ASUSTOR AS1002T 2-Bay Entry-Level NAS Review

Setup – Users, Services & Files

We’ve done our basic initialization and the system is running, what we need now are some users, user groups, and network shares; these three are all conveniently found in the Access Control.

Users

There are two default users created, admin and guest, and you can create pretty much as many more as you want. That is if you want less than 1024 users and I doubt anyone would create more on an NAS like this anyway.

Creating new users is quick and painless. There are only two things required here and that is a username and password. Optionally you can change the user-ID, set a description and email, and also set expiration date and the users ability to change his own password.

If you already created a user group, then you can assign the new user to a group right away. The two groups called users and administrator are created by default during the initialization.

Access to shares can also be set right away during the user creation process.

Disk quota can be useful to prevent users from filling your NAS with too much garbage. Set a limit that they need to stay within and you have one worry less.

And that is all there is to it and you’ll just have to repeat the process for all the users that you want to create.

User Groups

User groups is an easy way to keep track of who is who, where the different accounts you created belong, and what they got access to. It is a lot easier to manage a few groups that 10s or 100s of users manually.

Creating new user groups is a simple three-step process. Set a name and optional description, select what users should be in the group, and what shared folders they should have access to.

Shared Folders

The shared folders are the backbone of your NAS and its main area of use. At least when you go by the network attached storage part. The shared folders will be the ones you can access over your network and easily read, copy, and move files to and from; there are a few default shares created, but you’ll most likely want to create more.

Creating a new shared folder reveals a feature that’s awesome on this NAS and that is the shared folder encryption. Not that it has that feature in itself, most have, but the AS1002T has a hardware encryption engine for AES 256-bit folder encryption that makes encrypted shares a lot faster.

Privileges can be set in a multitude of ways, allowing you to have it the way you want to.

There is also another way to create shares on your network from the content that is stored on your NAS and that is Virtual Drives as shares. The virtual drives will be created from ISO files stored or accessible through the NAS, allowing you to create a virtual drive from any disk image.

Services

Now that we have created our users, groups, and shares, we need to decide what services to starts and which fully depend on what you need. Don’t turn anything on that isn’t required, it’ll just eat resources. Windows shares are turned on by default and the rest is off.

Windows users have several more options besides just turning it on, such as Active Directory support and NTLMv2 authentication. Mac OS X users can benefit from both Bonjour advertising and Time Machine support while Linux users have NFS with its own privileges.

The FTP server is one of my favorite tools on an NAS as well as in general. It is simple, fast, and reliable.

The AS1002T supports both FXP and SSL connections for the FTP server. FXP is a must for all remote-operated systems that run FTP server, it can save so much time and bandwidth and it’s nice to see that it wasn’t forgotten.

The AS1002T only has 1GHz dual-core ARM CPU, so you shouldn’t run the biggest websites from this unit. You can however do it, as it features a built-in web server with virtual host and MySQL features.

Backup Features

Backup is a very relevant feature for an NAS and ASUSTOR has this area covered well, both to and from the NAS. One of the most popular ways to create remote backups is Rsync and it is also the first option you get within the Backup and Restore functions.

FTP backup is even simpler and all that it requires is an FTP server running somewhere that you got access to. I really like do like the FTP protocol.

Double is better, at least sometimes, and that is why you can create backups from content on the NAS to another location on the same device.

The external backup functions allow you to create easy backups to and from connected USB devices.

ASUSTOR also included a cloud backup feature for Amazon S3 users. A nice bonus, but I don’t think that many users of this particular NAS will use that service.

Last but not least, you also have the ability to backup and restore the system settings for the NAS itself. You can also schedule these exports.