Asustor AS6104T 4-bay NAS Review

1. Introduction2. Asustor AS6104T - Packaging and Bundle3. Asustor AS6104T - Design4. Asustor AS6104T - ADM OS5. Testing Methodology6. CrystalDiskMark7. ATTO Disk Benchmark8. Intel NASPT9. IOMeter10. Real Life Testing11. Power12. Final Thoughts13. View All Pages

The latest AS6 series NAS units from Asustor are the first to market from any company powered by Intel's new Braswell Celeron processors as well as supporting dual channel memory. Currently the family consists of the AS6202T, AS6204T, AS6208T and AS6210T (two four, eight and ten bay models respectively) that use quad core CPU's while the AS6102T and AS6104T two and four bay models use dual core processors.

 

Sitting under the Asustor Home to Power User banner, the four bay AS6104T has a 1.6GHz (burst up to 2.16GHz) Intel Celeron N3050 CPU at its heart backed up by 2GB of DDR3L memory.

The memory comes in the shape of two 1GB SO-DIMMs but the system itself can support up to 8GB of memory and the good news is that its user friendly to upgrade.

Highlights

• Intel Braswell CPU
• Built in AES-NI hardware encryption engine
• HDMI multimedia output (4K, 1080p)
• Link aggregation
• Mobile Apps suite
• Snapshot support
• 3 year warranty

The Asustor AS6104T ships in a fairly large box with an image of the unit alongside its quad core sibling, the AS6204T. There is also a row of icons informing you that this is more than just a storage device.

One side of the box has a small specifications panel, a list of what is in the box and information about the mobile apps that are available for the AS6104T. The other side of the box has information about the ADM OS and a list of other four bay Asustor NAS units that are available, with some of their features.

Inside the box there is a standard accessory bundle which comprises an 90W AC adapter, a pair of  Ethernet cables, a selection of screws for both 3.5″ and 2.5″ drive installations, a quick installation guide and a software CD.

The Asustor AS6104T is fairly compact for a four bay front loading NAS – measuring 230 x 170 x 185.5 mm and has a high degree of build quality and a well constructed chassis.

The top side of the front bezel houses two stacked LEDs – the top one being the power indicator while the lower one which is built into the on/off button is the system status indicator. Further down panel is the network activity LED.

Sitting at the bottom of the front bezel is a USB3.0 port that is built into the One Touch back up button, which again has its own LED indicator. The button can be set up in either a transfer mode or to perform one touch backups.

These LEDs can even be controlled from within the OS; you can increase or decrease their brightness or even program a night mode for them including time and day.

While the front panel may be light on ports, the same can't be said for the real panel as its very busy and gives an idea of what the AS6104T can support.

Firstly there are a pair of Ethernet ports that support Link aggregation, a pair each of USB 3.0 and 2.0 ports, dual eSATA ports, an HDMI 1.4b port and finally a S/PDIF output. Also on the back panel is the input for the 90W power adapter.

   

The four front mounted drive bays have a locking latch mechanism to hold them in place but there is no form of physical security lock, something to bear in mind if using the NAS in a busy office environment.

Each tray has an LED disk activity indicator built into it.

      

The drive trays continue the build quality theme as they are of metal construction and support both 3.5 and 2.5in discs including SSDs, although they are not tool free.

The larger disks are fixed through the tray side walls by four screws while the smaller format drives are fixed in place via holes in the tray floor. Currently the AS6104T supports drives up to 8TB in capacity giving the unit a maximum capacity of 32TB (4x8TB).

  

The AS6104T ships with 2GB of DDR3L-1600 memory as standard but upgrading it presents no real problem as accessing the two SO-DIMM slots is pretty straightforward.

Undoing three screws allows the units cover to be removed and the two slots sit behind a protective covering on one side of the chassis. The covering is cut to allow access to the slots but you mind find it easier to undo the four screws that help keep the covering in place and carefully peel it away, it does have an adhesive backing but with care it comes away easily enough. 

Physical Specifications

Processor Intel Celeron N3050 1.6GHz (burst up to 2.16GHz).
Memory 2GB DDR3L-1600.
Gigabit Ethernet Ports x 2
Front panel connectors 1 x SuperSpeed USB 3.0
Rear panel connectors 2 x SuperSpeed USB 3.0, 2 x USB 2.0, 2 x eSATA, 1 x HDMI 1.4b, 1 x S/PDIF.
RAID support  JBOD, RAID 0/1 /5 /6 /10, RAID 1 /5 +Hot Spare.
Maximum hard drive size supported 8TB (max total storage 32TB).
Dimensions (D x W x H)  230 x 170 x 185.5 mm.
Weight 2.9kg.

