At a look

Expert’s Rating

Pros

• 4 NVMe drive slots
• Dual 2.5GbE LAN port
• Expandable RAM
• SMB Multichannel

Cons

• Needs two M.2 drives for learn/write caching
• No M.2 2230 help

Our Verdict

Powerful and totally featured, the one true limitation of this {hardware} is the 2 3.5-inch bays. Adding of NVMe drives and USB 3.2 Gen 2 USB ports turns the AS5402T from a helpful possibility right into a extremely fascinating one.

Price When Reviewed

$369

Best Prices Today: Asustor Nimbustor 2 Gen2 (AS5402T)

$360.99

$369.00

The Asustor Nimbustor 2 AS5202T first appeared in 2019, when it was thought of one of many better-specified dual-bay NAS of that period.

Whereas Synology gave the impression to be protecting Celeron processors and faster-than-gigabit networking away from its dwelling merchandise, Asustor delivered these issues in a compact kind issue and at an approachable value.

The unique Asustor Nimbustor 2 AS5202T continues to be accessible right this moment from some retailers, though these could be the final of that inventory since Asustor has now delivered a alternative.

Initially, the brand new {hardware} was nonetheless known as the Asustor Nimbustor 2 AS5202T, however ‘Gen2’ is now inserted into what was already an excessively lengthy title. They have since determined to vary that to Asustor Nimbustor 2 Gen2 AS5402T, which makes extra sense if nonetheless a bit long-winded.

Whatever it’s known as, that is a wholly new inside design that shares virtually nothing with the unique. Costing roughly $70/£70 greater than its predecessor, is the AS5402T definitely worth the further funding?

Design & Build

• Dissasemble so as to add NVMe drives
• Unused reminiscence slot
• Plastic and steel development

Given an informal look, the unique AS5202T and the AS5402T mannequin look comparable, as they each help two typical SATA drive bays, are principally constructed from shiny black plastic and have a line of LEDs on the entrance and community connections on the rear.

The angular-shaped rectangular cowl on the entrance is held in place by magnets to cowl the 2 drive trays, and two buttons present the facility toggle and a method to automate the dumping of a storage gadget positioned within the entrance USB port.

Once two screws on the rear are eliminated, one facet of the NAS can slide again to entry the inner {hardware}, identical to on the unique.

One essential be aware about doing that’s that you will need to take away any drives and trays earlier than doing that, because the detachable part received’t slide with these in place. And, clearly, the facility ought to be off and disconnected.

Special to the Gen2, the highest of the field has some trendy vent slots that weren’t current earlier than, and the explanation for this turns into obvious while you get inside. Below these vents are 4 M.2 NVMe slots, permitting for an extra 4 drives to be added to the 2 HDD or SSD that use the SATA interfaces. Ventilation for all drives is through a temperature-controlled 80mm fan on the rear.

With the machine opened, entry can be doable to the twin DDR4 reminiscence slots, with solely one in all these being occupied on the manufacturing unit. The unique AS5202T got here with 2GB that may very well be upgraded to 8GB, however the Gen2 comes with 4GB. If the slots are populated with 8GB modules, the system can have 16GB in whole reminiscence.

It could be good to have the ability to get entry to the reminiscence and M.2 slots with out disassembling the machine, nevertheless it most likely isn’t one thing that almost all house owners might be doing commonly.

The solely barely off-putting factor in regards to the AS5402T is the quantity of plastic that Asustor utilized in its development. While it does have an aluminium inside body, the surface is totally plastic, as are the drive trays. Those trays don’t really feel substantial, and common elimination of the drives may finally finish in them breaking.

That level apart, and the way dusty shiny black objects that generate static electrical energy can change into, there’s comparatively little mistaken with the design of the AS5402T.

Specs & Features

• Better Intel Processor
• USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports
• Bandwidth equals flexibility

Some NAS makers, one particularly, are very astute at rationing enhancements between product generations.

However, with the AS5402T, Asustor modified and upgraded each facet of this machine, justifying its new moniker.

While the unique design did use an Intel Celeron, the brand new N5105 mannequin on this NAS is superior in each conceivable technique to the Gemini Lake Celeron J4005.

It has double the cores, double the threads, the next turbo frequency, higher GPU, can deal with 16GB, not 8GB of RAM, and helps PCIe 3.0, not 2.0.

The change to this newer Jasper Lake know-how gives considerably extra bandwidth, going from six PCIe 2.0 lanes to eight PCIe 3.0 spec, greater than doubling the processor pathways. With these additional lanes accessible, Asustor engineers have been capable of make some wholesale adjustments to the remainder of the design.

