Review on Asustor Drivestor 2 AS1102T - 2 Bay NAS by Michael Dixon

Actual read speed is 212MB/s and same write speed is about 1.7Gb/s. Although the speed is under the 2.5 Gbps limit, it is still almost twice as fast as the Synology DS416Play. Every single function in ADM is orders of magnitude faster than anything in Synology, even on the demo site. I've been using Synology since 2013 but speed is something I've never liked about their products. Every single app is a click and a wait. I don't even see the point of adding so many apps if they just aren't responsive. The Asustor file system seen on Windows is much more responsive than Synology, even when doing multiple robot copies + photo scaling, etc. While the AS3304T has the performance, the software is intentionally clipped, speeds are slower, and you actually don't get BTRFS, no read-only snapshots. One of the reasons I got it is supposedly an easy way to recover data if it was detected by ransomware (not sure if this is true or not). I have contacted support. They suggested an alternative using iSCSI, but that was too much for me and I wasn't sure if it would be solved the same way. So I decided to go back and upgrade to the AS5304T. The AS55304T bumps the speed up to 260-280Mbps, which is almost 2.1Gbps, fairly close to the maximum on a single drive. It also enables BTRFS. The other interesting thing is that you can use an SSD as a volume if you really want to saturate 2.5 Gb/s. Note the link aggregation trick. A single connection must not be faster than 2.5 Gbps. The fact that the AS5304T is equipped with 2 x 2.5 Gbps, it can reach up to 5 Gbps in total and serve 2 clients or 2 connections, but a single connection cannot exceed 2.5 Gbps. For the switch I used a Netgear GS110EMX. However, Ubiquiti has developed a UniFi Flex XG switch that supports 4x 10Gb/s ports, which is a pretty good alternative to the Neatgear 2 10Gb/s port. I hope he doesn't cook as he doesn't look like he has a fan. While I miss some of the Synology apps, I'm happy to downsize the shared file system to a plain shared file system that works pretty well. Speed. In fact, the benefit of fewer applications is that there are fewer attack vectors and fewer security issues. The fewer security issues there are, the less likely it is that the data is ransomware. If you need applications, install them on another computer.