 12 bays populated beyond about 2 meters away. That said, being that you're no stranger to replacing case fans, literally any other 4 pin fan can be plugged into the USB adapter so you can go as nuts as you want to on the sound signature. Edit: you can also completely turn off the beeping entirely in ADM via Settings > Hardware > System tab > Buzzer section > uncheck "error" (which is coincidentally the only lowercase option at the moment)
That Akasa Turing case wasn't on my radar previously, thanks for mentioning it, only 93% the size of the Flashstor! That said, if it's got 3 drives and you need both an OS and some form of redundancy on your storage pool, how exactly would you propose hitting 20TB of flash storage in it?
Disappointing. Talking very long about the procuct but still nothing about the noise of the device. If you are just saying "they are not loud" - that is not enough, I have heard the exact same comment about NAS as loud as a hairdryer.
Hi. We are not ASUS. We are ASUSTOR. We make extensive checks on our updates and products before release. We can't catch everything but we work hard to make sure our updates are stable and we allow people to beta test our software as well.
To be fair to them on this one (and I think I do touch on this), ECC memory is NOT cheap and you need beefier/more capable CPU)..so although ECC on a flash server is typically THE standard, it would be very difficult to do this and keep at the $499 price point here
If you are concerned about data reliability, then you should be keeping your data backed up regularly using the 3-2-1 method. ECC is not a white knight that guarantees data protection. The modern file systems we support, Btrfs and Ext4 already come with numerous error correcting features that keep data safe and the only file system that really requires it is ZFS. Even if we wanted to put ECC, we'd have to change the SoC because most Intel SoCs don't even support ECC to begin with and to change it would increase the cost significantly while removing features like the iGPU for the smooth transcoding that many of our customers love when using their NAS for video content. To keep data reliable, keep backups often. Us 'idiots' have only been hiring top engineers to sell these devices to customers around the world for 13 years. What do we know?
ECC will fail! Ask for failover architecture rather than failsafe hardware because all hardware will fail at some point!!! So keep it cheap but intelligent
*Note* - Fairplay to @ASUSTORTV , after my criticism of the system not arriving with M.2 SSD Heatsinks, they have produced a test video showing compelling evidence that the PCIe Gen 3x1 slots are not able to generate enough heat on a x1 speed each. I will be conducting sustained tests later on that factor in spiked use, but I have to hand it to them, it is a great response and makes a solid case. You can find their video here - ruclips.net/video/Vr__5B3oGtM/видео.html
17:07 The heatsinks for the SoC are under the motherboard. Heatsinks for the SSDs if preferred, are sold separately. They're the same heatsinks as the AS-T10G3. During testing, we could not cause SSDs to overheat in our NAS. This isn't to say that some SSDs in the future might need heatsinks due to their design, we wanted to keep the NAS flexible to take almost any SSD while giving people the option to add SSDs later on and not pass those costs onto people who might not need them. Remember, the PCIe lanes are limited to x1 to match with the 10GbE and provide a higher quantity without much sacrifice in real world performance. Since they're x1, they're not being fully throttled sequentially and thus, run cooler.
15:41 The problem with the claim that the SSDs aren't able to stretch their legs is that, practically, no copper-based network solution is going to allow 40 Gbps on PCIe 3.0 x4. We'd have to buy a 40GbE controller, add heatsinks for the cooling, tell everyone to upgrade their PCs with QSFP+ 40GbE cards, tell everyone to buy expensive 40GbE switches for their network etc... PCIe 3.0 x1 perfectly matches with a 10GbE port, and to be honest, as a NAS user myself, very few actually do much internal transferring to make x4 sockets worthwhile. 99/100 interactions are through the NIC, the main entry point, and SSDs provide unbelievably superior random I/O performance, which helps with, actions that require HUGE amounts of small files, like video editing, audio editing, photo transfers and more. Such actions will not even saturate Gigabit, but will be substantially faster, orders of magnitude faster than regular hard drives. 10GbE helps balance it out.
@@ymeshulin Thank you for your support!
@ASUSTORTV A couple of n00b PCIe-related Qs here: 1. Isn't 3.0 x1 slightly slower than 10GbE's theoretical max throughput?
