A closer look inside
Once the cover is taken off the ASUSTOR AS1002T, the inner workings get revealed. We see a simple layout with the motherboard mounted on one side and a PCIe bridge for the SATA3 ports and power connections. Behind it all, we can spot the 70mm fan.
The hard disks aren’t just held up by the screws when you mount them, they are also supported by the frame itself. This should make sure that there isn’t any unnecessary strain on the SATA connectors and thereby also the drives.
The motherboard in itself is very simple and there aren’t many parts on it. The ARM CPU is located right in the middle and it has a small heatsink for passive cooling. There is a lot of free space on the motherboard as there isn’t any need for a lot more in a device like this.
The rear of the motherboard is almost empty, with little worth mentioning here. We do see the front USB port mounted here and above it the LEDs.
The PCIe bridge for the SATA connections is held equally simple as the motherboard is.
Taking a closer look at some of the parts, starting with the rear IO area, we see that there actually is room for more ports than were used. The power button is located to the right in this photo, followed by the reset button, the rear USB 3.0 port, the LAN port, and the DC power connection all the way to the left.
ASUSTOR went for a Marvell Alaska 88E1512 Gigabit Ethernet transceiver for the AS1002T and used a Samsung DDR3 chip for the system’s memory.
The final parts to show up closer are the LEDs and the FAN used, both can be seen below.
I have a Asustor NAS 1002 . Recently I have had two WD purples fail on this device within 3 months. (both less than 18 months old). I have been carrying out a lot of disk intensive operations (that’s what purples are designed for) and I can’t help thinking that this system just cannot cope with it. Anyone else have any Disk problems with the Asustor 1002T??
Hey Fred
In theory, a NAS shouldn’t be able to kill the drives like that – at least not in comparison to other NAS devices or PCs that would put the same strain on the drives as you had on your AS1002T.
I’ve recently had several WD RED 6TB drives fail on me, but they’re also from the first production of the 6TB series. No idea if there is a correlation there or if it’s just normal wear and tear combined with general luck.
I’ve not heard of other people having trouble with the unit, except a few comments that it’s underpowered for the needs people have of their NAS’. But yea, it’s a budget device with a relatively slow CPU, so that’s a given for enthusiasts and other heavy users.
Hi! I am looking into to buy this or its upgraded sister 1004 v2 – my primary goal is to use it as my music library – so reading this there should be no problem stream hi res audio files (stereo or multi channel) to an Nvidia Shield and over to AVR and speakers? I plan on letting the Shield do the heavy work (I have Kodi installed there) and just want the files sent to the Shield.