Asustor Flashtor 6 NVMe NAS

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1

A few people asked me about the NVMe NAS I purchased a few months ago, so I thought I would start a new thread to share info on it for anyone interested:

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There are two versions available with a 6 or 12 disk enclosure. I went for the 6 disk version and it cost c£430, which is not bad for a high spec NAS:

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I have 4GB disks and two 1GB disks in there. There are a number of really amazing aspects to it from my perspective:

  1. It is COMPLETELY silent and very slimline meaning it is easy to hide away and does not get hot at all (only when transferring large amounts of data).
  2. NVMe disks are now crazily fast - one of the disks I have is a Samsung 990 PRO PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 and it has a max 7450MB/s Read, 6900MB/s Write speed!!! And the newer versions are only getting faster.
  3. Those read/write speeds mean the rendering of music and video is literally instant, zero buffering on my home network over WiFi.
  4. It also has a decent amount of upnp options (although not Asset so I am using Minim) and can even be used as a Roon server.
  5. Lastly, NVMe disks are not mechanical and so far less prone to failing. You can still use RAID; but I just prefer to take a backup to old HDDs I have on my PC every now and again.

Worth noting that NVMe disks are also pretty affordable now. You can get a decent 4TB disk for anything between £200-250. Anything above 4Tb is very expensive though so if you need more than 6x4TB, you will need to go for the 12 disk enclosure.

Oh and one final point - if you get one, make sure you buy the additional heatsink for c£30 that sits on top of the disks inside the enclosure. No idea why it is sold separately…

Hope that helps anyone who is interested in getting one :+1:

2

Thanks for the extra information - looking at buying something like this - review online talk about poor build quality? Is it so? DGP

3

More than welcome. As far as I am concerned it is a pretty high-end unit and well built. I have had a 7 series Synology NAS in the past and it is at least on par with that with regards to build quality.

4

One other point that may prove helpful if you are considering purchasing one is that the Asus NAS software is pretty much identical to Synology. They just use slightly different names for the apps; but their functionality and layouts are almost identical. Being familiar with Synology meant I had no issues setting this up fairly quickly.

5

Again thanks for the info - I think people take a dislike because the styling seems to be aimed at gamers. DGP

6

Yes, it is definitely more akin to their Asus ROG gaming design ethos. It is so compact though, I have it sitting underneath a cabinet completely out of sight.