The $399 Ryzen-Powered Dual 2.5Gb NAS - AOOSTAR NAS + ROUTER Review
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- Опубликовано: 22 сен 2023
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When AOOSTAR reached out to request a review of their NAS + ROUTER combo, I was expecting your run-of-the-mill Celeron-powered generic PC. What I got was a Ryzen 5500U, 16GB powerhouse, complete with dual 3.5" SATA Drive Bays.
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who needs a trash can when you've got a space toaster to store your files
Space toaster is a great name for it 😂
I bought one of these a few months ago. It's currently kitted out with 2x12TB hard drives, 2x2TB nvme ssds, 64GB of ram, and a 500GB external ssd for boot. It's currently running proxmox and its been amazing.
So much potential for setups like this. Great setup!
Thank you@@CraftComputing
I've been considering one of these for some time now as a way to reduce my server power costs. Wish they had a model with more drive bays to gain more functionality through the use of ZFS.
I'm genuinly curious, but isn't a two bay NAS just inadequate? My knowledge of NAS and RAID setups are antiquated but if you want to have redundancy aren't you stuck with losing out on 12 GB to backup the first drive in this setup?
What NAS software do you use?
3:53 Woot Woot! dual NVME slots! perfect for RAIDing all the things!
WOW. This is a killer deal. 2 bas NAS plus 2 NVnme slots. Thanks for the find! As for the Power brick... even MOST mini pcs, and all with this specific CPU use power bricks.
Thank you 👍 for bringing my attention to alternative brands and their solutions to my attention.
Excellent video on the AOOstar NAS.
I've had this in my cart for a few weeks when I saw it browsing Amazon for small nas options. Thanks for doing the review!
The buyer informed me that this machine has been confirmed to be discontinued and will soon be out of stock.
Surprisingly good price, feature set, build, and upgradability. Those four attributes are really rare in 2023 in terms of value-to-feature ratio.
"Not everyone is going to need all of the features available here..."
Yeah but since when have we ever really needed any of our homelab equipment?
hell yeah I've been wanting someone to get one of these they look great!!
oh yeah i was looking into getting one (or something fairly similar). nice to see there is a review of the 5500u model now.
OH! I been dreaming of such a device. awsome.
This is the best NAS that i'm waiting for. Thanks Jeff
This would be a killer retro game device. I am going to put this into my wish list. It could store all of the files and be able to play the majority. The price on it is pretty good too.
I also appreciate the comparison to the trash can. Like you said, my homelab has a lot of old equipment in it - always interesting to see how they compare to modern hardware.
I wish I knew of this before I built my back up NAS in May. So much smaller than my Node 804, oh well.
I'm sill running a rack mount server, with virtualized firewall, file sharing, home automation. This seems like a good alternative. And then use the rack mount for once-per-week backups.
Bought one of these after watching the video. I needed a box to put a pair of hard drives in. I seems pretty nice so far except I tried Fedora out with it. I was getting SATA link errors under load (RAID 1 resync) that resulted in constant link resets plus reducing the speed to the lowest. I tried out RHEL and then Rocky and I didn't have the problem with those two but then the wifi didn't work because the driver required is only in the newer kernel. Finally with Rocky + kernel-ml I got wifi working and no sata link errors. Haven't had a chance to dig into this much more but I did swap the drives and the problem followed the slot and not the drive. Otherwise, this seems like it's going to make a great replacement home server for me.
What about sleep mode ?
Good video Jeff !!
You should test out it as a hosting box like throw proxmox on it and see how it does virtualizing both true Nas and PF/OPNsense it looks like it would be perfect for that
This would be a great camera NVR. With 2 network ports, you could have once physical network for the cameras and the other port plugged into your regular network. With 2 drives you could do redundant or maximum storage. Thanks Jeff.
I’ve been looking for a 2 bay 3.5” compact system to run TrueNAS Core for the last couple of months and this looks like a PERFECT fit. Thanks so much for the review. Not seeing the $50 off promo on Amazon applying though.
