ASUSTOR AS5004T Four-Bay Consumer NAS Review

Introduction

In early April of this year, we had a look at the ASUSTOR AS5102T, a two bay prosumer appliance that after testing we gave our "best performance award". The AS5004T we are looking at today comes from the same 5000 series of appliances from ASUSTOR and features the same Intel Bay Trail platform at its heart.

Bay Trail is perhaps the largest upgrade to the NAS market since vendors started putting Atom processors in appliances a number of years ago. With Bay Trail, and more specifically the J1800 with the AS5004T, ASUSTOR adds to its lineup with Quick Sync Video Technology, adding a hardware encoding engine for quick transcoding of all sorts of media.

With the AS5004T, ASUSTOR is touting an energy efficient NAS platform with marketing numbers that say it's capable of producing read/write speeds up to 112 MB/s. With the J1800 at the center in this appliance, ASUSTOR has also paired with it 1GB of DDR3L. This memory is upgradable to 8GB by simply removing the panel in a two step procedure. Like many modern NAS platforms, the AS5004T is part storage and part media hub. ASUSTOR does this by utilizing XBMC Kodi supporting 1080p HD and 5.1/7.1 Multi Channel Audio.

Above, we have the full system specification pulled from the ASUSTOR website. As you can see, we have the Intel Celeron J1800 SoC running at 2.4GHz with a boost clock of 2.58GHz paired with 1GB of DDR3L. Adding to this, we have four bays that are hot swappable, along with three USB 3.0 ports, dual USB 2.0 and two eSATA. Connectivity goes on further adding dual gigabit LAN ports in addition to a single HDMI 1.4a port and S/PDIF connection. Power consumption of this unit is rated at 31 watts in operation, while hibernation is listed at 12 watts and sleep mode at just 1.8 watts.

The ASUSTOR AS5004T carries an MSRP of $439.99 with a three-year warranty.