What stays unchanged are the twin 2.5GbE LAN ports and the HDMI 2.0b output. But critically, all three USB ports have gone from USB 3.2 Gen 1 to Gen2. And there was ample bandwidth left to incorporate 4 M.2 NVMe slots.

Just to be clear, these slots most likely solely get a single PCIe 3.0 lane every, however that’s greater than sufficient to make them helpful. But, the designers made the identical error that was seen on the 2 M.2 unique NAS Asustor created, in that these slots solely settle for 2280-sized NVMe drives and never the more and more standard 2230-sized modules. This may be fudged with a plastic extension, however I want to see this fastened.

If this specification appears acquainted, it’s a really comparable platform to the Asustor Flashtor FS6706T, a design that provides extra NVME drive bays however zero SATA ones.

For those who need extra SATA drives on the AS5402T, Asustor has the AS6004U NAS Storage Capacity Expander. The whole drive capability may be expanded to 14 by utilizing these hooked up to the USB ports. What’s mildly disappointing is that the AS6004U solely helps USB 3.2 Gen 1 operation, however now Asustor has launched the Xpanstor4 AS5004U that provides 4 drive bays and USB 3.2 Gen 2 connection.

Whereas some NAS makers embody HDMI after which do nothing with it, Asustor does have an interface for its video-out functionality, and the NAS does have an infrared sensor for distant management to entry apps and companies by way of this.

While the GPU on the Celeron isn’t one thing I’d select to recreation with, it’s greater than ample to play 4K video again easily, making the AS5402T a good selection for multimedia purposes and is almost good for Plex customers.

Overall, the AS5402T specification is great and opens up loads of prospects. The USB ports, for instance, now have sufficient bandwidth to help USB 5GbE adapters if the working system acknowledges them. Using adapters, the potential efficiency of the M.2 slots utilizing NVMe in RAID may very well be higher exploited, because the community bandwidth could be nearer to the drive efficiency.

In comparability, Synology has the marginally cheaper DiskStation DS224+ that makes use of the older Celeron J4125 processor, comes with solely 2GB of RAM expandable to simply 6GB, and has no M.2 Slot, solely USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports and a single 1GbE LAN port.

Performance

• Channel bonded 2.5GbE LAN
• 295MB/s reads over a single LAN port
• NVMe and HDD for optimum efficiency

Forget the NVMe drives and how briskly they are often in a desktop system. The limiting issue within the velocity of the AS5402T is the twin 2.5 GbE LAN ports except you might be utilizing the NAS as a pc for native processing.

Two LAN ports may be channel bonded along with an appropriate 2.5GbE change that permits two shopper techniques to every have round 290MB/s of switch bandwidth concurrently.

However, these utilizing two HDDs will restricted to the utmost efficiency of these drives since most bodily drives can solely obtain round 150MB/s every. The methods this may be mitigated on this NAS are to make use of SATA SSDs, use M.2 NVMe drives or cache the HDD with the M.2 drives.

SATA SSD within the 2.5in kind issue will work on this drive, and with a efficiency of round 500MB/s, it’s ample to help each 2.5GbE LAN ports at full velocity. Any single NVMe drive has greater than that bandwidth. And, you should utilize them to cache typical HDD on the system.

However, in case you have a single NVMe drive, the system solely permits Read caching, and also you want a second if you wish to allow a write cache. Another limitation is that the drives within the bays solely provide RAID 0 (striped), RAID 1 (mirror) or particular person drives (JBOD), as they will’t be blended with the NVMe storage for RAID functions.

That’s mildly annoying, nevertheless it’s comprehensible, contemplating the efficiency hole between these two units.

As there are 4 M.2 slots, these drives can be utilized in RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID and RAID 6 together with singularly. Little could be achieved utilizing RAID 0 or 6 to achieve efficiency, however utilizing RAID 5 to make 4 drives into three with resilience could be worthwhile.

If you utilize SATA SSDs or the M.2 slots, the drive efficiency ought to be sufficient to saturate the 2 2.5GbE ports totally, and Asustor kindly affords SMB multichannel mode as an experimental possibility, the place one shopper with a 5GbE or 10GbE hyperlink to the change may get the mixed bandwidth of each ports and near 500MB/s.

How properly this works will rely upon the change and having twin 2.5GbE LAN on the shopper finish of the equation, however that Asustor is now including this as an possibility exhibits that it isn’t removed from being an ordinary function of SAMBA and never simply an experimental one.

In my testing, I used a single 1.5TB WD Green and two Crucial P3 M.2 NVMe drives for caching, connecting through an Asustor ASW205T change. The caching enabled the very common single HDD to learn and write at 118/113MB/s over gigabit Ethernet and 227/160MB/s over 2.5GbE.