2. N5105 has 8 3.0 lanes. How do you stick 12 NVMe drive slots and a 10GbE controller on top of that? What am I missing here?
I got a Flashstor 6 and installed all six SSDs. The Storage Manager shows "M.2-1" to "M.2-6", but I couldn't find the info showing which one corresponds to which physical drive. Is there a map or picture or something online that can tell me the link between "M.2-1" and its physical location? Thank you very much in advance!
For anyone interested, I have six Crucial P3 Plus 4TB CT4000P3PSSD8 PCIe 3.0 and they work just fine in my Flashstor 12.
Thanks
Thanks.. Great review!
12:13 ECC does not protect against bit rot. You need to power on the SSD every so often to protect against bit rot.
11:11 If we shoved an i3 in there, it'd cook itself. We want our customers to have their cake and eat it too. An i3 would still not support ECC either. The profile just won't physically support a Xeon.
What about the new N series? Looks pretty low power and kinda fit for this form factor? PS. it looks theres plenty of room to host a large heatsink, would probablt fit 35W cpu if sacrifice a bit of noise probably
@@bits2646 We plan these things well in advance. We aren't that big to get the super secret far away advance stuff from Intel or AMD. If we swap BGA design during development, we have to retest everything. And we don't want to deal with bugs or unforeseen issues that can cause data loss. We need to be careful to maintain our trust we have with our customers.
Also. We really wanted to make this quiet. Otherwise it defeats one of the purposes of an SSD NAS.
i just purchased one for a friend as a gift. 12 2tb samsung 980s installed, just because.
the ssds seem to run at about 50 ish degrees and it remains quiet.
i’ve gotten heatsinks and i’ll test that out later once i’ve installed them.
if i had one criticism, it’s the plastic case. i would have preferred aluminum as it would be more durable for the long term.
overall, a lovely device i will be recommending to people.
@@pauldwalker Wow, I hope that friend appreciated the spend.
I hope you do a followup on this device with a recomended ssd choice and tests. The hdmi output is also interesting. How well would that work vs. Accessing media on the network.
Is there any drawback to connecting the NAS to a Mac Studio with SSD for the 10G speed and the rest of the computers on the network via ethernet? Do you get the same functionality in terms of storage and apps? Looking at 6-bay unit.
I've recently found your site and your reviews here. Great job!
I'd like to know if this would support having a SSD pool to have a PS 5 access it for game storage. Not sure how a PS5 would deal with NAS storage for game content.Any thoughts?
Some notes about these Asustor FS 67 series NVMe NAS's....
1. Currently the only 4TB NVMe supported is the WD RED 4TB (WDS400T1R0C-68BDK0) per the Asustor HCL .
2. The NAS will stream DSD (up to quad-DSD) to an attached USB DAC. However, none of the USB DACs listed on Asustor's HCL support DSD.
In your next video, can you please advise the best NVMEs to use based on the throttling of Gen 3 x 1 and how to populate the NAS for best throughput i.e. is 3 NVMEs with Raid 5 the best. Thanks.
Do you have any cpu heat issues? I’ve read on Reddit that some said there is design flaw that the contact of the cpu heatsink isn’t contacted correctly to the CPU
Due to the throttling of the SSD's, what 4TB sticks would you recommend?
Most gen4 SSDs are available with heatsinks, so that issue is solved. Quite an appealing device, this, and the HCL lists a lot of consumer SSDs.
Thank you for the review of this product.
I have been giving consideration to it and the form factor along with the SSD's does have an appeal. This would be a home use application that does have SD, HD and 4k movies. There is also a fairly large amount of music files as MP3 and video as well. Other than that, it's all about data and the combined volume is in and around 7TB. Again; home use two users.
The question: what Drives of good quality would you recommend? I also understand through reading, the device is RAID capable. Is that part correct?
In advance, thank you!
You should put the video title "You Should Buy"🎉😊
After watching your reviews we have bought the Flashstor 12 for our video editing NAS. Great so far. One of our editing laptops is older and only can support 2.5Gb ethernet adapter speeds due to USB 3.1 Gen 1 bottleneck. If I got a second 2.5Gb adapter is it possible to set it up to get 2x 2.5Gb throughput❓ If so what do I need and how do I set it up❓
I am debating between DIY vs Terramaster F4-423 (currently at $399) vs this unit (Flashtor 6). I’ll be using it for basic storage and remote cloud access (Gdrive GPhotos replacement potentially Home Plex Server). What do you recommend?
