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Asustor's AS620*T family of NAS devices sit under the companies Power User to Business banner with models ranging from 2-bay all the way up to the flagship 10-bay model, the AS6210T. One notch down the food chain from the flagship unit is the 8-bay AS6208T.
With the combination of a quad-core processor and dual channel memory, the AS6208T is a powerful NAS device. Asustor quote three throughput figures for the AS6208T depending on how you have the four Ethernet ports set up as they support Link Aggregation.
In RAID 5 mode with all four ports linked Asustor quote Sequential Read/Write figures of 398MB/s and 355MB/s respectively. With two ports linked, the figures drop to 244MB/s for reads and 220MB/s for writes and finally with a single connection the performance is quoted at 112MB/s for reads and 111MB/s for writes.
When tested with a single connection in the ATTO benchmark we obtained figures for a RAID 5 array of 119MB/s for reads and 117MB/s writes, a little better than the official figures.
One area where the AS6208T shines is when it comes to backing up data for Windows, Mac and Linux users. There are a multitude of options both hardware and cloud-based, over twelve in fact. On the hardware side, data can be backed up onto USB external devices, local machines on the network or by using the MyArchive technology. As for cloud-based options; Amazon S3, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box.net, Google Drive, WonderBox, xCloud, CrashPlan, HiDrive and Ralus are all supported.
On the business side of things, the AS6208T provides Hyper-V, Citrix and VMware virtual storage support which together with support for iSCSI/IP-SAN and NFS protocols allows it to fully integrate with existing IT setups. By using VirtualBox with 4GB or more of memory you can install virtual machines of differing OS on the AS6208T, turning the NAS into a company backup PC and by using ADM it's also possible to set up mobile virtual machines.
A dedicated hardware AES-NI encryption engine provides AES 256-bit encryption and the various collections of important data that can be stored using the MyArchive technology are protected by AES 256-bit encryption with an added level of security afforded by being able to use a USB device as a physical encryption key.
It can also be used as a center of a security system for a business as it comes with 4 free camera channels. By buying additional camera licenses, up to 36 channels can be supported by the AS6208T. By using Surveillance Center together with the AiSecure mobile app you can even stream live camera feeds to a mobile device.
In the home, the AS6208T’s 4K playback support and HDMI port make it an ideal central hub for a multimedia collection and with up to 80TB of storage capacity (at the time of writing the NAS supports drives up to 10TB) there's a fair bit of space to store media files. Add in the host of streaming software that is available via the Asustor Portal (Google Chrome, Chromium Web, Netflix, Kodi, Spotify and Virtual Box), with others available through the URL-Pack, and the multimedia capability is excellent.
In its multimedia guise, the AS6208T doesn’t even need a PC to be powered up to use it. Just connect the NAS to an HDMI ready display and you can use it to watch videos browse the internet or listen to music.
We found the AS6208T for £666.92 on Amazon.co.uk HERE
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Pros:
- ADM software.
- Data backup options.
- Hardware transcoding engine.
- Expandable memory.
Cons:
- Lack of proper locks on drive bays.
Kitguru says: A powerful, and thanks to the ADM software easy to use NAS for business or with its multimedia support and potential for huge storage space, a powerful home media hub.
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