  

The Asustor AS6104T uses the latest 2.6.0 version of the ADM (Asustor Data Master) OS. Any NAS is only as good as its user interface and the ADM is one of the best around, graphically and feature rich and easy to navigate through.

Setting up the AS6104T is straightforward and takes no time at all; from loading the OS to being able to use the NAS took around 10 minutes although waiting for the disks to synchronize takes a good deal longer – around 5 hours for a RAID 1 volume using 4TB drives, for example.

   
The main ADM shows the major sections of the OS although maybe having some form of side menu as all the other section pages have might be handy to find what you need a bit quicker.

    

As for backing your data up ADM comes with a multitude of options; external backup,  FTP backup, one touch backup and backing up to the Cloud.

If you want apps, then the ADM has them in spades. The App Central menu shows any installed apps, all available apps and updates. Currently the apps menu runs to 15 pages with 12 apps per page, except the last one with only ten – giving you 178 to choose from.

MyArchive
Now this is a bit special. MyArchive allows hard drives to be used as removable drives so you can swap between different collections of data as and when you need it. If you are worried about data security the MyArchive drives now have AES 256-bit encryption support. The AS6104T has up to three bays reserved for these disks.

Asustor Portal
If you want people to use a NAS has the central hub for a home media collection then the software you provide must be able to do the job. The Asustor Portal comes pre loaded with Google Chrome, Chromium Web, Netflix and YouTube apps and it also supports Boxee, XBMC and Kodi.

Connect the AS6104T to a HDMI ready display and you can use it to watch videos or browse the internet without the need to fire up your PC.  Adding the URL-Pack gives even more streaming options.

ADM 2.6 Highlights

• Asustor Portal
• MyArchive
• Searchlight
• iSCI Lun Snapshots
• Cloud Backup
• Web-based file access.
• VPN server
• Built-in FTP server.
• BitTorrent client.
• Plex Media support.
• Mobile control and media streaming via  AiRemote and AiCast.

To test the Asustor AS6104T we used 4TB performance and 6TB standard NAS drives, in both cases drives manufactured by Western Digital.

The performance drives were four WD 4TB Red Pro's (WD4001FFSX, 7.200rpm, 64MB cache) while the standard drives were four 6TB Red drives (WD60EFRX, 5,400rpm class, 64MB cache). Each set of drives were built into all the RAID arrays supported by the device; RAID 0,1, 5.6 and 10 and then tested.

Software:
Atto Disk Benchmark.
CrystalMark 3.0.3.
IOMeter.
Intel NASPT.

To test real life file/folder performance we use a number of different file/folder combinations to test the read and write performance of the NAS device.  Using the FastCopy utility to get a MB/s and time taken for each transfer, the data is written from and read back to a 512GB SSD.

60GB Steam folder: 29,521 files.
50GB Files folder: 28,523  files.
12GB Movie folder: 24 files – mix of Blu-ray and 4K files.
10GB Photo folder: 621 files – mix of .png, .raw and .jpeg images.
10GB Audio folder: 1,483 files – mix of .mp3 and .flac files.

Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0.3.

The AS6104T is pretty consistent across the board when it comes to dealing with the small files of everyday use apart from the write speed when in a 4 x 6TB RAID 6 array where the performance does seems to tail off slightly.

The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously.

Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.

With a dual core processor and a decent chunk of dual channel memory the AS6104T is no slouch when it comes to overall performance topping the 100MB/s mark for all RAID arrays with the exception of the 4 x 4TB RAID 5 score which was under the magic 100MB/s but at 97MB/s it really is splitting hairs.

Intel's NASPT (NAS Performance Toolkit ) is a benchmark tool designed to enable direct measurement of home network attached storage (NAS) performance. NASPT uses a set of real world workload traces (high definition video playback and recording, video rendering/content creation and office productivity) gathered from typical digital home applications to emulate the behaviour of an actual application.

We've used some of the video and office apps results to highlight a NAS device's performance.

