Sitting under Asustor's Power User to Business banner, the AS6404T 4-bay NAS is powered by an Intel Apollo Lake Celeron processor backed by 8GB of dual-channel memory and supports both USB 3.0 Type -C and HDMI 2.0 ports. Powered by an Intel Celeron J3455 1.5GHz (burst up 2.3GHz) processor, the Asustor AS6404T comes with 8GB of DDR3L 1866MHz dual -channel memory (2 x 4GB modules in the two SO-DIMM slots). Asustor quote performance figures of 219MB/s and 221MB/s for reads and writes respectively for the AS6404T in a RAID 5 array, but that is with both LAN ports in Link Aggregation mode. With a single Gigabit connection the performance is quoted at 104MB/s for reads and 110MB/s for writes. It has both a dedicated hardware AES 256-bit encryption engine, which will appeal to small business because of the data protection it offers and a hardware transcoding engine, which will be more useful to the home user. The transcoding engine supports H.264 (AVC), H.265 (HEVC), MPEG-2, VC-1 and VP9 up to 1080p. Specifications Intel 1.5GHz quad-core processor. Built in AES-NI hardware encryption engine. 8GB DDR3L memory. Dual Gigabit LAN. 3-year warranty. The Asustor AS6404T ships in a fairly large box with an image of the unit alongside what appears to be its dual-core sibling, the AS6104T (there are no drive bay locks on the second image). There is also a row of icons informing you that this is more than just a storage device, something you can say about most of today's NAS devices, and three icons informing that the AS6404T supports Windows, Mac OS (OS X 10.6 onwards) and Linux. The rear of the box is covered by multilingual resumes of some of the AS6404T’s features. 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 AS6404T. The other side of the box has information about the ADM OS and the Surveillance Center app. Inside the accessories box, there is a Delta Electronics DPS-90AB-3 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 AS6404T is a 4-bay NAS of compact design with excellent build quality. Above the four vertically mounted bays sits an LCD display with four menu buttons to the side of it. When the NAS is fired up the LCD screen displays the IP assigned to the NAS. Using the menu buttons next to the screen allows for a number of operations to be carried out. The unit can be shut down and restarted, the one touch backup can be initiated, the server name can be changed and the network settings adjusted. But to be honest it’s just as easy to use the ADM OS to change these settings. The left hand side of the bezel is home to the system indicator LEDs, the power switch and the front USB 3.0 port. Sitting under the power switch at the top of the bezel is the system indicator then moving further down the bezel there are a pair of network activity LEDs and finally the USB activity LED. This front USB port is built into the One Touch back up button, which can be set up in the ADM OS in either transfer mode or to perform one-touch backups. All the indicator 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. The real panel is dominated by the grill for the 120mm cooling fan. To the right of this sit all the rear external ports. From top to bottom these are; single USB 3.0 Type -C and HDMI 2.0 ports, a pair of USB 3.0 Type-A ports, two Gigabit LAN ports and a single S/PDIF port. Under these sit the reset button and the power input port. The four front mounted drive bays have a locking latch mechanism to hold them in place and each has a small lock at the bottom of the door, which needs something like a small bladed screwdriver to lock and unlock them, which may not be as good as a key lock but it's better than nothing. This feature offers a level of data security in a busy office environment. Each tray has a LED disk activity indicator built into it. The drive trays support both 3.5 and 2.5in discs including SSDs and are of metal construction but unfortunately 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 spec sheet for the AS6404T says it supports drives up to 10TB in capacity, but the unit does support the latest 12TB hard drives but only with the 3.0.2 or later version of the ADM (Asustor Data Master) OS. The AS6404T ships with 8GB of DDR3L-1866 memory (2 x 4GB modules) filling both SO-DIMM slots but if you need to access the memory slots then it's pretty straightforward. Undoing three screws allows the unit’s 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 may 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 J3455 1.5GHz (burst up 2.3GHz) Memory: 8GB DDR3L 1866MHz Gigabit Ethernet Ports: 2 Rear panel connectors: 1 x USB C Type-C, 2 x USB 3.0 Type A, 2 x LAN, 1x HDMI 2.0, 1x S/PDIF Front panel connectors: 1 x USB 3.0 RAID support: