ASUSTOR AS6202T Enthusiast 2-Bay 4K-Capable NAS Review

Setup – Activity, Hardware, Notification & Other System Features

So far, I’ve mostly focused on the basic file distribution features, but the ASUSTOR ADM operating system has a lot more features, function, and abilities. In this section, I will take a look at the hardware and monitor functions as well as energy saving features and easy methods for remote connection setup.

Activity Monitor

The Activity Monitor is a great way to quickly find out what takes what amount of resources, what’s draining your systems resources, and what processes are running. The first four pages explain themselves and show the CPU, Memory, Network, and Disk Usage respectively.

The fifth activity page is a little more interesting when looking for more details. You can see each process that is running, their state, and how much CPU usage and Memory they’re consuming.

Hardware Information

The System Information app provides a quick and easy glance at your NAS’ hardware and setup. On the first page, you find information such as BIOS and ADM version, time-zone settings, hardware info and temperature.

The network page has all the information you’d expect, it does however not report the 802.3ad connection error that’s currently present.

The Log page is a little more interesting. You can find all the events that have happened here in order to quickly diagnose why something happened. For example, you can see all the failed events from my various testing below as well as USB detection, virtual drive mounts, and more.

This is also where we can view what users currently are logged into our server.

The final page called Dr. ASUSTOR is able to diagnose your NAS and detect possible trouble before it becomes an actual problem. This is a very useful feature that every ASUSTOR users should check on regularly.

Hardware Control

ADM offers quite a bit of control over the hardware itself, not just the software. For example, you are able to control the LED brightness and disable specific LEDs. You can also enable a special night mode and customize that. In the same way, you can also disable the system buzzer from various events. We can also disable both the IR receiver and hardware reset button.

The AS6202T can be sent to sleep mode on a specified inactivity timer and the same goes for both internal and external connected drives.

EuP mode is supported for that extra bit of environmental conscience and we can define what to happen in various power situations. Power Scheduling is another awesome feature that lets you configure the NAS to automatically turn on and off by scheduling.

Last but not least, the fan speed can be manually changed in three intervals or be set to automatically adjust based on system temperature and load.

Notification

You can send and receive notifications to both email addresses and also via SMS. The last does however require you to have the service available already. Neither takes much effort to configure and you’d be done in a minute or less.

Push notifications to your mobile devices is another way to receive warnings and systems messages. You got your phone with you most of the time anyway, so why not simply use this.

More Features

Ease of Access is just what the name promises. It is an easy way to set your NAS up to be accessed from you anywhere and from any device as well as sort your router and DDNS connections.

The EZ-Router will automatically configure any port forwards that installed apps require in your router if UPnP is enabled. You can also manually add more rules or modify existing ones and let ADM send it on to your router. No need to fiddle with multiple user interfaces.

If you don’t want to use ASUSTOR’s Cloud Connect, then you got plenty of other options in the form of DDNS services. ADM supports a long list.

Besides the EuP settings we saw earlier, the AS6202T also has its own Energy Saver feature. This can be set to the automatic version that keeps track of internal and external drives as well as the fan, or you can manually adjust them all.

With the Network Recycle Bin feature you don’t need to worry about accidental file deletion on network drives anymore. Normally when you delete from a network drive, it’s gone. This adds a recycle bin to your shares and adds another convenience.