Switching over to utilizing a SATA SSD because the supply over 2.5GbE achieved 295MB/s learn and 165MB/s writes. Reorganising these drives to solely use the NVMe drives, learn speeds of 295MB/s and write of 280MB/s on a single LAN connection was doable.

Unfortunately, our take a look at atmosphere isn’t configured for SMB multichannel but, however it will be cheap to imagine that with typical drives cached or straight accessing NVMe drives, speeds above 500MB/s may very well be achieved with each LAN ports lively.

Price & Availability

The Asustor Nimbustor 2 AS5402T is $369 on Amazon and thru most on-line retailers. That’s for a unit with 4GB of RAM pre-installed however no NVMe modules or arduous drives.

UK purchasers can pay £369, or round £70 greater than the first-generation mannequin can nonetheless be purchased.

Those costs are with none storage, although some resellers are providing offers with two HDDs pre-installed for a bundle value.

For those who need extra drive capability, Asustor additionally makes the AS5404T, growing the drive bays to 4 however with the precise technical specification in all different respects. That possibility prices $590.21/£529, making these two bays an extra $170/£160, roughly.

Compared with competitor units, the Synology DS224+ is a less expensive possibility, however not remotely near this specification.

Similarly, the TerraMaster F2-423 has a barely lower cost however a decreased specification that solely consists of two M.2 slots.

With an virtually similar specification to the F2-423, QNAP has the TS-264-8G. The limitations of that design are the 2 M.2 slots, a most of 8GB of RAM and solely two USB 3.2 Gen2 ports.

It’s additionally costlier than the AS5402T Gen2, nevertheless it does have a PCIe Gen 3 x2 card slot that permits it to make use of a PCIe card so as to add a 5GbE or 10GbE adapter.

Looking at what else is on the market, the AS5402T is priced at a tier greater than the most affordable manufacturers however affords extra know-how for the additional value.

If the worth differential between this and its four-bay brother have been much less, we’d counsel shopping for the AS5404T, however the two-bay mannequin represents higher worth.

Should you purchase the Asustor Nimbustor 2 Gen2 AS5402T?

The Asustor Nimbustor 2 Gen2 AS5402T doesn’t barely beat the Synology DiskStation DS224+. It completely obliterates that {hardware} and makes the specification of that gadget look wildly outdated.

For dwelling or small enterprise customers, this isn’t an inexpensive gadget, however the know-how onboard makes it a extremely adaptable answer that would simply be repurposed down the road.

Making an funding at this stage is less complicated when you can see how the system may evolve or broaden, and Asustor has baked flexibility into this design from the outset.

I want they’d not reused the AS5402T mannequin quantity since this can be a utterly new system, however that’s a advertising resolution Asustor made.

The solely purpose {that a} buyer may select Synology or one other model over this feature may come all the way down to the standard of the interface and the app choice that Asustor gives.

The ADM 4.2 working system icons look drained and will do with a revamp in locations, as may a few of the Asustor apps.

But the place that undoubtedly wants a bit work is the PC apps that Asustor provide to Windows customers. Why they should put the performance for Backup Plan, EZ Connect and EZ Sync into three separate instruments is a thriller.

These instruments should be mixed right into a easy software that also needs to be made accessible for the Apple Mac. Currently, the one software program device help Apple customers get is the ASUSTOR Control Center, which is required to determine the NAS on a community and provoke set up.

The success that Synology has had is basically all the way down to the trouble the corporate put into each the DSM OS and the branded app choice, and that is nonetheless one thing that Asustor, QNAP and TerraMaster are fighting.

But for individuals who can work with the Asustor software program, the {hardware} that Asustor delivered with the Asustor Nimbustor 2 Gen2 AS5402T is game-changing.

Specs

• CPU: Intel Celeron N5105
• GPU: Intel UHD Graphics
• RAM: 4GB DDR4 (upgradable to 16GB)
• Drive Bays: 2x 3.5/2.5 SATA
• M.2 Drive Slots: 4 x M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe 3.0
• Maximum Drives with Expansion: 14
• USB: 3x USB 3.2 Gen2
• Video Outputs: 1x HDMI 2.0b port
• Raid Types: RAID 0/1/5 (RAID 5 on NVMe drives solely), Single, JBOD
• Weight: 1.71 kg / 3.77 lb
• Dimensions: 170 (H) x 114 (W) x 230 (D) mm
• Networking: 2x 2.5-GbE Ethernet (100/1000/2500)
• OS: ADM 4.2
• Internal File Systems: Btrfs, EXT4
• External File Systems: EXT4, NTFS, FAT32, HFS+, exFAT
• OS Languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Magyar, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Turkish, Portuguese and Russian

This assessment initially appeared on techadvisor.com.