Hurry up and make your purchase now! This machine is already confirmed to be discontinued. As for why there isn't a $50 coupon available, it's because this link is out of stock in the United States. You can reach out to the seller, who will provide you with an alternative purchase link along with a $50 coupon. Additionally, please be advised that there are currently only 20 units of this machine left in stock.
That is slick. Might buy one and run unraid on it as a backup. You’ve gotta do some more videos on that
I'd say it looks more like a Fibre-Optic Modem/Router combo, like you see with ISPs. That said, I want one! It would be perfect for my minimal homelab/NAS needs!!
Re the comparison with the trashcan on geekbench scores… it’s incredible how far we’ve come in ten years. What was the professional high end is now available on a new system for just a few hundred bucks. Hope that continues ten years from now.
I came here for the beer recommendation but ended up learning some tech shit 😊
With the dual NVME and 6 cores, if its quiet enough this could be a great little Ableton/Studio PC, even some video editing
Have you seen the upcoming Jonsbo N3 ITX case? (Starts shipping in October.)
It looks like something you'd be into, similar to the 8-bay NAS you built a few videos ago. The MB section of the case looks tall enough that you wouldn't have to rely on right-angle SATA cables just to close the thing.
10cm fans is so stupid.
This may be on my shortlist for systems for my homelab.
With that being said, I didn't think Mac Pro. This looks so close to the Arris BGW320 Broadband Gateway that AT&T is using in their new fiber installs (I have one in my closet). I can see the comparison to the Mac Pro though 😁
Would be nice with every level desktop CPU and socketed to leave options for tinkerers. How good is shielding for HDD noise?
Sooo this could actually be a genius idea! Imagine router, nas and smart home hub all in one! Would be awesome for power consumption maybe this thing with a zigbee stick is all I would need🤔
Silly question... it's a NAS. Did you test TrueNAS? Could this be a node in a distributed family storage and backup plan?
If there was a shield OS competitor, that would be a bitchin standalone box.
Seems like a decent emulation machine (up till PS2/GC) that multiple the functions as NAS & router. I can store thousands of retro game ROMs with this device.
I know these NAS OSs dont really take advantage of them yet, but imagine once ROCm is supported and we can get iGPU transcoding, that a 7640u based NAS could do AV1, and possibly use the NPU for things like motion and object recognition for security cameras.
Right now i'm probably going to pick one of these up for my sister's house, to both work as her NAS and an offsite for my NAS. I just wish it was 3 bay, or maybe 6x2.5. Yes SSDs would be much more expensive, but it would be worth it to have worry free off site managed by someone who is far less technical.
For reference, i currently have a windows box for recording broadcast TV, and my file server does playback, but so far almost all host OSs other than windows only natively supports Intel QSV, yes i am able to get AMD transcoding to work with a ROCm package, but this is a NAS, i dont want to make any modifications to it, especially if i am going to leave it at someone's house who cant service it.
However, my old main NAS is more than powerful enough to transcode with CPU using the Ryzen 5 4640GE, it just used quite a bit of power to do so, and lacked enough power to transcode for more than 2 TVs
It would be nice to show this running as a two-bay NAS, running Trunas.
That is a awesome little NAS.... did it come with any AOOSTAR software to manage the NAS?
Nope, management is up to you 😉
Definitely interested to know how you get on with Proxmox installed and several Virtual Machines. Also would be intrigued to know how this gets on with OMV installed.
This looks like an awesome NAS/Server. I just built one with a Ryzen 9 3900x in a Fractal Node 304 and to be honest for my use this would have been better.
But at least now you have the option for actual NAS/server utility wrt to IO. If the AOOSTAR had even 1 x8 pcie slot for an hba it'd be a contender. As-is, it's more in between a roided out Raspberry Pi and a Zimaboard or, now blade. And from the 'at least a full sized pcie slot' pov there's argument that the Zima's are better. Granted, with some 'franken-adapter-fu one or both of those m.2 nvme slots could be extended and adapted to full-sized (x4 electrical) slots. /shrug on pro/con wrt the added 'eye-sore/mess' that would result in on which is the superior effort.
The core areas for NAS/server are IO {in,e}gress specifically (network), storage (preferably via hbas), memory capacity and cpu cores for virtualization purposes. Unlikely to ever be a thing but here's the dream:
0) cut down Epyc or scaled up Ryzen mobile such that it's >=16 cores, support for >= 1TB RAM (w/support for ECC), and >= 48pcie (gen4) lanes.