I'm having trouble connecting it to SABRENT 10 bay hard drive docking
Do you have a video on how to set up fs6706t for a novice?
I have WD My cloud and no month fee,what are with Asustor?I hear,that for any need to pay any month fee.
Definitely interested but it is quite ‘plasticky’. I would have been keener to buy with a metal chasis, plastic just doesn’t say quality. I am quite keen to see what the competition produces that is similar. Kudos though for kicking off this type of NAS.
Hi, you were to spend around $600 for a NAS, which would you buy?
So if I understood this right, If I'm still running a 1Gbps switch/router my home network would be the bottleneck not the NAS itself right (with the 6 bay)
correct.
14:04 -- "a thousand megs per slot" . . . but assuming that is (or is not) with all six slot filled?
For instance, if I make a pool out of three of six slots on FS6706T, then will each slot in such a pool get double that (i.e., 2,000 megs per slot)?
With much appreciation. Great video 👍
Kindest regards, friends and neighbours.
Just please someone to tell the manufacturers, to put full size pci slot (or mobile 3070 soldered to the mb) and space for gpu and here you go, the perfect plex server 😍😍😍
I really miss the youtube app in NAS (AS6704T) to watch it on my TV. Asusstore please add it app central.
What would it take to get the Synology OS Software installed onto 1 of these?
I would guess that the Synology software probably has a verification check to make sure it only works on Synology hardware. - But that is a neat idea!
Spdif is a no for me. I am getting one of these but will be going Ethernet to my transport to the DAC. This will be replacing my DS220+. Fits and better looking 😊
Thank you for your support!
A better CPU could have gotten Gen4 NVMe speeds, but then it would have doubled the cost and would be marketed towards content creators photo/video editing. With the N5105 and those ports it seems like it's going to be marketed towards Plex media users.🤔
@@ymeshulin Yeah. Unnecessarily increasing costs for almost no practical gain.
Is not need ECC RAM for a reliable NAS?
NVME's don't get that hot. This is only needed if you are actually pushing them but 90% of the gen3 x4 NVME's even when using them in high end computing don't need heatsink. A NAS unless the user is pushing it with multiple users in an x4 configuration don't need heatsinks. If they are limited by x1 i don't see them even remotely coming close to needing a heatsink. This is another one of those geek things that the higher end users say you need but don't realize that 99% of the people watching their content don't. There are also some studies out there that show they work better when they are warmed up. This is definitely seen when talking immersion cooling.
I'd completely agree with this.
I have the Flashtor 6 with 3 X Samsung Evo 970 Plus NVMe drives (notorious for getting hot) and even when pushing 100's of GBs of data across onto them I've only seen them reach a maximum of 52 Deg C (60 Deg C at the controller). That's without any heatsinks.
The fan in these Flashtor systems when set to auto usually stays on its lowest speed at around 900 RPM and if heat builds up it can increase and quickly get the temps under control. Heat is certainly not an issue for these drives.
Granted I'm only using 3 drives in RAID 5 and the Flashtor only has 2.5Gb LAN so maybe it's a different story in the FS12 when 12 drives are used, but certainly the FS6 is fine.
I think Asustor has made a very good system here and I'm certainly happy with it so far.
@@bigphaddy Hey! Thanks for your support!
Seriously considering one of these. M.2 is cheaper than SATA for flash storage.
Any other storage appliance offering a good option for flash storage is incredibly expensive.
The M.2 is still moving data at much faster than the Ethernet speed.
The product shows registered, but the website says it's not, so I can't open a ticket. I leave voice messages with Asustor and they don't return my calls. I'm kind of stuck and not happy with their support. The 12 bay unit is displaying errors when I scrub and sometimes says the resource is not available. I don't have these kinds of issues with NAS units from other brands. I've never had to contact the manufacturer for the other NAS units I have. Disappointing.