JBOD, RAID 0, 1, 5, 6 & 10 Cooling: Active: 1 x 120mm Drive Bays Supported: 4 Maximum hard drive size supported: 10TB (12TB with ADM 3.0.2 or later) Maximum Capacity: 40TB (48TB with 12TB drives) Internal File System support: EXT4 Dimensions (D x W x H): 230 x 170 x 18.5mm. Weight: 2.9kg. Asustor’s ADM (Asustor Data Master) OS is a constantly evolving GUI (version 3.0.3 RAI4 at the time of writing) and is easy to install, navigate through and is one of the most feature rich around particularly when it comes to add on apps. After you've logged in for the first time, a welcome to ADM guide window pops up. ADM 3.0 sees a fresh new look for the OS and a word of caution, as the new version has a modified file structure you won't be able to roll back a version after upgrading. The main ADM page shows the major sections of the OS, although for speed it might be handier to have some form of side menu on this main page as all the other section pages have to help you get to what you are looking for a little quicker. At the top of the main menu window are three icons; admin, tools and search. The admin drop down has five options; personal, sleep, restart, power off and sign out. The personal section is where you can configure the account password, E-mail address, description and ADM language. The search icon links to Searchlight, Asustor's own search tool, designed for running fast and precise searches for files on the NAS. To the left of the search icon is the tools icon. This drops down a number of widgets that display various NAS functions for easy monitoring. With ADM 3.0 these can now be individually tailored to a user's needs including the ability to monitor system status in real time without having to open an app. As with any NAS, disk management, RAID and volume creation are at the heart of things. Storage Manager looks after all things disk related and has had a refresh with ADM 3.0 with a list type interface and an added overview section. ADM provides the AS6404T with a pretty comprehensive set of backup options. Data can be backed up remotely (either as backup source or destination), via FTP, internally, externally and to the cloud. The front USB port is used for one touch backups. It can be configured to transfer data from a USB device to the NAS or back the other way. You can setup backup methods (copy or synchronization) and folder paths from within the settings page. With File Explorer you can browse photos and play music straight from within it, either single or multiple songs. It also supports video playback of files while searching. App support has always been one of ADM’s strong points, as one glance at the App Central menu confirms. App Central is the control centre for app management and shows installed apps, all available apps and updates. At the time of writing, the list of available apps listed for the AS64** series is an immense 245 and counting. New for ADM 3.0 is App Central upgrade prompts. If there are items that can be upgraded, App Central will now indicate which ones these are, instead of waiting for an overall ADM upgrade. The Activity Monitor has been updated with a new interface and icons and supports real-time monitoring of the NAS system and resources. The ADM help page has five links to various parts of the Asustor web site where you can find help and advice if you have problems with the NAS. The Forum button takes you to the Asustor online forum and Downloads is a direct link to the download pages. Compatibility is a useful addition as it takes you to the Asustor Compatibility page, a very handy selection of hardware compatibility tables. Another useful link is to the Asustor College. Here you will find a collection of online easy to follow courses to learn all aspects of the NAS and its functions. The final link takes you direct to the Asustor online Support Center. MyArchive One very clever backup solution that ADM brings to the table is called MyArchive. This allows hard drives to be used as removable drives so you can swap between different collections of data as and when you need it. Recently upgraded, MyArchive now supports EX4, NTFS and HFS+ file systems. Data security, particularly in an office environment is paramount and MyArchive drives have AES 256-bit encryption support (EXT4 file system only at present) and to add another layer of protection a USB device can be used as a physical encryption key. The AS6404T has up to three bays reserved for MyArchive disks. Asustor Portal With Asustor Portal there's no need to turn on your computer when you want to play videos or browse the internet. You need only simply connect your NAS to any HDMI ready display. It comes preloaded with YouTube and Netflix and by