1) dual qsfp28 100Gbe ports (e.g. intel E810). Could be just another x16 slot but having it embedded allows smaller formfactor/case.
2) full-sized pcie slots (2 x16 and 4 x8) w/jumper/bios configuration to mix/match based on remaining (from 48 min) 32 pcie lanes.
Probably too much for 100W USB-C, maybe pro/con that with dual type C for power vs larger brick-like typical 330W gaming laptop types or Eurocom 780W in the same/similar formfactor.
From here you could do everything you could want and it could easily fit into something the size of that case. Plenty of RAM, decently capable cores/threads cpu, no real compromise on the IO expansion, and zero issues wrt this epidemic of gimped embedded nics; >= dual >= 10Gbe or GFY.
@@PrimalNaClcurious about the idle power draw of your home server NAS
@@kahnzo Right around 800W-ish. The bulk of which would be the 827TB (usable) of 'spinning rust' hanging off the thing. The drives likely represent a little under half (using 2.8W/drive idle) of the total.
The system I outlined would, even w/the HBAs, including the superior NIC, would be less than the other 450W-500W-ish.
Why do you ask?
Tropical citrus beers, yes.
Was expecting NAS/router benchmarks though?
Yeah $400 is a good price for something like this with a lot of features and a well designed machine!
Normally when you see little NASs like this, it's poorly designed with a major bottleneck somewhere in the system and it's like $800 for no reason.
FINALLY a mini PC for the home lab people
This NAS is legitimately more powerful than my brother's gaming PC. That's what happens when you don't upgrade for 11 years.
After your shop intro.. how is your wall-plate project going?
So this runs whatever OS you decide to put on it? That's kinda neat as most have their own proprietary OS's
This world be great if it had:
- fan pwm
- a bunch of ssd m.2 slots to make it into an ssd nas - ideally, of there's sufficient lanes, not the slowest ones.
If it had at least three it would be great - one for a small boot ssd + 2 for a mirror ssd setup for relatively fast storage. I guess one could use 2.5" ssds instead of 3.5" - if the drive sleds have mounting option for that
- at least 5gb network ports
- sd card reader would make it good for photographers unlike the microsd
I don't see this a good option for hdds. Mirroring large drives is way too expensive.
On a sidenote: does it support ecc ram?
Maybe a problem you can not solve. But shows an interesting problem. In Proxmox i can see the AMD RX5700 xt gpu on the windows 11 machine after I did passthrough it. I run it on a Fujitsu RX350 v7 server. This server should be specialized not as Gaming pc. Topic here is to run it as Media video editing Server and a music composition and daw server. The reason I did first install an AMD gpu is to be compatible later with a Hackintosh machine.
Any idea why the windows vm use the AMD gpu and I can see it running in the device manager but Davinci Resolve does not see the gpu. Any idea or to make a video for this task?
Do you think this rig will be enough to run a CCTV surveillance NVR system, such as Blue Iris, with 5 - 8 4K IP cameras, alongside the NAS?
Hey Jeff, how is Craft Studios 3.0 coming along? It'd be great to hear an update about your progress! 🙂
As soon as I get the permit approved I'll be doing an update. #soon
@@CraftComputing Oh ok, cool. Best of luck with it! 🙂
I want to know how much power it draws at idle with 2x 3.5" HDDs and how much under moderate load
Yeah me too. But sadly the reviewer lives in a cheap energy country so he dont care about this important information.
Amazing but does it come in black??
I'm still relatively new when it comes to home networking, need to upgrade in my main Wi-Fi router in my also been thinking about getting a Nas. Would this be a good choice to take care of both of my problems?
I would not recommend beginners .
Engraved coaster artwork idea: an LGA2011 socket with a bent pin. Mmmmmmm!
You're a sick man.
....maybe...
I'm watching this video on my main PC, which is currently a Xeon E5-2697 v2, running on my Asus X79 Deluxe motherboard. 😉 😀
How do you like that setup? I've been looking at some of those bundles on Aliexpress and considering building up a server based on the same. Biggest concern is power and heat with those Xeon CPU's.