The US based tech support never returned my calls. I ended up calling Taiwan. It looks like in order to open a ticket you have to do a search. I was getting errors and lost data with Raid 0. They said to use raid 5 which slows down the unit a great deal. The fastest sustained I can get with Raid 5 is 600MB. I was getting 1GB for 3 minutes then 875MB with RAID 0. I'd say this device is good for size, portability, and power, and it's a good value if you want to run solid state media. If you want better performance a NAS with 6 spinning drives or more in it will give much better performance with solid 1GB reads and writes.
Hmm. Need something like this but with ZFS and encryption capabilities. I guess that would need a stronger CPU. I don't really care about the external bottleneck, even 1 Gb is more than enough for what I need. I do care about the dimensions, noise, and power consumption, which far outweigh the network limits.
Can you boot a TrueNAS on this or is the system drive vendor-locked?
From a cursory look at the relevant ArsTechnica forums, you do not want to go ZFS w/o AES-NI support in your CPU but when you have it, it's fairly smooth sailing. N5105 here does have such support.
I bought one of these and decided to go for the Flashstor 6 version.
I simply couldn't justify the jump in price between the FS6 to FS12 for an extra 6 drive slots and the 10Gb LAN.
For me the FS6 is plenty fast enough.
The reason I decided on one of these as they are almost silent (the fan is really very quiet) and use barely any power. In sleep mode they make no noise at all and use literally nothing (less than 1 watt). But the main reason is they wake up from sleep in less than 2 seconds vs my Synology NAS which takes sone 40+ seconds to wake all the drives up and come to life.
Mine is not accessible online and i only access it via VPN so my data remains safe and its plenty fast enough for moving files around my network vs my Synology with its limited 1Gb LAN ports (why Synology).
The only slight issue i have is with regards to the NVMe drives. Because there is limited compatibility listed on the Asustor site for these i thought I'd try just a couple of Samsung Evo 970 Plus 2TB drives to start with and if tgey worked ok I'd add more.
I bought two and set them up as RAID 1 and everything worked fine.
I then thought id add another and change to RAID 5, so i got another 2TB exact same drive bought only 2 days later (all bought from Amazon). It set up as RAID 5 fine and seemed all ok but the 3rd drive seemed to be considerably hotter than the previous two.
Also i noticed the 3rd drive was showing as having "ERROR INFORMATION LOG ENTRIES" when i checked that drive in the NVMe SSD status log.
I assumed that drive might be faulty so RMA'd it. But the replacement was exactly the same. So i completely deleted the volume and set all 3 drives up a fresh as RAID 5. But that 3rd drive is still getting the ERROR INFORMATION LOG ENTRIES which is odd. The initial two drives don't have them and they are exactly the same drives.
Ive tried swapping drive slots etc but that 3rd drive just seems different. The only physical difference is the first two drives were manufactured date of 2022 but the 3rd (and replacement 4th drive) are manufactured dated 2023 so presumably newer firmware.
Any ideas what these ERROR INFORMATION LOG ENTRIES are and are they a reason for concern? Why does this 2023 drive have them but not the 1st two drives?
@Asustor TV
Apart from that issue im loving the system and its a great price too for such a silent, low powered (energy wise) and rapid system)
Forgot to add......
I only see these ERROR INFORMATION LOG ENTRIES increase each time the system boots or wakes up from sleep. During normal use it doesn't have any errors increasing. Just when it boots or wakes up I see another one of two entries. I've just no way of knowing what they are, but it's only related to that one newer 2023 drive.
Any thoughts?
All I can really tell you is to use compatible SSDs that we have validated. We constantly add new ones all the time to our list, but this depends on receiving the drives from the various manufacturers, testing them, solving bugs, trying different SSD firmware updates and validating those or dealing with kernel issues. There isn't much I can do except say to use compatible drives at this moment in time.
@@ASUSTOR_YT I'm very excited about this unit, but that compatibility list is very short. I find none under "Hard Disk" that includes many SSDs. Under "M.2 SSD" I can filter to "FS 67" and I see a hand full (only a single high priced 4TB). Am I missing something? I'd like to see the Crucial drives used in the "ServerTheHome" youtube channel where he shows 12x Crucial P3 Plus 4TB.
