Asustor Flashstor 6 FS6706T - 6 Bay All-SSD NAS Storage, Quad Core 2.0GHz, Six M.2 SSD, Dual 2.5GbE, 4GB RAM DDR4, Network Attached Storage (Diskless)

I have been running a plex server for years on my desktop PC. I got the dreaded message from MS that Windows 10 was dying soon and my PC did not meet the minimum requirements to run Windows 11.I have been looking at NAS solutions like Synology and QNap. While these are definitely an option, I ran across the ASUStor on Amazon and then jumped to YouTube to do some research. Thank you guys over at NASCompares! Great info and guidance.Then I discovered how much SSD prices have fallen and well, decision made! I dove in to this ASUStor Flashstor Pro Gen 2! I chose to go with six 4TB drives in raid 5 to start with. Still have 6 slots that I can expand into for future needs!I chose to go with the ASUStor heat sinks for an additional $29 and 6 TeamGroup MP44 4TB SLC Cache gen 4x4 SSD drives to round out my initial setup.First I have to say, make sure you cross reference the drives you choose, with the ASUStor compatibility guide online. This is critical.Next, the Flashstor 12 Pro Gen 2 was super easy to open up and add the drives and heat sinks to. Took about 10 minutes total and boom, powered on and ready to rock and roll.Quick note here, you may want to log into your router and find the DHCP address assigned to your Flashstor, you will need this so you can connect to the web interface!Setup was super quick with the ASUStor ASM! This software is freaking amazing and very intuitive! It basically walks you through the process to get your drives configured and they have their own App Store! Super easy to find apps you will need. It has everything from Container Software to back up software to streaming media software. Amazing job here ASUStor!Be warned, 24Tb of SSD is a lot, even with the AMD Processor, it is gonna take awhile to complete. Good news though, you can actually start loading the apps you want while it is doing its thing after a certain % complete on the raid! Nice touch there!Again, my plan was to replace my aging PC I stream Plex from. Here is where it gets a little frustrating, the Plex App was difficult to actually get working. So much so, that as I dug in on researching the issue, I discovered that Plex actually generates a ton of bloated traffic on your network! What the heck Plex!? I have a lifetime pass with them, but this really made me second guess my choice of Plex… yep I wound up switching to Jellyfin and the Flashstor had the app available in their store and it was super quick and easy to setup and get running. Again, phenomenal job here on third party apps and availability in your ASM tool!The quality of this hard ware is amazing! It feels pretty well made and they have done a lot to dissipate the heat in a passive system! They have built in monitoring in the ASM and you can track the health of your raid(s) with real time temperature monitors for the SSD and Processor.They offer dual 10gb Ether ports and ECC RAM support. The RAM comes at 16gb (single stick) with the initial device. This is easily expandable to 32gb, and I recommend you jump on that quick! It will really improve streaming performance when you get a few people in your house streaming to their various devices.This thing is super quiet too! Say goodbye to jet engine sounding NAS in your house! This bad boy is so quiet! Benefits of no mechanical drives and massive power requirements!To sum this up, I was very impressed by this device and would recommend to anyone looking to venture out into the world of NAS for backup solutions and/or streaming. A little bit pricey for the initial setup, but you can grow as you go and need because of the expandability this device offers!

As far as I know, there are only two NAS on the market as of today that exclusively use nvme m.2 drives. The one I purchased holds 6 of them which I populated with 6 SK hynix Platinum P41 2TB PCIe NVMe Gen4 M.2 2280 drives. I've only set up a couple of NAS units in my, but this was by far the easiest. It walks you through it. In 15 minutes, I had it formatted as RAID 6 and on the network. Our Datto backup system had no problem finding the drive and backing it up to the cloud. Its light weight, quiet, small, fast, and pretty cool looking.It has what I would call a fairly standard NAS web interface. You can download software that will automatically detect it on the network and allows you to launch the interface. There are plenty of apps you can download to it to do just about anything you would want to do with a NAS. It had no problem recognizing my corporate Windows domain network and accessing all user accounts. The two 2.5gb ethernet ports is also a nice feature and if you want, you can bond the two ports as one ink aggregation port for a 5gb throughput.While the construction is plastic, that doesn't bother me. It was easy to open up to install the drives and upgrade the memory. I transferred about 200Gb of their files to it in about 15 minutes.If there is any downside to this setup was that we lost the ability to restore a previous version of a file because I haven't been able to figure out how to run a snapshot on it. Maybe I should have used a format other than NTFS. But it has the ability to restore a deleted file and with the regular cloud backups I feel safe.I've only had it for 5 days, so time will tell how well it holds up. But since I set it up, I haven't had to think about it and my Engineers seem happy with it. They use Inventor and SolidWorks and work on their drawings directly off of it.I can't wait for a version of this that support gen 5 drives.

I purchased this early on and overall, I've enjoyed it. I have 6 4TB NVMe drives installed in RAID 5. The setup was simple.I find the utilities are not quite as polished as their Synology competitor, for example the USB backup capability is primitive compared to Synology for easily backing up the NAS ot an external USB attached drive.Of bigger concern, is the issue that when copying large files from my PC (Win10 and now Win11) the Asustor FS6706T has a chance of suddenly dropping off the network in the middle of the copy. Network shares fail, URL fails. Ping fails. I at first was pushing power button to restart. Later I found I can just detach and re-plug in ethernet (2.5GBiti).Looked online. Many other users have this issue. It is believed it is somehow the RAM or a cache overflowing and resulting in the network crashing on the NAS.I have a recommendation on how to update the cache size ( I had upgraded from 4GB to 16GB) so I have a lot more RAM. Alas, I can't find instructions on how to do that.I've contacted Asustor support. Responses are bleak. First, they "had not heard of this before". I give them a URL to their own forum where people are complaining on this issue from day one. Sigh. I then am told "I don't know how to help you, contact the person in the forum for instructions.".This is support help?No thanks. I guess I need Synology to get off their but and offer a NVME NAS with 2.5GBit connectivity.