Computex 2014: ASUSTOR Announces 7 Series NAS & Shows ADM 2.2 Operating System
by Kristian Vättö on June 13, 2014 8:20 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- NAS
- Asustor
- Computex 2014
While NASs are more of Ganesh' expertise, I dropped by the biggest NAS manufacturers at this year's Computex as Ganesh was unable to attend the show. First up is ASUSTOR who introduced a new 7 Series NAS for the high-end market.
The 7 Series NAS is mostly aimed towards the enterprise and comes in two form factors: rackmount and desktop tower. The rackmount model is available in two sizes with the smaller one being a 9-bay and the bigger being a 12-bay solution. Both version come with either an Intel Core i3-4330 or Xeon E3 processor depending on the customer's choice. The default configuration ships with 4GB of DDR3 but that is expandable to up to 32GB. Connectivity wise there are four Gigabit Ethernet, four USB 3.0 and two eSATA ports for additional storage and two HDMI ports along with a VGA port for display connectivity.
The desktop tower version drops one bay at the low-end and two at the high-end and thus comes in 8-bay and 10-bay configurations. The processor is the same i3-4330 but there is no option for a Xeon CPU and the RAM changes from UDIMMs to SO-DIMMs with the default capacity being 2GB (up to 16GB). Gigabit Ethernet ports drop to two as well but there are still three USB 3.0, two USB 2.0 and two eSATA ports. For video output there are two HDMI ports and one audio output.
ASUSTOR also had their other NAS lineup at their booth. The 6 Series is available from two to eight bay configurations and ships with a 2.13GHz Atom CPU along with 1GB of DDR3.
Moving to the mainstream models, the 3 Series comes in two and four bay options and ships with a 1.6GHz Atom CPU and 1GB of DDR3. Similar to the higher-end models, the 3 Series has an HDMI port, making it viable as a media player as well with 1080p playback support.
And finally the 2 Series. This is the low-end series with no video playback support, so it's suited for people who just want a regular NAS with no added features. Two and four bay models are available and the CPU is a 1.2GHz Atom with 512MB of DDR3.
ASUSTOR was also showing the new ADM software. This is the HTPC view with the desktop mode being a bit more iOS-like. The new 2.2 version brings Mail Server and Photo Gallery apps for instance and there are over a hundred apps in ASUSTOR's App Central, which are designed for NAS use.
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isa - Friday, June 13, 2014 - link
Thanks for covering NASes at this show. Are any of the Atom NASes based on Silvermont? I've been looking forward to such since last September and I've been disappointed and puzzled by not finding any Silvermont consumer/SOHO NASes in the market. Or maybe they're out there and I missed them.Kristian Vättö - Friday, June 13, 2014 - link
I'm pretty sure these are based on Intel Evansport platform (i.e. with Bonnell cores). As far as I know, Intel has not launched Silvermont based NAS chips yet, which is why e.g. QNAP has decided to dump Atom totally.tuxRoller - Friday, June 13, 2014 - link
...and I'm sure these are hugely expensive.I really wish someone would offer a reasonably priced 8+ bay nas for the consumer market at around $400. You can't really make your own both as small and hotswappable.
romrunning - Friday, June 13, 2014 - link
Hear, hear! With some of these 8-12 bay NAS chassis, you can pay more than the sum total of the drives you're putting into them! I find that it's cheaper at times to just buy a used server (Dell/HP) with the amount of bays you need, and then re-purposing it as your own NAS for business use.tuxRoller - Friday, June 13, 2014 - link
It is cheaper, but you've got to deal with a pretty damn big tower.Considering all the niches companies serve, why hasn't someone stepped into this one? It wouldn't be super high margin but do they need to make close to 100% markup?
cen - Saturday, June 14, 2014 - link
400$ seems completely unreasonable. I am planning to build a "proper" NAS based on Silverstone DS380B and C2550D4L which were reviewed here a while ago. Without the disks I am already close to 800$ in parts. Put in 16TB of disks and you have another 700$ to add. Which is probably still cheaper than any of these solutions and it will blow them out the water with performance.tuxRoller - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
400 should be the price without disks, of course.For an OEM if they can't put together decent kit for that which includes case, motherboard, CPU, ram and PSU they shouldn't be in the business.
The problem we have, as consumers, is we can't take advantage of scale (well, if I were a buyer for, say, Walmart, I could). The actually fab cost for a small case (tdp of around 120W), and bulk purchase of avotron w/4GB ram and disk support up to 8 should be under 350. Even at 500 I'd be happy.