Asustor AS7008T 8-bay Intel Haswell SMB NAS Review
by Ganesh T S on November 30, 2014 5:05 PM ESTSingle Client Performance - CIFS & iSCSI on Windows
The single client CIFS and iSCSI performance of the Asustor AS7008T was evaluated on the Windows platforms using Intel NASPT and our standard robocopy benchmark. This was run from one of the virtual machines in our NAS testbed. All data for the robocopy benchmark on the client side was put in a RAM disk (created using OSFMount) to ensure that the client's storage system shortcomings wouldn't affect the benchmark results. It must be noted that all the shares / iSCSI LUNs are created in a RAID-5 volume. As expected, the more power platform in Haswell enables the unit to shine in almost all the single client workloads.
We created a 250 GB iSCSI LUN / target and mapped it on to a Windows VM in our testbed. The same NASPT benchmarks were run and the results are presented below. The observations we had in the CIFS subsection above hold true here too.
In a few of the benchmarks, the Rangeley-based Synology DS1815+ manages to take the lead over the AS7008T. This can be attributed to the fact that Synology's DSM is much more mature compared to Asustor's ADM.
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bernstein - Sunday, November 30, 2014 - link
Holy crap $1500?! subtracting i3-4330, GA-H97N, 2GB RAM, a 2x SATA3 PCIe controller, some usb stick for the os & a psu thats over $1100 just for the case & that custom operating system...to which i can only say: apple would be twice as rich if it had such margins...
tocker - Sunday, November 30, 2014 - link
We have not had the best run with the Asustor NAS devices - seem to have some bugs they need to sort out - We have found that even as backup targets they do bizarre things like stop sharing the folders via CIFS/SMB. (log in and reshare, problem solved)We expect a NAS to run for months/years without issues, and sadly this had not been the case for these units.
bill.rookard - Sunday, November 30, 2014 - link
I have to agree. When you build a NAS, it needs to be rock-solid, always on, and always available. Oh, and reliable disks help too. I have a FreeNAS 7 based system in my basement (Rack-mounted, Gigabyte board, Phenom II x 2 processor, 4gb ram, 5x2tb drives in RAID5) and it has been restarted maybe a half dozen times in as many years - most of those being deliberate power-downs for reconfigurations of the hardware (ram upgrades/chassis swap/1 drive replacement & rebuild) and it has been probably the most reliable OS I've ever dealt with.Considering FreeNAS is a free, open source project, I would think that the people at Asustor would be able to come at least as close.
leexgx - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
mine is i7-920 with 8 GB ram not ECC but never had stability issues its both CPU and ram underclocked as well (only 1 of the 3 ram slot works got the mobo for like £40-50 when i was doing folding@home with 3x9800GX2 ) 6 HDDs gets rebooted for updates every so 3-6 months (running 2003 server (the XP x64 based one) the later versions of MS server (vista at the time it was Built so been running for long time) was giving me issues with network performancemrdude - Sunday, November 30, 2014 - link
>$1500 for an i3 with 2GB of non-ECC RAM and only dual ethernet?That's a steal!
bill.rookard - Sunday, November 30, 2014 - link
No kidding, for $1500.00 it should almost come populated with at least 8x2tb drives.bernstein - Monday, December 1, 2014 - link
not almost... at $1500 it has to come with at least 8x3TB, everthing less is just ripping consumers off...Wkstar - Sunday, November 30, 2014 - link
EMachines came in 1999 and knocked the computer world prices in half. Somebody will come and do the same to NAS.. There prices are crazyKerryl - Monday, December 1, 2014 - link
Don't throw out your tongue...Asustor seems to be lower-priced in the league of i3 NAS. Over $2000 out there for even lower cpu configuration:http://www.amazon.com/QNAP-TS-1079-PRO-10-Bay-iSCS...
http://www.amazon.com/Synology-DiskStation-Diskles...
techticket - Monday, December 1, 2014 - link
at the core-i3 QNAP TS-879-PRO-U cost $2000+ from newegg.....