loading the additional URL-Pack, even more streaming sites become available including Plex, Vimeo and Youku. Adding the URL-Pack-Social brings support for Facebook, Google+, Hangouts, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin, WhatsApp and Instagram. ADM 3.0 Highlights Asustor Portal MyArchive Searchlight Surveillance Center 2.8 MyArchive LooksGood SoundsGood iTunes Server Mail Server 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 AiData, AiMaster, AiRemote, AiMusic, AiFoto, AiCast and AiVideos. Setting up the AS6404T is a pretty straightforward and painless task; it only takes around 10 minutes to load the OS and get the unit ready for use, although waiting for the disks to fully synchronize obviously takes a great deal longer, e.g. around 20 hours for a RAID 5 array. First job is to download the Asustor Control Center from the Asustor website. This app will search your network to find any Asustor NAS units on the network. Actually you can do a lot more with the ACC than just find the NAS to install ADM. There are six menu buttons on the top of the GUI; Scan, Open, Connect, ADM Update, Service, and Action. The first two are pretty self-explanatory, Scan for the NAS and Open, opens a web browser and connects to ADM. Clicking on the connect button gives you three options to connect to the data on the NAS; map a shared folder, create a remote file folder (via WebDAV or FTP) or connect via FTP. The ADM Update button checks for ADM updates and if there are any starts the upgrading as soon as you've logged into the NAS. The Service button provides a shortcut to Photo Gallery and/or Surveillance Center if you have either of them installed. The final Action button provides access to power controls; Wake-on-LAN, Find Me, Night Mode, Sleep Mode, Restart, and Shut Down but only after logging in administrator details. Once the ACC has located the NAS and you select it, the welcome screen appears. There are two ways to setup the device; 1-Click Setup and Custom. With the 1-Click method you simply enter name for your NAS, choose a password and then select how you want the storage to be set up and that's about it. The Custom method gives you more detailed choices as can be seen from the screens below. Whichever method you choose to set the NAS up, each stage along the install process is checked off on the initialisation page so you always know what’s happening during the install procedure. The last job is the register the NAS. Registering it provides an Asustor ID which you will need to download apps from App Central. It will also be needed if you should require the technical support center. To test the Asustor AS6404T we used four 6TB Red drives (WD60EFRX, 5,400rpm class, 64MB cache), 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 240GB SSD. 100GB data file. 60GB iso image. 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. 5GB (1.5m pixel) image. BluRay Movie. Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives, SSD’s and other storage devices.We are using V3.0.3. Overall the AS6404T makes a pretty good job of dealing with the small bity files of everyday use, averaging 9.43MB/s for writes and 11.81MB/s for reads for the five arrays tested. 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 single Gigabit connection, Asustor quote throughput performance for the AS6404T at 104MB/s for reads and 110MB/s for writes. We were able to confirm these figures and indeed better them a little under testing. The ATTO benchmark gave figures of 118MB/s for reads and 117MB/s for writes for all the arrays tested, about as fast as you going to get out of a single Gigabit connection. 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. On the whole, the AS6404T performed pretty well in the video tests of Intel's NASPT benchmark. However the performance did drop off in RAID's 0,1 and 6 during the HD Video Playback test and overall the RAID 6 performance was a little down on the rest of the arrays. In the NASPT Office tests the AS6404T shows a good degree of consistency across the arrays for the Office Productivity and Content Creation traces. When it comes to dealing with the multitude of small files that make up the Photo Album trace, the AS6414T performs the best in RAID 1 by quite some margin. 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. In our backup and restore test the AS6404T only topped the 100MB/s mark on one occasion, when reading back the data in RAID 0 mode, but on most of the other runs it got very close to that level. The clear exception was when writing to the disks in RAID 6 when the performance dropped considerably. The hardware encryption engine in the AS6404T works pretty well in both RAID 5 and 6. In RAID 6 the drive drops just 12.7MB/s when writing an encrypted 16GB folder of data and just over 10MB/s when reading the data back. In RAID 5 mode there's a 12.9MB/s drop in write performance and 12.5MB/s fall in reads. The Asustor AS6404T for the most part dealt with our real life data transfers without any real problem. The exception being when data was being read from the drives in RAID 6 where there was a noticeable drop in performance. 