This NAS Has A Powerful Secret! - Asustor 5404T Review & Setup Guide

[@WesPerry]

Correction: The USB ports are capable of 10Gbps. Which is good for externally attached storage. Maybe someday there will be a 10Gbps ethernet adapter for USB that I can try on that (currently they're all thunderbolt 3/4). Although it would likely never reach a full 10Gbps on USB, it could still be much faster than 2.5Gbps!

[@roberthexter5076]

Seems out of everything this is one area they could improve this device. Other than this one thing it's an awesome little machine!

[@WesPerry]

I was hoping the new lockerstor revision would add 10Gb ports, but unfortunately they didn’t. Apparently those ports are still too expensive for this price point? Hmm

[@digitaldisruptlabs]

Best walkthrough ever! Almost a year after I got my NAS, I just learned how to do link aggregation in the NAS

[@MichaelThomas-qh4yv]

Greetings Wes, I trust you, your family and loved ones had a wonderful Christmas. Just want to say I have found your channel and its videos, educational, helpful, entertaining and inspiring; as a keen amateur photographer. May I wish you and your loved ones a Blessed, Peaceful and Prosperous New Year 🙏 🎉

[@WesPerry]

Thanks so much, Michael! Merry Christmas!

[@theol1044]

Nice video (thanks!) & interesting setup, but isn't the SSD cache a bit superfluous, since all you seem to use the hdds for is internal backup (plus maybe some kind of archive)? Esp. the write cache seems pointless, as everything on there has to finally be committed to the hdds anyway, and all those internal backups will make an additional detour through the cache SSD.

[@WesPerry]

@@theol1044 one of the big purposes of the SSD cache is to reduce wear and tear on the HDD’s. This lets it process data and prepare it, organize it etc without wasting wear on the HDD’s. If the SSD’s fail it’s no big deal at all in this case. HDD failure is the thing one is ultimately trying to avoid in the NAS game.

[@theol1044]

@@WesPerry If all you're writing is one big backup job per night, you won't save any wear on the hdd. Everything will be written to the hdd in the end anyway. All you'll acomplish is wear on an SSD that doesn't need to be there in the first place.

[@AyoolaBoyejo]

Thanks for a very thorough review!

[@DaveAndrus]

Thanks VERY much for the tips on installing the NVMEs first for snappier OS, as well as the internal backup from hot to cold storage. I have the LockerStor Gen 2 6-bay, and I noticed a definite difference. Definitely will watch more of your vids and have subscribed. BTW, I found the same CAT 5e cable issue that killed my 2.5 Gbps connection about a year ago, BEFORE I bought my Asustor. The identical thing happened with my desktop PC, so it's not specifically an Asustor-caused problem or a cable quality issue. I assumed it was an impedance mismatch between my house CAT6 cable and the CAT 5e, so I threw out almost everything that was not CAT 6 or better. Problem solved, and I've never seen the same issue again. I agree that Asustor should be supplying CAT 6 cables just to be safe.

[@WesPerry]

Asustor took issue with me taking issue with this but it seems like such an obvious thing. The pennies they're saving by using cat5e just makes absolutely no sense at all to still be using them. I'm Still annoyed at the amount of time I spent troubleshooting this issue. You just don't expect it from the accessories that come in the box! I second guessed Everything else I did first. 😫

[@MathiasHellquist]

So, why a 5404 (4 HDD slots) and not a 5402 (seemingly the same but with 2 HDD slots), if you are only using 2 HDD's anyways? Are there other benefits of the 5404 that the 5402 doesn't have? Or just more/better future proofing? Oh, and thanks for a great video! Just the thing I was looking for. I'm hovering a finger over a "buy" button but figured I should look for guides first, and yours is the absolutely best, and closest, to what I was looking for.

[@WesPerry]

It’s definitely about future proofing. Also, with just two HDDs you’re limited to RAID1, which isn’t as efficient as RAID5 (both in terms of space used and wear resistance), for which you need at least 3 drives, and can be migrated to at a later date when you do eventually need more space - which is an inevitability.