@@windfire5380 Hey there! Our NAS is not restricted to the SSDs in the compatibility list. The compatibility list is only for SSDs we have had the opportunity to test and verify. There are far more SSD vendors than hard drive vendors and we are working hard with our partners as well as find new partners to add new SSDs all the time! An SSD not on our compatibility list may work and 9/10 times it probably will. It's the outliers we have to worry about. If Servethehome's SSDs work, buy them and feel free to send a report to us on your experience! If buying unverified SSDs, just make sure you buy from a dealer with a good return policy.
Thanks!
"Mine is not accessible online and i only access it via VPN"
I always thought that "VPN" was "online".
Good NAS Good job ASUSTOR
cand the SSD be mix and match or all the same?
you can control how the ssds are configured
can you run Truenas on these instead of the Asustor os?
Hi! While the Flashstor NAS will run it, it does not come with support from us.
@@ASUSTOR_YT and DSM? :)
@@RapManCZ Nope. We won't sully our hardware with that. ;)
I think the worst Problem is realy the CPU. If Asus has used something like an AMD V1500B or an R2314 with 15 Watts but 16 PCIE 3.0 lanes, they could use 4 lanes for the NIC's and USB which would be enough to even saturate a dual 10gbit NIC and 2 10gbit USB 3.2 Ports at the same time. That the NVME only run at 1GB/s or 2GB/s at the Store 6 wouldn't be the problem. But with intel there are no efficient 16 lanes processors, so you have to go AMD which is notorious problematic at providing embedded Prozessors, Synology has some around.
Robbie, you're famous (or infamous) they're watching you! hahahahaha
Who, me?
Probably a great review video, but I have to say that I don't understand point #1. I could puke looking at this device, and I wouldn't even want to put it into a closed cabinet. It's a great device in terms of functionality and price, I'd definitely want to see more of these on the market, but the design really rubs me the wrong way.
I saw your review of the Asustor Flashstor 12 Pro NVMe NAS and liked it, but I think there is missing information, such as:
The type of memory used, is it ECC?
Do we need to buy heat sinks for the M.2 drives?
What is the type of the PCI lane connection, is it 3.1 or higher?
Best budget that i found in Portugal was:
Nome Marca unidade Preço Totais Preço Final
ASUSTOR 12-Bay M.2 FLASHSTOR 12 PRO Asus 1 898,90 € 898,90 €
Samsung 2TB SSD 970 EVO PLUS M2 PCIe - MZ-V7S2T0BW Samsung 12 113,58 € 1 362,96 € 2 333,90 €
Samsung 2TB 980 Pro NVMe - MZ-V8P2T0BW Samsung 12 143,82 € 1 725,84 € 2 696,78 €
Memória RAM Kingston 16GB 2666MHz DDR4 Non-ECC CL19 SODIMM - KVR26S19S8/16 Kingston 2 36,02 € 72,04 €
Just for reference. Thank you for your attention. Keep up the good work.
Best regards.
Thanks for you comment and feedback bud. I should add, that the full/massive review that I said in this videos introduction was taking longer is now LIVE, and be found here - ruclips.net/video/uV_Qp75rWcw/видео.html
It does cover a number of your follow up Qs. Have a great week
N5105 - Max # of PCI Express Lanes = 8 - Each NVME = Capable of 4 lanes. Whats the point of running NVME? May as well use SATA SSD's.
Now does anyone (at home) have the capability to run 60Gb/s (12x5Gb/s) networking. Nope. But..... Thinking outside the box and allowing for smb multi channel. maybe a third edition 12 bay, a 'proper' processor, with 4 10Gb/s SFP+ on the back and we might have some serious sales. There are definitely people out there who have that sort of capability. (like me)
10Gb networking for home is a sensible price currently with mikrotik but 25/40/100 is still going to be real pricey until corporate entities start rolling this stuff to the pre-loved market
The 1GBps per drive comment isn't exactly accurate. Due to the CPU only having 8 PCIe lanes, they're using ASMedia PCIe MUX chips to share all of the PCIe bandwidth. In a RAID6 array with all 12 bays populated with 2TB Intel 670Ps, I haven't seen more than around 3100 MB/s reads and 840 MB/s writes.
Look like this storage running with Android OS, because i found that the apps are using apk
Are there any other brands beside ASUSTOR that offer NVME NAS storage?