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. Asustor quote operational power consumpton for the AS6404T at 24W (11.2W HDD Hibernation, 0.44W sleep). These figures were obtained testing with WD 3TB Reds which have power rating of 4.1W for active read/write and 2.7W when in idle. The WD 6TB Red drives we used for testing are a little more power hungry at 5.3W read/write and 3.4W idle. Asustor refresh their NAS product lines on a regular basis allowing them to bring in the latest CPU technologies and other hardware advancments to a range of NAS devices ranging from value units for the home up to powerful NAS designed for the SMB market sector. The AS6404T is a refresh of last year's AS6204T (which we have reviewed here) bringing with it an Apollo Lake quad core Celeron J3455 in place of the Celeron N3150 powering the AS6204T and replacing some of the older external ports with faster, more modern ones. From the front, the AS6404T looks identical to the previous generation AS6204T but once you turn it around to look at the rear panel you can see some important changes, not only in the port layout but the type of hardware too. The S/PDIF port in the AS6204T has been moved down from the top of the panel to the bottom in the AS6404T and replaced at the top by a USB 3.0 Type-C port. The HDMI 1.4a port has been upgraded to HDMI 2.0 in the new NAS, and the pair of eSATA ports have been removed completely to be replaced by a pair of USB 3.0 ports. The two USB2.0 ports of the AS6204T have also gone, with both LAN ports now mounted side by side. The latest verison 3.0 of Asustor’s ADM (Asustor Data Master) OS improves on what is already one of the best NAS operating systems around. ADM 3.0 brings a file structure change (note of caution here, if you update to 3.0 you won't be able to roll back to a previous version). The interface has been refreshed and now has a grouping function so you can group apps together. Also new is the ability to resize all app windows which makes it easier to view long names. Desktop widgets, so useful for monitoring the health and resource status of the NAS can now be user defined and monitoring is now available dynamically so there is no need to open any further apps. A system announcement function has been added. This is a real boon to system administrators as it eliminates the need to send around emails warning when updates, backups etc. are due. It can also be used in the home environment to notify people logged on the NAS about content changes such the addition of photos or videos. A really useful new addition is the App Shortcuts for the Photo Gallery, SoundsGood, LooksGood and Surveillance Center apps. If you have any of these installed a shortcut can be added to the login screen so you can skip the main login and go straight to the particular app you want to use and login to the system via that app's page. With the AS6404T, (in fact all the AS63 & AS64 models) comes not only WOL (Wake On Lan) which enables the powering up of the NAS from a signal set over the local network but also WOW (Wake On Wan) which enables powering on/off and enabling of services of the NAS over the internet. When it comes to backing up your data (remembering that RAID is no substitute for properly backing up your data) you are almost spoilt for choice with AS6404T. Want to back data to the cloud, no problem as Amazon S3, WonderBox, xCloud, CrashPlan, Box.net, HiDrive, Ralus, ASUSWebStorage, Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive are all supported. If not the cloud then there are remote options using FTP Explorer as well USB external drives (via the front USB One Touch button) and local backup. Then there is the MyArchive techology that allows NAS hard drives to be saved as archive disks. We found the Asustor AS6404T available Brought To Order on Overclockers UK for £539.99 HERE Pros. Overall performance. ADM OS. Feature rich. Cons. RAID6 performance was a little disappointing in some tests. Kitguru says: A powerful, well featured NAS that is easy to set up, Asustor's AS6404T is equally suited for home or office use. The latest 3.0 version of Asustor's ADM (Asustor Data Master) OS improves on what was already one of the best NAS OS available.
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