[@theol1044]

​@@WesPerry Another benefit is that you could use one bay for the "MyArchive" feature, put an extra-large hdd in one slot for additional backups, and regularly swap it out for offsite storage. That feature is actually what made me interested in the Asustor NASes. (Edit: Overall, you could put 3 hdds in RAID5, plus one additonal backup, if you find a single drive large enough for that task).

[@35mmraw]

Great video as usual Wes. I've been planning on moving to NAS for about 12 months but keep putting it off. I create about one TB of data each year for my photography business, most of it being several lightroom catalogues. The whole NAS thing is so complicated. I really just want a good on site backup solution. I don't need to work directly from the NAS, as all my client jobs are max 80gig so I can do them from my Macbook's native drive. Is there an uncomplicated, not overly priced NAS solution?

[@WesPerry]

Honestly this is one of the least complicated and cheapest ones. You just start small with two drives and base ram etc in it and go from there. Wouldn’t recommend going with any of the tiny two bay ones, because then you inevitably end up getting stuck for space and have a complicated process of migrating everything to a new one (and the price difference isn’t very big for the hassle).

[@testshoot]

If you work directly from the Mac you need a DAS also known as a run of the mill external drive in a pretty dress. Unplug it and it'll prolong it's lifespan.

[@f19ajw]

Can this be setup to only use m2 for os and storage. The idea is, start with 2 m2, then depending on storage required add another 2 if required at a later date?

[@WesPerry]

Yep!

[@XP1-hn9tq]

After looking for awhile I think Asustor is going to be my first NAS. I have 4 extra 20TBs already good to go and a set of 4 NVME also ready. I'm probably moving about 1TB per month of data so I need something quick lol the 3 drives I use are all almost filled - all 10TB each.

[@decalicatan2]

Hi, thanks for the video. I have just bought one and intend to use a m2 samsung 970 evo plus for the os and only that, no read/write cache (might be overkill but was kind of cheap so....) + Hdds for the storage. Do you think a heatsink for the m2? Thanks in advance

[@WesPerry]

At least in mine with the Crucial drives, my M.2’s don’t get any warmer than 42°C. They seem to have decent airflow in there.

[@WesPerry]

And the lightweight OS access involves very little iops to heat it up anyway.

[@WesPerry]

If you had it in as SSD cache and did some heavy transfers it might manage to produce some heat, but not sure if it would be enough to matter even then

[@decalicatan2]

Thanks for the answers!

[@roberthexter5076]

Very interesting and annoying about the first drive being the os drive, I've found myself with it on the mechanical drive. Im guessing you did as well, how did you correct this to get the os to the m.2 SSD? Great content, many thanks!

[@WesPerry]

Unfortunately I had to fully start over. You can’t install it on the SSD cache drive, to be clear. So if you start up the unit with just the ssd’s inside, it will then install the OS. If you then install the HDD’s, they won’t be usable in their current config anymore, so the system will reformat them to suit the new config.

[@rlp1905]

Looking forward for the network setup video! I decided to buy the 2 bay version of this one and set-up the nvme like you did (the volumes at 1tb each instead of 4) and the cache 500gb each + 2 16TB hard drives. My goal is mostly photo backups (im not a pro photographer) but i would love to be able to edid the raw doles in lightroom straight from the wifi. Thats where my selfish interest in the network setup xomes from. 😂 Thanks for sharing!

[@WesPerry]

Hoping to film it this week!

[@rlp1905]

Nice! Found your channel with a very good timing!

[@manujk6802]

hi, you did? :) i cant find it :(

[@testshoot]

Ok, so here are some points to remember. You'll probably never hit the limits, but the CPU is an old Celeron, not even an N100, the ethernet if 2x 2.5gb and most will not have a switch to handle it, the USB is 10gb not Thunderbolt. A lot of people will be disappointed they didn't get a better switch so they'll go through USB like an external HDD and it is super quick but not "fast". Ugreen solves a lot of this with 10gb ethernet (also needs a switch) but it has a far more capable CPU and Thunderbolt. They however are a little sketchy on their software as we see it before the release. Asustor is pretty rock-solid, but if you take a loot around at this price, you may be better poised for the future elsewhere.

