AsustorDrivestor 2 AS1102T - 2 Bay NAS, 1.4GHz Quad Core, 2.5GbE Port, 1GB RAM DDR4, Network Attached Storage, Personal Private Cloud (Diskless)

I watched a few YouTube reviews and knew before I started this wasn't going to be a beast for Plex and the like. That did not bother me so much as I was really looking for network storage and SMB file sharing.The two bays aren't hot swap but again this wasn't something I was concerned about.Straight out of the box I put in 2 X 8gb drives powered it up and updated the firmware. This took around 10 minutes. A further account setup for access outside of my LAN and we were off to the races. The software is really intuitive and adding more apps was painless. I used the pre installed Asus file manager software to copy over the contents of a couple of my portable hard drives. Average copy speeds from these drives over USB 3 was around 120/130 mbps which I found very acceptable.After that I mounted the Nas as a network drive and copied a couple of TB of data off my PC where I achieved slightly slower speeds of about 100 Mbps. Still quite acceptable.Other positives are the unit is almost silent in operation, goes to sleep and wakes up without issue. Streaming to multiple PC's and televisions etc. has been simple.There are lots of things I plan to try in the coming days like Bubble UPnP etc but so far this has more than met my expectations.I know how I am and this will be a gateway drug and it'll probably be replaced by a bigger better unit within 12 months but as an introduction to how convenient and useful a Nas is it's been a revelation. Can't believe I've gone this long in life without one.

Recently replaced my Synology DS119J with this Asustor unit. The DS119J, despite all its bells and whistles, decided that it didn't want to carry out simple real time backups using the additional apps that had to be installed. I followed many "this will fix it" guides but none of them did.Enter the Asustor: - I didn't want another Synology box as they all run the same DSM software.I bought the bare unit and transferred my 10Tb Seagate Ironwolf over. The drive has to be reformatted before use - so make sure that you back up your data elsewhere first! The formatting didn't take long and with very little reference to any documentation I was up and running.The Asustor works fine with my external USB3 Seagate 8Tb HDD and my APC ES550G UPS (connected via USB).There are a lot fewer icons than with the Synology NAS so it is much easier to locate the settings you want. I've not installed any additional Asustor apps as I don't need them.Our PCs run the Asustor Backup Plan software and real time backup just works without any fuss.The only downside so far seems to be with accessing the content via NFS. My CoreElec HTPC units sometimes can't connect to the Asustor. The workaround seems to be to log into the NAS and simply turn off the NFS service and turn it back on again.Other than that, very pleased with this unit.

I was looking for a cheap low end NAS server just to put some media on. This definitely wasn't suitable.The installing of drives was easy and took a mere minute or two. That was the easy bit done.The device took 15 minutes to boot up and load into the installation screen. The installation took another 30 minutes including downloading and installing updates.After installation had completed the main web interface looks nice and the options are clear and easy. There was an option for installing plex and clicking it started the plex installation, where it hung. I had to reload the webpage several times for the system to complete Plex installation. I loaded some media on to it and it struggled, just to load the plex home page. It couldn't play anything, it would have the loading icon just spinning for about 15 minutes before I finally refreshed it.I did consider that plex could have corrupted and caused issues, so I reinstalled that, tried using a docker installation of Plex and when both of those options had the same result I tried Jellyfin (another media server) and that was even worse.I decided to give up on the media server idea and tried to use it as a normal NAS for storing documents. That too struggled, it would take forever to load a folder, would hang and need the page refreshing.At this point I figured it was not fit for purpose. I factory reset it, which took over two hours, removed the drives and returned it.It could have been a faulty unit, but I will never know, I opted to buy the QNAP TS133 instead, https://amzn.to/3InxdSK (was meant to buy the TS233, https://amzn.to/3GgU93t, but clicked the wrong choice), it is a fantastic machine, installation was simple, quick and the media server software (Plex and Jellyfin) just work seamlessly, it's quick and nippy and streams to my TV, ROKU bar and other devices in the house without issue.

Disk installation is pretty easy despite the flimsy plastic enclosure however, one of the screw holes on the disk cage was drilled in the wrong place and retaining screw would not fit into the disk. Early in the setup process you are asked to create an account for ASUSTOR with a user id and password; amongst other things this will give access to support and allow a trouble ticket to be raised. Watch this space! The rest of the setup was straightforward and I had the NAS working within half a day. I opted to install ClamAV, the ASUSTOR anti-virus app. This proved to be very slow and took an hour to virus scan 300 files on a NAS device having around 32k files. By contrast Norton AV scanned the whole NAS in just over an hour. I tried to uninstall ClamAV but no uninstall tools are provided. I tried to raise a trouble ticket but every-time I tried to login to ASUSTOR I got an 'invalid password' message. I later discovered that several other people had the same ClamAV and login failure and that the only way to login to ASUSTOR was by signing in via Google. Despite this, people reported that nothing had been done to fix either problem. I was using a password manager whilst trying to log in to ASUSTOR and in the general confusion I managed to put the wrong password into the NAS drive and after the second warning I was locked out. Hands up - finger trouble on my part. The lockout message instructed me to press the reset button on the back of the NAS which would put my password back to its default however, this did not work. The only way to gain access was to do a factory reset which erased all my data. I had to start from scratch again and re-input all my settings and recopy my data. Eventually I got everything back but it took a long time. After the NAS was working OK I attached a USB drive as a backup to the NAS and used the backup software provided by ASUSTOR. After I had done a few tests I discovered that deletions were not always being applied i.e a file deleted on the NAS still appeared on the backup drive. At this point I decided enough was enough and returned the NAS drive to Amazon. I now have a Qnap NAS which is more complicated to setup but the build and software quality are far superior to ASUSTOR.

Arrived today had up and running within 30 mins. Most of that time was consumed with downloading software and installing Hard drives. Plays most formats , suprisingly does not like old style avi files of which i have many. Have tried to stream to 2 tvs and 2 blu ray players so far with various results. The hisense 58" 4k picks up the Nas straight way and plays with no suttering or buffering. The old 32" toshiba in the bedroom is a little more picky . My panny ub820 also is a little picky when it come to certain formats , but this is easily gotta round by using a different app. The interface is very easy to follow and the apps are useful , not bloated like some others. i am no expert in running home media servers , but this nas was a breeze to set up and use. Buy with confidence or pay much more from other manufacturers for less. "So much for so little" should be there slogan.