Asustor AS-604T review

When you connect to the NAS’s web interface it checks online for firmware updates automatically. There’s also a helpful pop-up that guides you through the key features and settings of the interface. These include Asustor Cloud Connect, which lets you use the AS-604T as a personal cloud server. The clear onscreen instructions ease the process of setting up the cloud server.

The NAS defaults to a RAID 5 volume, which we regard to be the ideal compromise between capacity and redundancy for a four-disk array. If one drive fails in a RAID 5 array your data will still be safe and the lost drive can be reconstructed on a new disk. However, if more drives fail, you will lose data.

We tested the NAS using four 3TB Western Digital Red hard disks, which gave us 8.11TB of capacity when formatted as a RAID 5 volume. The AS-604T’s Atom processor makes the AS-604T more powerful than many rivals. This not only means it runs apps more easily, it also leads to improved transfer speeds.

We tested transfer speeds to both a Windows share on the AS-604T and an iSCSI target. While a shared folder can be accessed by many users, an iSCSI target is only accessible to a single user. The iSCSI target is mounted on their PC as if it was a local hard disk. Because the user’s computer handles more of the throughput processing, iSCSI targets are faster to access and to write.

In our SMB transfer tests, the AS-604T produced an average large file transfer speed of 88.9MB/s, which is based on a write speed of 96.4MB/s and a read speed of 81.4MB/s. In our always-challenging small file test, the NAS averaged 17.4MB/s, with a write speed of 14.7MB/s and a read speed of 20.1MB/s.

Meanwhile, our iSCSI test achieved a large file throughput of 133.1MB/s write and 92.4MB/s read for an average of 112.8MB/s. When it came to small files, we saw an average of 62.7MB/s, based on 92.9MB/s write and 32.5MB/s read.

The Asustor AS-604T costs £355 excluding VAT, which is a good price for a powerful NAS enclosure with a slick interface. It’s both faster and cheaper than the QNAP TS-469 Pro and compares well against other four-bay NAS enclosures on the market. If you want a fast, well priced and easy to use NAS then you should buy the Asustor AS-604T.