ASUSTOR AS4004T 10GbE SOHO NAS Review

Bohs Hansen / 5 years ago

Pricing

At the time of this review, ASUSTOR’s impressive AS4004T can be yours for just $359.99 or £339.90. A fair price for a 4-bay NAS any day and especially considering this one comes with built-in 10Gbps Ethernet. There’s also a 2-bay version available called the AS4002T which can be had for £258 if you’re on a budget.

Final Thoughts

The times of 10Gbps ethernet being reserved for enterprise setups and rich people is over. With a device such as the ASUSTOR AS4004T that I tested today, it becomes affordable for almost anyone.

The AS4004T brings the advantages of fast Ethernet without being priced up due to other features which you might not need. This could be expansion slots, Intel CPUs, and upgradable memory. You won’t find those things on the AS4004T which is powered by a Marvell dual-core CPU and comes with 2GB DDR4 soldered. Despite this, the device delivers a great performance. And not just in the throughput areas. The user interface felt incredibly responsive throughout everything. Even such things as the storage manager that usually is one that takes time to load on any NAS, it loaded almost instantly.

With 10 times the network bandwidth, it’s easy to know that we get performance figures higher than from Gigabit devices. We saw great figures in my tests and these could easily be improved with the use of SSDs instead of HDDs.

Physical Design

The last thing we need to touch is the design. I really like this new diamond-pattern shape a lot. It gives it a sleek appearance that either can blend in or stand out as a clean device. The vital information is shown via LEDs on the front where there’s also a one-touch USB 3.0 solution.

Operating System

By now, we’re familiar with ASUSTOR’s ADM operating system, so there isn’t a lot to say to this. It works great, it’s responsive, and it is expandable with a lot of apps. With this latest addition of the ADM 3.3 update and Btrfs and snapshots, it’s better than ever before.