@@ckthmpson - During the last month, I've installed a Xeon E5-2667 v2 (8c/16t ; 3.30GHz-base/4.00GHz-boost). It's got the same 130W TDP as my original Core i7-3930K (6c/12t ; 3.20GHz-base/3.80GHz-boost), which I used from early 2012, until last Fall, when I installed the E5-2697 v2 (12c/24t ; 2.70GHz-base/3.50GHz-boost). The E5-2667 v2, with its higher base clock speed, provides a more responsive workstation UI experience, when running Debian Linux 12. With the E5-2697 v2, my system would go into low-power sleep mode, and then after a keypress, wake up within 5 seconds - without any problems. But, the E5-2667 v2 won't wake up - no response from keyboard or trackball. So, until I figure out which settings to change, I have to either leave the PC running all the time, or shut it down each time I'm through using it.
This thing could only be better if it had a quad 2.5" version. Patriot Burst SSDs are cheap, and striped with a RAM cache to give them a boost, they're actually shockingly quick for cache-less SATA SSDs. I'd happily pay an extra $50 for that benefit. ~5.5tb of smart, redundant flash storage in a NAS with a fair bit of it's own grunt for ~$650 would be a steal of a deal. (Edit: I stand corrected, the price of Patriot Bursts went up by $25/drive, to $75/drive, making it less Price to Performance efficient than just a pair of 4tb WD Red Pros).
Not sure USB PD as the primary charger would be the best bet for that system if it was fully loaded with a pair of 3.5" drives and a pair of M.2's. It *shouldn't* be enough to max out a 65W brick, but power on draw is still a thing and for a 3.5" drive that's still around 20-25Watts. Just the HDD's and CPU will pull 65watts, ignoring the rest of the system I would not be comfortable with that lack of headroom, even if the system will be running most of the time.
90W type C power adapters are readily available, but I think it would jack the price up.
That said, this does seem like a nice expandable unit with good performance.
Only thing I'd like to see would be either a 3rd 3.5" bay for something more than RAID 0/1, OR a model with a backplane for four 2.5" drives so one could build an all SSD NAS.
That delivery time from Amazon is... wow. (Late November 2024 as of Sep 26th 2023.)
Due to the machine being out of stock and their decision to discontinue its production, they will no longer restock this machine through this link. However, they have another link available.
How is the SATA connected? Is it via USB or PCIe?
These are really, really neat little machines, and the IT industry never misses a chance to shoot itself in the foot; it was therefore inevitable that they be discontinued and out of stock just a couple weeks after this review came out.
Any chance new models are expected to come out? You'd think with demand there would be new supply...
Because they replaced the 5500U with the newly released R7 5700U (8C/16T, up to 4.3GHz), the price difference is only $10.
I dont know alot about nas, i wsnted to get one to offset alot of storage im using for video editing etc. Why do nas use hdd onstead of ssd, price, or speed doesnt matter when u use interent antway or what??
I agree that it would make a great DIY NAS, and, at the current discounted price, I would likely purchase it if Amazon would let me. For some unspecified reason, it can't be delivered to my address (in US). 😞
Try contacting the buyer and ask them to send you the machine by other means
This looks pretty awesome, The fact it has a 512gb m.2 and 2x8gb sticks of ram included in the price (currently a $50 coupon) it's an insane deal
I went the intel 5105 nas board and N1 case to have more bays but if I wasn't into this build for so much already and didn't want more bay expansion i'd def give this a debate.
I went for Unraid Plus.
this seems like a good NAS / Virtualization box. It would replace several devices for me.
I recently purchased one of the N100 variants and it does accept power via USBC. I wonder if that is a difference between the Intel and AMD models.
In fact, both versions can be powered via USB-C
So, does it virtualize, does it run Proxomox, does it run Freenas? Can you boot a linux distro?
Yes to all of the above.
@@CraftComputing thanks.
Would be better if it had more sata ports (or better NVME slots). An interesting china kludge box.
That's totally possible, And all that would require is more money.
Use case? Nas with graphics?
