Asustor 1 Series: Sub-$200 NAS

[twitchyzero]

Got my hands on the AS1002T budget NAS a week ago...ASUS' sub $200 offering
I pretty much pulled the trigger blind. Pre-ordered it last month when it was announced with absolutely no customer reviews or reviews from the usual suspects.

quick specs:
Marvell ARM M7 Dual-core 1GHz
512MB DDR3
gigE, 2 USB3
Tool-less design
only sips a few watts when disks are hiberating

more deets here:
http://www.asustor.com/product?p_id=42#tab3

I'm running 2X8TB RAID 1 which operates quite loud, but NAS is self is very quiet unless it's booting up.

This is my first NAS so I have no other point of reference but the UI was simple yet very responsive. The settings are really robust and in depth ( you can even choose which LEDs you want on and its brightness. I like the backup option of allowing even your external HDD to spindown, so you can just set a schedule and forget about it). Schedulable SMART and bad sector tests are handy to have for a peace of mind. It's like they took all of RMerlin's work and incoropated it into the ADM OS.

When I was transferring the USB3 over ~150GB files it was running around 75MB/s
when I was moving roughly 3.5TB it dropped down to 28MB/s so needless to say it took about 2 days to have that done. Didn't test the network speed.

To my surprise, using its uPnP Media Server, Blu-ray remux 25Mbps mkv playbacks on my smart TV was smooth. Plex server did not work, I don't believe that plays nice with ARM processors simply because they're too weak for transcoding-on-the-fly

Looks like Guru3d released their review and it was very favourable. The rest you can read there as it's way more methodical.

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/asustor_as1002t_nas_review,1.html

Now some noob questions about drive longevity:

I understand Archive SMR HDDs aren't meant for NAS/RAID, but I'm wondering if it's best to keep the drives' orientation parallel to the floor or to have the nas stand up right as the nas was designed but the drives will be vertical?

RAID 1 reads doesn't always happen simultaneously to both drive. Does that mean in theory 1 drive will wear out faster than the other drive?

Cheers.

 

[L&LD]

Drive orientation doesn't matter. Even at angles other than 0 or 90 degrees. Using those bleeding edge drives though is an expensive experiment though. They will fail sooner rather than later and if you keep them filled up, it will make it much harder to save your data or move to better suited (but currently smaller) hdds for your NAS.

RAID1 reads may not be used from both drives, but internally, both still need to be accessed at the same time. I would say the wear levels would not be statistically significant between two identical drives used in RAID1.

 

[stevech]

Consider too using two independent volumes rather than RAID1, since for a 2-bay, this is, I say, much more prudent.
Where volume 2 has the backups for important parts of volume 1. Independent file system. Protection from human error (oops).

No matter, an external USB3 or eSATA drive for full backup is needed.

And yes, 8TB drives are bleeding edge.

 

[twitchyzero]

yeah I have an external backup drive also 8TB
it helps that each of them were only $200 locally few weeks ago ($150USD)

Next question: How do I allow my drives to spin down? I already have it set to have spindown after 5min of inactivity. I set certain hours where torrents are not uploading...yet I've not heard or seen them spindown. I've also set certain hours where the NAS will go into standby...any other choices?

 

[sfx2000]

FWIW - Enterprise/Carrier data centers keep the drives on the side - mostly due to space utilization, but the drives basically don't care...

Spindown - different opinions, but from my experience - most drives die on spin-up... drives that are kept spinning tend to last for years in heavy usage - again, data center experience here...

 

[twitchyzero]

The experience that you speak from, is that pertaining to SMR drives or just a general statement on HDDs?

 

[sfx2000]

The experience that you speak from, is that pertaining to SMR drives or just a general statement on HDDs?

general statement

 

[stevech]

I don't want my NAS' internal drives to spin down. Shortens life, lengthens access time.
I do config my home NAS to sleep while I do. That's one spin-up per day.
(Except when I'm on a project with people in Asia).

 

[twitchyzero]

ok good to know.

even if the drives dont' spin down i'm constantly hearing it clicking/scratching as if it's actively reading/writing when i'm not even streaming/downloading/running tests. I look at the processes and it's just the process 'top' is active, everything else is sleeping. Any ideas if this is normal?

 

[stevech]

Odd. My DS212 is about 3 ft. from where I sit at a desk. Totally silent - fan, drives.
Drives are WD Red 3TB.


Clicking might mean a drive is getting a high error rate on some track and is "homing" the heads against the parking stop. This is a very bad sign.

If instead, the noise is not a dramatic "click", but rather the sound of the heads moving (more like a 100Hz noise), that's OK.

I'd take a close look at the SMART status of each drive. Most NAS OS's can display that.