HD Video Playback
This trace represents the playback of a 1.3GB HD  video file at 720p using Windows Media Player. The files are accessed sequentially with 256kB user level reads.
4x HD Playback
This trace is built from four copies of the Video Playback test with around 11% sequential accesses.
HD Video Record
Trace writes an 720p MPEG-2 video file to the NAS.  The single 1.6GB file is written sequentially using  256kB accesses.
HD Playback and Record
Tests the NAS with simultaneous reads and writes of  a 1GB HD Video file in the 720p format.
Content Creation
This trace simulates the creation of a video file using both video and photo editing software using a mix of file types and sizes. 90% of the operations are writes to the NAS with around 40% of these being sequential.
Office Productivity
A trace of typical workday operations. 2.8GB of data made up of 600 files of varying lengths is divided equally between read and writes. 80% of the accesses are sequential.
Photo Album
This simulates the opening and viewing of 169 photos (aprrox 1.2GB). It tests how the NAS deals with a multitude of small files.

The HD video scores from Intel's NASPT shows the benefits brought by the latest Intel Celeron processor and the
dual channel memory support. The HD Video Record test brings 100MB/s + performance across all arrays but once
again the performance dips when in RAID 6 mode for the other three tests.

When it comes to dealing with everyday workloads the AS6104T handles them without too much difficulty. It also shows pretty good consistency across the range when it comes to the multi file/file type Content Creation test and when faced with opening multiple small files in the Photo test. Once again the exception is when the device is using four 4TB disks in a RAID 6 array.

IOMeter is another open source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on hard drive and solid state drive technology.

We set IOmeter up (as shown above) to test both backup and restore performance on a 100GB partition.

The AS6104T shows pretty good consistency throughout the range of RAID arrays it supports with performance getting close to 100MB/s mark with the exception once again of RAID 6 where the the performance dips in both writing to the NAS and reading from it.

   

  

When it comes to dealing with real life file transfers the AS6104T doesn't skip a beat.  Backing up a 60GB Steam folder to the device configured in a 16.6TB RAID 5 array  took  just ten minutes, while performing the same action with a 50GB file folder took just under twelve and a half minutes.

Backing up a 12GB folder of movies using the same RAID mode took a shade under two minutes to complete while a 10GB folder of audio files took just over  two minutes and a 10GB folder of photos one minute forty.

We tested the peak power consumption of a NAS at the wall during a run of CrystalDiskMark 5.0.2  as this version of the benchmark runs the read and write benchmark suites separately so its easier to monitor what power the device is using during each function.

There's no real surprise in the arrays built with WD's standard Red drives showing less power usage than the ones built with Red Pro drives as the standard Red drives use power a bit more thriftily than their faster spinning cousins; average peak read/write power requirements for the 6TB Red drives is 6.4W and 5.2W at idle while the  4TB Red Pro's peak at 8.6W with 6.5W used during idling.

Asustor's AS6 series are the first to market using Intel's Braswell CPU technology together with dual channel memory support and the AS6104T shows the advantage of having both of these as it was regularly performing operations at 100MB/s plus throughout our testing. Although the performance is very strong in most of the arrays tested, we did see a fall off in RAID 6 performance in some of the tests with both 6TB and 4TB drives.

With its 4K playback support and HDMI port plus the host of streaming Apps that are available in the Asustor App Central it would make a powerful home mulitmedia center and the ability to be used in this guise without needing a PC to be booted up is a bonus.

Although it sits under Asustor's Home to Power User banner it would also make a very useful workhorse for a small office. The two LAN ports not only bring Link Aggregation support but also redundancy and the dedicated hardware encryption engine would be more useful in this environment as would the MyArchive technology.

Various collections of data can be stored on different drives and locked away and as it now supports AES 256-bit encryption, the data can be properly protected on the drive as well.  The AS6104T can also form the base of a quite a sophisticated surveillance system by using the Surveillance Center App and by adding the AiSecure mobile App you can always keep an eye on the camera streams from wherever you are.

Asustor's ADM OS has always been one of the better NAS OS around and it gets ever stronger with each release. The software is quick to install, easy to use and navigate through although some form of drop down menu on the opening page may make it a little easier and faster to get directly to the feature you are looking for.

The AS6104T is well built and is pretty compact for a four bay NAS so finding a place for it in a home or office environment shouldn't present too many problems and with support for the latest 8TB discs, it offers huge amounts of capacity to go with very good all-round performance.

You can buy from Red373 for £388.43 inc VAT HERE

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Pros:

• Latest Intel Celeron processor
• dual channel memory support
• ADM 2.6 OS
• Support for 8TB drives
• Generally very strong performance

Cons:

• RAID 6 performance is a little weak in some areas.

KitGuru says: The Asustor AS6104T uses the latest Intel processor to good effect and would make a powerful and feature rich addition to both the home and office environments.

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