ASUSTOR AS1002T 2-Bay Personal Cloud NAS

I bought a REFURBISHED 2 bay ASUSTOR AS1002T 3 days ago. Buying the refurbished unit saved me $40. Don't let this unit and its 1 Ghz ARM processor or its 512 Mb of system ram fool you. Its extremely capable for the price,which is $140 refurbished might I add. I will say that if I were going to get the 4 bay version I would have bought new instead of the refurbished unit simply because there's twice the chance of a bay being bad.The unit does have 2 USB 3 ports on it and they do accept external drives/caddies or even an external JBOD array plugged into them. You cannot however add anything in the USB 3 slots into the external raid on the NAS. As far as the NAS is concerned they are seen and used as External hard drives. The ADM software is very easy and straight forward to use.I'm assuming people return most of the 2 bay units because they quickly realize if you run RAID1 you need two 6TB drives in order to get 6TB of space. That's because RAID1 is redundant, data is mirrored over both drives allowing for 1 drive to fail with ZERO data loss. You could do what I did and set them up as RAID0 or Just a Bunch Of Disks, this allows for no redundancy ( no drive failures ) but gives maximum space. These 6TB disks come at a significant price increase over the 2TB or even 4 TB models . Simply put a 4 Bay unit allows you to get smaller drives for, if your lucky, half to two thirds the cost of the 6TB drives and have more usable space once everything's set up.The NAS performs extremely well. I am using it as a PLEX media server for my KODI boxes, an automated daily PC backup, an NVR for my 4 camera security system and I also have SABNZBD and Sickbeard set up to automatically download my media as it becomes available on my Usenet provider. All this took about 3 hours of set up, not counting the time it took to test my drives with Badblocks and run full S.M.A.R.T tests. 3 hours to setup autonomous Usenet downloads a full media server a security NVR and a daily PC backup schedule... not bad.Its not all peaches and cream though. I am running this thing relatively hard for what it is. The CPU usage depending on whats running is 50 to 75 percent or more on both cores. The memory usage is also pretty close to pegged out, typically only having 75 to 30 MB left. The external's of the unit don't get hot as far as I can tell but my hard drives do sit between 35 and 40 degrees C ( 95 F to 105 F ) However they are two HGST enterprise HDD's. So its not like they are manufactured with cooling or acoustics in mind to begin with.The Surveillance station software is pretty straight forward but currently only supports 600 different types of cameras. It is very robust once you get it set up, you can set space limits and once it hits those limits it will over write the oldest recordings. You can set the cameras up to support scheduled recording also and I believe motion detection is set up on the actual camera itself, at least mine is, so I cant speak for the software's accuracy on that aspect of things. As a side note you do get 4 free camera licensees with the unit itself, hopefully they don't do what Synology did and reduce that to 2 with Surveillance software updates though. Scheduling PC backups is super simple, a bit of fiddling in windows and a bit of fiddling on the NAS and it just works.Plex server is dead easy to set up provided your media is named correctly. Plex is weird with naming conventions, luckily Sickbeard can rename all your media for you if its named wrong. Be warned if you have a lot of media already it will take quite a bit of time to scan your media library into Plex and it will take equally as long to rename it all with Sickbeard. I use the KODI Media Connect add on for the KODI client side. I have run 3 concurrent streams and they play and seek fine but you CANNOT trans-code. Unfortunately that's a limitation of the ARM CPU and 512 Mb of RAM. Sickbeard and SABNZBD are mildly difficult to set up but once its done they function pretty much autonomously. There are numerous you tube videos and guides on how to set all of this up so I wont get into that here, for that you'll have to use your Google-Fu just like I did.If you wont run all of this stuff on your NAS concurrently and you don't require 12 or 16TB or more of drive space this unit is for the price a steal. If you will run all of this a unit with an Intel processor and more ram would be better. It would also be quite a bit more expensive and if you even think you will need more drives in the future get a 4, 5 or 6 bay unit. All of these options increase the price and for what I got and what I paid I'm pretty damned happy. I knew about the drive limitation going in and accepted it.TLDR: Good unit for the price, has very easy to use software, performs well & punches above its weight in a home environment. A bigger unit with a faster CPU & more RAM would be nice but for the price & with 4 free camera licenses this is a good NAS for a first time user & is probably enough for any casual user.

Currently I have been using a Drobo 4 Bay USB unit for the past 7 years and its never failed me. Over time the unit has has reached it total storage capacity of 16TB. So naturally I was trying to find a new solution to help me increase my storage capacity which lead me to the Asustor AS1004t NAS. This NAS is awesome and for the price at the time I purchased it was a no brainer. Its a very simple unit to setup, find the Apps you want to install, fast and very reliable. This NAS has been doing such a good job for me that I will be getting another unit so that I can use it as a backup, which you are able to do. So while I love my AS1004T there are a few minor cons that one should know before buy it.Cons:1. While the AS1004T is a 4 bay unit, you are only able to use 3 hard drives for a RAID setup. The 4th hard drive is used for storing the apps your download and anything else the OS needs. Now it will let you use the 4th hard drive to store files however since its not part of a RAID system you could loose files if the drive goes bad. While I did my research before buying the NAS no one every mentioned this little fact. All the youtube reviews failed to mention this... oh well.....2. One of my hard drives went bad on me. Unfortunately the system did not tell me there was a drive failure and it never sent me an email notification. Plus the NAS became unresponsive to the point that I was not able to connect to the web interface.. After awhile I was able to figure out the problem and put a new drive the system. Will say that this RAID rebuilding process only took 6 hours, which compared to my Drobo that would take days.So in conclusion would I buy this unit again? My answer is yes.

After toying with this, I decided to never buy a Asus or Asustor product... Ever. I simply can't get behind a company that's so negligible in critical areas.Pros:Build quality is pretty good. Even though I was missing pieces. It was refurbished.Cons:Instructions, downloads and failure to upgrade and acknowledge their customer base.Their quick setup guide is literally a piece of paper saying "Go to the CD or website URL". In about 10 different languages. The problem with this is the CD like their quick setup guide isn't specific. That's even if you have a CD player in your laptop or computer. Those got heavily phased out years ago. I had to dig and break out my external CD.Why didn't I go to the site you ask? Well I did. Their download page doesn't have downloads. The model page doesn't have models etc etc.So I went to the CD and that was a tragedy in itself. There's no real direction in how to do things. Their first software step wasn't their real first software step. I had to do research on other sites, since theirs is essentially trash. It's pretty but no help. Honestly the buffalo thread kinda helped. Went back to setup it. Their organization of files in their generalized rewritable cd is also trash. The software couldn't make up it's mind if it worked or not. Even the account registration phase was faulty. Some of the programs used were archaic.I'm not going to a "community forum", for things that should already be in my box or easily on the site. Often companies don't pay attention to those. I'm certainly not going to deal with their phone or email customer service, based on the corners cut on this. Plus with my work hours I wouldn't be able to anyways. I've been IT, hardware, software and network for some big companies. Currently in the electronics field. If I was getting paid to set this up, I'd recommend another brand. But I'd set it up. The thing is, I paid for this and was essentially lied to by a giant margin. I also don't want to deal with possible further issues like the IP cameras (don't see anything about it). I don't need an nas, badly. It'd be cool to have. I did this to play around. There's no excuse for this.

some issues with vpn config but a useful entry level nas