Nope. Not in this class of product
@@ymeshulin It's not NVMe. It's SATA AHCI.
@@ymeshulin Oops. Missed that one.
@@ASUSTOR_YT LTT just did a video of an internal card that holds a ton of NVME but its a prototype at this time and super expensive.
Let's all face facts - if you're expecting to fill a 10Gbps link with traffic all the time, or want/need a 25Gbps or 40Gbps+ link, you're not looking at Asustor. You're looking at professional solutions. My potential use for this is in long-term NAS storage, not performant storage. Meaning, I want to have 12x4TB disks in RAID 6, and load them with Plex data, and let them sit there. For over a decade. And be reliable. Something spinners can't really nod their head at. With RAID 6 NVME drives, I would expect easily 10+ years of use - I'd expect that the CPU or memory may suffer a defect long before the drives die. The only thing I wish the 12 bay unit had would be dual 10Gbps ports - not for throughput (and I'm sure some people would scream about that) but for redundancy, so that if I do a switch upgrade and it reloads, nothing is interrupted from a file mount perspective.
The asking prices though, holy F. These name brand NAS companies trying to do Apple pricing based on aesthetics. SMH...
looks a lot like the ps4 pro, hopefully does not sound like one jet engine one
They are actually very quiet systems and barely noticeable. I have the FS6 and the fan when set to auto usually runs just under 900rpm, you can barely hear it. They also use very little power too and when they go to sleep the fan completely stops so the system is silent.
When I hear you referring to these units as "cheap" or "affordable", I have to wonder if it's me who's living on another planet, or you. I think they are horrendously priced. Perhaps you are thinking of their use by large companies? But just saying they're less horrendous than some of their competitors doesn't make; them affordable for a lot of us.
typo when you talked about the CPU choice: "it's" instead on "its" on the chapter on screen title 😊
Wait… Let's nip this in the bud, shall we. Making no apology, this is a ha'p'orth o' tar situation, though in NAS terms we are talking more leaky coracle than creaky man-o'-war. More than that, here is an offstage exercise in elephant wallpapering. Having said that, I do agree pretty much with mostly all you've said in your pros and cons presentation, and with ASUSTOR TV clarifications and rejoinders - but!
It's one thing to announce that the Flashstor is populated exclusively with NVMe cards, whilst waving the like to your ear. I can't fault your delivery. It's priceless. NVMe cards are silent as a dead parrot, of course. But the so called bad boy Flashstor NAS - with a manufacturer stated Operation Noise Level of 18.7 dB due to the built-in active cooling fan - is, well, audible. Not just audible, but with a strangely metallic, nay, ironic quality to the noise it produces.
Very quiet, and barely noticeable, are relative euphemisms, like almost silent, not useful in translation. Every ear hears what it will. An acceptable level of noise depends subjectively on individual use case scenarios. I suspect the majority of any gathered assembly will be quite comfortable agreeing to differ on the intrusiveness, or otherwise, of a quiet device.
Should you buy it? On a promise it never makes and doesn't need to keep? See below. Even if you convince yourself to overlook the inclusion of a fan in the specification you won't be spared the morning after. Remove the fan, or if it stops working of its own accord, and there is a series of loud beeps to alert all those within earshot. No secret. It insists functionally on being present and correct, and, as I may have indicated, it is noisy. It oughtn't be, but it is. Thanks to two significant factors: a) aerodynamics, that is diameter/rotational speed/blade design, and in particular b) dual ball bearings.
I suggest a line be drawn at the apparently casual use of the word silent since it means something entirely different, by varying degree indicative of subjective experience of noise level, to the word quiet. (Aside - You might want to call the latter virtual silence. Mmmm, a bit 70's. How about artificial silence. Ah, yes, now that's modern. Of course, it still means categorically not silent in any way whatsoever, rather of questionable value, a compensatory poor substitute for the real thing. Who cares.)