[@WesPerry]

I’m currently editing the ugreen NAS review ;) Most of their NAS’s don’t have thunderbolt, though, only the highest end ones. And the two lower end don’t have 10Gb Ethernet.

[@IanClos3]

I bought 2 1tb ssds and 4 hdds. Im curious could i use 1 for the os and 1 as a cache drive? Or do they need to be pairs? Thank you and love the video!

[@WesPerry]

An excellent question, which is somewhat answered deep in the gobbledygook of the video but here we are lol The cache drives must be either read or write, which I find weird and annoying. So depending on how you Use the NAS, only having a write cache or read cache could be fine (write is for ingest, or read for access basically). But if you want read/write you need two matching ssd’s for it. The OS doesn’t Need to be on a pair of drives as I did. I just set my OS / hot storage drives up as a raid pair to increase redundancy. You could just operate it from a single SSD. My setup is a bit overkill, but that’s because I have some Very expensive client work on it!

[@IanClos3]

@@WesPerry thank you for the response! I haven't gotten to deep into the super technical side of drives yet so wasn't sure if there was a way to have it read/write on a solo drive. I am going to start without a cache and see if it handles my workloads well and go from there. Thanks again!

[@cjr950]

@@WesPerry Great video but I do have follow up questions. Why two matching SSD's if I want to read/write? Can I just use one SSD for R/W? Your video shows one volume for the cache and your video identifies one SSD for read and the other SSD for write. How is that accomplished if you have one volume? Isn't one volume an extended disk

[@WesPerry]

@cjr950 unfortunately that’s a hardware limitation common to a lot of NAS’ for some reason. I also don’t quite understand why. Can only assign a drive to read or write cache, not both.

[@Demonioiua]

Hola muchas gracias. Muy interesante el video, para Latam las velocidades son mucho menores pero con tu video me diste grandes ideas de como iniciar la configuracion de mi Asustor Nimbustor. ya que actualmente tengo otra NAS Synologi la cual se queda muy corta para lo que requiero hoy en dia. Asi que es hora de migrar mis datos y mi entorno de trabajo diferente. Saludos desde la tierra del tequila Mexico!

[@jahon2013]

Good NAS performance with m.2 SSD*4 and build raid 5

[@kerrylensin1230]

You should try Flashstor 12...

[@WesPerry]

Considered it, but I also need something that can hold a lot of data as well. And that gets awfully expensive with the Flashtor. Tough call!

[@testshoot]

Ancient Celeron CPU with PCI bottlenecks. Still plenty fast but it feels handicapped. Qnap's TBS464 is better and the new Ugreen is better still. Software though... who knows

[@WesPerry]

@testshoot honestly the ugreen software is Much better than the earlier (pre 1.0) reviews made it out to be. It’s somehow already more stable than ASUSTOR ADM 😬

[@lowerleftside]

Did you look into using a Synology NAS? I run 3 Synology NAS units for my business / home. 1 for security cameras for our house / my office. I’m starting to use HomeKit for security cameras so this NAS is slowly going away. 1 for local file storage and usage. 1 offsite for backup of the onsite storage. I use a vpn connection for the 2 NAS units so they can see each other.

[@WesPerry]

For me the issue with Synology NAS's is they're mostly built for cold file storage and I wanted something I could use for active work, as mentioned in the video. You have much lower specs with regards to processor and ram, less space (if any) for installing M.2 storage, and even with that, generally a 30-50% higher price. What I Would like is the ability to install a 10Gb ethernet adapter. I definitely underestimated the possible utility of that initially. If you look at their website they talk about storing spreadsheets and word documents and backing up photos and videos. It's pretty clear they realize that high speed iops isn't their priority, but simply redundancy and reliability. (which is great! just not the only thing I'm looking for).

[@JasonLorette]

Great video…I may need to hire someone to set one of these up for me someday…my eyes glaze over with some of this tech speak stuff…😂

[@WesPerry]

I might know someone who could be available 😏😂

[@JasonLorette]

@@WesPerry ha ha…new computer first, maybe NAS later in the year :p