Any way to get this in the UK?
I wish you hadn't skipped over installing the drives, I'm struggling to get all 4 yellow screws in
Much prefer the barrel jack over usb3, imho
Could you add 2 more sata drives with a M2 adapter in the second slot? there looks to be space for 2 more drives and iit should be easy 3D printing a cage for them!
If you added a SATA controller there, you wouldn't be able to install the hard drive caddy on that side.
@@CraftComputing Fair enough if amazon uk ever stock one i'll still pick one up to play with, designing and printing a new case that could sort the space issue or maybe add acouple of sata ssd with a M.2 sata card. Thanks for the review, this looks like a good fun bit of kit. Take care, God bless one and all.
What's the maximum drive capacity this will take? 20TB drives need substantial current on startup
With modern hardware, there's really not a 'max capacity' limitation. Any SATA disk will work.
@@CraftComputing to clarify, I mean will the 12 volt rail in this box cope with 2x2A from two 20TB drives spinning up at boot?
Don't know that I'd call it a NAS, but it's mildly interesting for niche cases.
dual bay NAS exist
What a nice find! This should be able to run unraid right?
yes， I'm running unraid
@@AMBER88-gk8vp awesome! if you don’t mind sharing the drives and how you have them configured would be appreciated :)
@@AMBER88-gk8vp what power consumption & do you have sleep mode working ?
Has a sleep mode and doesn't use much power@@bluesangel75
It’s a good video, and an interesting device. I think it’s quite damaging to not bring up ECC support when talking about things that are supposed to be NAS or server solutions. You made direct comparisons with xeons that do have that.
We need manufacturers to know that we want it, and it would often be trivial for them to add it to ryzen based solutions
Homelabs don't need ECC. Fite me.
@@CraftComputing are you really at post of the problem. I guess no servers need ecc then, that’s all a nas is
I didn't say no servers need ECC. I said homelabs don't sling enough data around for systems to randomly flip bits.
Sure, ECC is recommended for ZFS, because TrueNAS provides support of billion-dollar businesses for data protection.
The only time ECC comes into play is when data is in-flight, that is, between being told to write data to disk, and actually writing data to disk. It's while you see the progress bar in a copy dialogue window.
Not having ECC isn't going to randomly corrupt data you're storing on your NAS. It's not going to corrupt your immutable OS partition. If the data is on disk, it's 100% secure (as far as memory is concerned).
Oooh shiny.
A router with Windows 11 preloaded. Yep, makes sense........
It's marketed as a 3 in 1
Desktop - nas - router
That's probably why
I'm seriously waiting for a bunch of neat devices out of China based on recycled Ryzen netbook or chromebook CPUs etc.
I'm still baffled, none of the mini PC vendors came up with something Ryzen based that can handle more 6 disks or more
Anyone thought of clustering 3 of these? What are your use cases?
That would be a bit costly.
I honestly wish you could get this in the UK, unfortunately no matter where I look I cant find one available. Anyone seen any in the UK?
Currently only available on their website
But can it make toast?
SPACE TOASTER PRESERVES! (RAID IS NOT A BACKUP)
Unfortunately it seems like the 5500U version is out of stock and not coming back. I have found one that is the same but with only one nvme. The Topton model has switched to the N100 and now only supports 1 nvme and 1 stick of memory. Really weakens the proposition of this as a jellyfin/plex box.
Hey man, AOOSTAR is pre-selling the R7 5700U, only $10 more than the 5500U, don't miss out again! I just purchased two of them.
What's the power usage like?
Even with a couple hard drives installed, it's less than 30W total power at full tilt.
Amazon listing says USB C supports 100w pd but seems unlikely you didn’t test? Can you confirm?
I tested it. It works.
@@AMBER88-gk8vp you’re a bot
@@tttomtxhc Unfortunately I can't send you pictures here
@@tttomtxhc The most important point is that you should use a 100W GaN, not a regular charging cable
Could this support ECC RAM?
Don't think mobile chips are designed with ECC in mind
A very interesting device for Unraid. But I would be interested in the power consumption. As far as the built-in CPU is concerned, I find different specifications on the internet: 15 Watt TDP and 25 Watt TDP. Does anyone here have exact information? I live in Germany, where electricity costs are very high... Therefore, my home server needs to be efficient, not powerful.