If you require silence, as in Solid State Drive, and wish to eliminate noise, as in Hard Disk Drive, then buying this machine is a straight forward mistake. Silent running is statedly not a design goal of Asustor for the Flashstor. That being the case, what exactly is the unique selling point of it? The case is sturdy, but looks ridiculous and those are fake exhausts on the front, whatever Robbie told you. If the proprietor also spreads the idea that its firmware potentially is written to deny service to those seeking to install other operating systems or scupper rival investment groups' memory modules then at best it is an impressive marketing exercise. Impressive as in pressurised sales loosening your grip on reality and in turn making a big dent in your paltry bitcoin collection. So keep your eye on the pea. Let's go.
Highly desirable, a silent domestic NAS device is a simple and clear objective concept. A design goal. Not a missed target. Not an Asustor. Not even a Flashstor. Not yet, anyway.
"We really wanted to make this quiet. Otherwise it defeats one of the purposes of an SSD NAS." ASUSTOR TV on Flashstor thermal design.
There it is again. That word. Quiet. Which means a degree of noisy as opposed to silent, which still means no noise.
My DS415+, admittedly with Noctua fans, is quiet. The reason for upgrading the fans is to eliminate the metallic grinding sound of ball bearings, to make the fans mostly tolerable. But it isn't silent with four WD Red 3TB HDD. The escaping chronic fixed level mechanical grinding sound, more than the lively seek chatter, is a depressive ergonomic that is unnatural to the ear and a factor in long term hearing loss. That's why most sysops tend to not live in the server room, or for that matter the plant room, or indeed the belfry. What? Away then, with those naughty hard disks and their moving parts.
"We really wanted to make this quiet." Really. If by quiet you mean to some extent noisy, you succeeded. You didn't. You did otherwise. Strange, but true. In doing so, as vouchsafed, you defeated one of the purposes of an SSD NAS. The distinguishing purpose presumably being to follow through silent (not quiet) solid state disks with a silent (not quiet) solid state chassis. You know. Silent storage. Instead of quiet (to some extent noisy) storage.
By design. Quiet and not silent. Why is that? It needn't be that way. Why stop at swapping out the last of those noisy spinning hard disks to do only half a job by leaving in a noisy spinning fan?
With respect to the Flashstor, use of the word silent is merely adjectival funny business, or perhaps fanny business. What I mean is this. A useful practical description of an object ought to align itself with the uniformly objective convergence of common experience and yield to independent measurement and verification. Thus, silent is probably a non-starter as there is a ball bearing attached. Unless that fan is off, that is, or running on mag-lev oil bearings below the bar of a gentle draught, which it isn't in this case.
Thursday there were two Flashstor 6 in stock on Amazon UK - then there was one. Closer inspection of the design would suggest that Asustor decided wilfully not to render the wannabe silent NAS in fact, silent. The thick plottens. The design includes certain case screw heads, including the fan screws, buried under pressed and recessed hard plastic caps that defy attempts to disassemble. The dimensions of the custom fan itself are suboptimal to sourcing better performing parts. Fan replacement is therefore a factory repair. Good luck with that. One is physically hampered even from modding the Flashstor for peace and quiet. One may be seen but not heard, but one's NAS - not so much.
When the Flashtor NAS is up and running, it's tiddly built-in fan is up and running. The ball bearing noise can be heard distinctly and penetratingly across the room. This is not to mention the rushing sound of air. Asustor has almost succeeded with that, although the fan is rather small. In fact the airflow can only be heard if one waves the entire NAS to one's ear or, equally, places one's ear really quite close to it.
That is not the major problem. The fan shifts enough air at idle to keep the inner workings from overheating and the airflow often is inaudible depending on the ambient sound of working conditions. Only in the dead of night, when you should be asleep anyway, or if you are fortunate enough to work in library conditions, can this humble rush of air be heard. The poor wee fan has to work the surrounding air a little too vigorously to waft the necessary draught. The sound level is very much like a DS423+ on SSDs, sporting replacement Noctua fans fitted with series resistors. Don't ask me how I know. Don't get me started on those cheap rattly Synology fans in a flimsy case. Why do you think I took in the Flashtor? Desperation. It certainly wasn't for looks.
I want to live with my NAS, not to have to listen to it when I require to hear a pin drop. A little more commitment to acoustic performance could easily have resulted in a silent Flashstor. Misanthropic marketing motivated by the boundless wonder of public imagination supposes why produce something good and well-engineered straight off the bat when you can sell it again, and again, and again. To the tune of a waltz.