ServeTheHome also presented interesting mini PCs from ASUS in the last video. Very power efficient, but I need space for two 2.5 inch SSD.
Does it have ECC support?
😂😂😂😂😂 on Ryzen mobile? Doubt it
no
Even if the answer is obviously no to you, this is a question that needs to be asked. To the manufacturer of every device that claims a server role.
Also, there's probably a more detailed answer hiding here; many newer RAM chips run in-chip ECC, but the reason isn't what you want to hear. They're expecting faults because they run close to physical limits. These are more common than the sporadic errors traditional ECC corrects. So on the plus side, the in chip protection may be able to correct the classic sporadic errors, but on the minus side, it could also be those that overwhelm the correction ability.
@@milescarter7803 the chip ain't so different from a normal desktop chip.
Any Ryzen chip has ECC support. Even the non pro variants of Ryzen support this feature. Pro variants have this as an official feature
@@0LoneTech DDR5 has on-die ECC which is better than nothing, DDR4 does not. This device uses DDR4 ram
Lol drinking in the morning
Perks of the job.
I completely misread the title! I thought it said Asustor and I was surprised they would make something so seemingly ugly 🤣🤣
NGL, it looks like a sweet little machine though!
lmao I'm so glad I bought this literally a week before this video dropped; they gonna be out of stock now.
I don't run a rack mount server. I run a HP Micro Server G10 Opteron. Its a 4 bay cube server. Its a bit on the slow side (for today) and transcoding is slow. For a NAS, it serves its purpose. I currently run Windows Server 2019 on it and it runs OK. I have served VMs from it and its fine as long as I acknowledge that I can only do 1 dual core VM at a time (no big deal for me). Currently, its set up as my storage server + Chia.
Wrong link?
@CraftComputing
While this does seem compelling, only two SATA drives afford little to no fault tolerances. This should have been built with 4 drive bays minimum.
RAID-1 is a thing....
@@CraftComputing
True, but not a very attractive thing. 4 drive RAID would be a much better option for both space and data redundancy concerns. Adding 2 extra bays to the setup wouldn't be very costly and would make for a much more attractive product.
I don't agree with the usb-c power plug idea. If that breaks it is impossible to solder it back at home, and a good power supply costs a lot. They are usually not designed to run 24/7, expect them to fail after a year.
USB-C is absolutely designed to run 24/7 at 65W. It's part of the standard. And you're right, you won't be soldering a new connector at home, but you would also have a power supply that is 1/4 the size and easily sourced and replaced.
@@CraftComputing I can replace a standard 12v or 19v 5.5mm notebook charger for free, because I have already accumulated so many of them. But to buy a reliable usb type-c charger online, that is not some fake Chinese clone, that's more difficult.
Stop buying shit USB-C chargers. It's not difficult to find good ones.
There's something to be said for machines with both @@CraftComputing - a barrel charger is outright cheaper to make (it only supports one voltage, no PD negotiation, fewer wires, cheaper connector etc) and there's no reason for it to be larger. The main advantage of USB-C is one adapter for everything.
In a static machine, i would prioritise the barrel jack. If you want to run barrel-jack powered stuff from USB, you can get a PD trigger cable (though it would be great if they spent the $3 to put one and a connector on the board).
I don't see the external similarity to be honest, it's more of a trashcan vs. humidifier to me.
You should laser etch that Mac Pro and use it as a flower pot.
So what makes it a router?
Dual 2.5Gb LAN
@@CraftComputing but it runs windows and not a router OS a bit confusing
Ryzen 5500u is too old for USB power in the Ryzen line.
Later models would support this feature.
Still a very nice little box. I might like it for a little cheaper.
It's a good point though, a PD trigger is like $2 wholesale, you could make it USB-C yourself, so they could have too.
My 3550U laptop has PD charging (and a barrel jack)
I hope the have adapters to use ssd's. I'd be interested if they did.
I think some 2.5 to 3.5 trays do work in bay, but I never tried
Now you just need to hackintosh on it 🤣