The problem is this. And this is the whole point. Asustor have used, not the cheapest fan design - it demonstrates reasonably good aerodynamics and manufacturing - but cheap enough to suffer from noisy ball bearings. I say suffer, because the sound is remarkably similar to the grinding sound of a spinning hard disk.
So here's a paradox for you. The elephant in the room is the Flashtor itself. As a design and marketing concept it is admirable: bold, striking and courageous. However, you could say that its greatest asset is at the same time its inevitable downfall. It is a victim of its own success. It contains the seeds of its own destruction. In other words, its balls. And it's a little fanny.
There is only one thing more disheartening than suffering from noisy ball syndrome, and that is foisting your head splitting ailment on sensitive, imaginative types who are trying to manifest (let's be generous) original thinking. That, and the blinding irony of an SSD NAS sounding for all the world like a wheezy old dog of an HDD chassis. Oooh, the bells! The decibels!
12th Gen Intel NUC with a Core i5-1240P 35W TPD in the Akasa Turing passive case with a 2.5" SSD, mSata and NVMe is for real. Silent. Oh, the sheer relief. Obviously, that represents overkill for power in a domestic NAS. Count them. How many cores? But proof of concept beyond doubt by an order of magnitude. The removal of barriers to achieving a silent NAS. How are you going to test the market for silent NAS if you don't release one? I see, you are testing the market for the acceptance of a decoy. As long as that's understood. You can be the best at taking the pea.
When you say heard from across the room, are you talking a doll house? In the dead of night, I cannot hear anything from mine with all 12 bays populated beyond about 2 meters away. That said, being that you're no stranger to replacing case fans, literally any other 4 pin fan can be plugged into the USB adapter so you can go as nuts as you want to on the sound signature.
Edit: you can also completely turn off the beeping entirely in ADM via Settings > Hardware > System tab > Buzzer section > uncheck "error" (which is coincidentally the only lowercase option at the moment)
That Akasa Turing case wasn't on my radar previously, thanks for mentioning it, only 93% the size of the Flashstor! That said, if it's got 3 drives and you need both an OS and some form of redundancy on your storage pool, how exactly would you propose hitting 20TB of flash storage in it?
Disappointing. Talking very long about the procuct but still nothing about the noise of the device. If you are just saying "they are not loud" - that is not enough, I have heard the exact same comment about NAS as loud as a hairdryer.
Honestly I would not trust asus drivers.they dont qc firmware updates
Hi. We are not ASUS. We are ASUSTOR. We make extensive checks on our updates and products before release. We can't catch everything but we work hard to make sure our updates are stable and we allow people to beta test our software as well.
Robbie please don't call them F-L-A-C files for flac sake 😂
it looks just like ps4
2GbE card on a 6GB/s nas...wtf?
We support SMB Multichannel. Combine both ports to double performance.
Too much talking, not enough substance just couldn’t spend any more time on this
As mentioned in the intro, this is a 'before you buy' bullet points vid and there is a full review with h/w, software, architecture availavle
These idiots producing NAS keep forgetting NAS priority is data reliability: where is the ECC RAM?!
To be fair to them on this one (and I think I do touch on this), ECC memory is NOT cheap and you need beefier/more capable CPU)..so although ECC on a flash server is typically THE standard, it would be very difficult to do this and keep at the $499 price point here
@@nascomparesI totally agree but I always find this kind of compromise the saddest. Thanks for your work
If you are concerned about data reliability, then you should be keeping your data backed up regularly using the 3-2-1 method. ECC is not a white knight that guarantees data protection. The modern file systems we support, Btrfs and Ext4 already come with numerous error correcting features that keep data safe and the only file system that really requires it is ZFS. Even if we wanted to put ECC, we'd have to change the SoC because most Intel SoCs don't even support ECC to begin with and to change it would increase the cost significantly while removing features like the iGPU for the smooth transcoding that many of our customers love when using their NAS for video content. To keep data reliable, keep backups often.
Us 'idiots' have only been hiring top engineers to sell these devices to customers around the world for 13 years. What do we know?
ECC will fail! Ask for failover architecture rather than failsafe hardware because all hardware will fail at some point!!! So keep it cheap but intelligent
@ASUSTORTV 👍 well said