Asustor AS7004T-i5 Consumer NAS Review

A supremely well-built appliance with just enough performance for the home market.

Published
Updated
Manufacturer: Asustor
5 minutes & 24 seconds read time
TweakTown's Rating: 90%
TweakTown award

The Bottom Line

With the AS7004T-i5, Asustor leaves nothing on the table deploying quite possibly the best prosumer four bay appliance we have seen.

Introduction

Early 2015, we had the AS7004T in-house for a full review. That unit came with 2GB of memory and a Core i3 at its heart. Now a few years have passed and requirements have changed for NAS platforms to the point we have a revamped SKU of the 7004T in-house; AS7004T-i5.

Asustor AS7004T-i5 Consumer NAS Review 02

Physically this model isn't different at all, it shares the same enclosure, drive trays and rear I/O but internally things are much different. This latest model, works off the Intel Core i5 processor effectively doubling the core count of the original while keeping the AES-NI encryption engine and hardware acceleration engines. This new solution offers up a 3.0GHz quad-core paired with 8GB of DDR3 still expandable to 16GB via the DDR3 SO-DIMM standard.

Drive compatibility continues to climb, with this model supporting 12TB drives with a peak capacity across four bays at 48TB. RAID modes include 0,1,5,6 and 10 along with JBOD while the Internal filesystem is limited to EXT4 only. External drives can use FAT32, NTFS, EXT3/4 and HFS+.

Asustor AS7004T-i5 Consumer NAS Review 03

For those wanting to use the AS7004T as a security workhorse, this platform supports 64 IP Cameras with local display the most of any prosumer NAS on the market.

MSRP of the Asustor AS7004T-i5 comes in at $1099.99 with a three-year warranty.

Asustor AS7004T-i5 NAS Appliance

Packaging and a Closer Look

Asustor AS7004T-i5 Consumer NAS Review 04

Packaging for the AS7004T offers an image of the NAS centered and a full house of marketing logos across the bottom.

Asustor AS7004T-i5 Consumer NAS Review 05

Specifications are found on the side of the box and include ASUS mobile apps to the right and hardware specs to the left.

Asustor AS7004T-i5 Consumer NAS Review 06

The package includes two cat5 ethernet cables, the power cable and drive screws.

Asustor AS7004T-i5 Consumer NAS Review 07

The AS7004T is a four-bay device as such we have four locking trays front and center. Above a small LCD screen with blue backlight. The power button can be found to the left and below that the one-touch copy USB 3.0 port.

Asustor AS7004T-i5 Consumer NAS Review 08

On the backside, we have a full I/O starting from the top with HDMI 1.4 supporting 4K30p. This is followed by dual USB 3.0 ports and our first Gigabit ethernet port. Next, we have two USB 2.0 ports and another gigabit ethernet port and rounding out the I/O, dual eSATA ports and optical audio.

Asustor AS7004T-i5 Consumer NAS Review 09

The drive trays have an underlying metal frame to aide in durability while the locking mechanism is plastic to match the NAS enclosure.

Asustor AS7004T-i5 Consumer NAS Review 10

Inside the drive bays, we find a standard SATA backplane.

Test System Setup and Web Management

Tyler's Test System Specifications

Asustor AS7004T-i5 Consumer NAS Review 19

When we are testing Diskless NAS platforms, the Toshiba High-Reliability N300 are the drives used.

Asustor AS7004T-i5 Consumer NAS Review 20

The dashboard of the Asustor ADM platform gives us a desktop environment to work from. This includes several icons that are shortcuts to manage the NAS platform.

Asustor AS7004T-i5 Consumer NAS Review 21

Diving into the Storage Manager, we have our first look at the configured volume at the top and the number of disks below.

Asustor AS7004T-i5 Consumer NAS Review 22

The volume tab, goes into further detail on the drives installed. Above, we can see the RAID mode and filesystem

Asustor AS7004T-i5 Consumer NAS Review 23

The disk menu gives us the health of each drive along with capacity.

Asustor AS7004T-i5 Consumer NAS Review 25

The settings menu is a general location to configure the broad range of options for the NAS. We start with display customization including the desktop wallpaper if wanted.

Asustor AS7004T-i5 Consumer NAS Review 26

The network tab gives access to both gigabit Ethernet ports and if you have a USB Wi-Fi adapter it will show up here as well.

Asustor AS7004T-i5 Consumer NAS Review 27

On the hardware tab, we have access to the front panel LEDs, system buzzer along with energy control and fan control.

Asustor AS7004T-i5 Consumer NAS Review 29

ADM defender allows you to create lists of devices allowed to access the NAS system, you can also make a list of devices not allowed in the black list.

Asustor AS7004T-i5 Consumer NAS Review 30

For those that want access to their NAS from anywhere in the world, Asustor aides in setup with EZ-Connect.

Asustor AS7004T-i5 Consumer NAS Review 31

Local network browsing can be completed via a few services, the first being SMB. One tab down allows setup of AFP and the last is NFS.

Asustor AS7004T-i5 Consumer NAS Review 33

Backup features include remote sync, FTP backup along with one touch and external options. At the bottom of this menu, you can setup Cloud backup.

Asustor AS7004T-i5 Consumer NAS Review 34

ADM has a large library of applications that work with it. Every time I have a new unit in-house for review this selection seems to increase in size. That said it has all of the basics including Google Drive, One Drive, and Plex.

Benchmarks - Single Client Throughput

Single Client Throughput

HD Video Play - 720p HD stream from Windows Media Player, 256kB reads

2HD Video Play - 2x playback

4HD Video Play - 4x playback

HD Video Record - 720p HD stream, 256kB writes

File Copy from NAS - 4GB file copy, 64kB reads

File Copy to NAS - 64kB writes

Asustor AS7004T-i5 Consumer NAS Review 40

Starting testing, we begin with RAID 0. The Asustor in dark blue for these charts, we see pretty solid performance in Single client workloads. Peaks reach 115 MB/s in playback and 117 MB/s in File copy.

Asustor AS7004T-i5 Consumer NAS Review 41

RAID 5 took a small performance hit, playback peaking at 110 MB/s and file copy 72 MB/s.

Asustor AS7004T-i5 Consumer NAS Review 42

Moving to RAID 6, we see performance stay at 110 MB/s for Playback. File copy seems to be a bit higher at this point reaching 114 MB/s.

Benchmarks - Sequential and Mixed Workloads

Our Sequential read/write workload is centered on 128K transfer sizes.

Asustor AS7004T-i5 Consumer NAS Review 43

Starting with Sequential read performance, all three modes seem to do quite well maxing out the capabilities of our gigabit ethernet connection at 118 MB/s.

Asustor AS7004T-i5 Consumer NAS Review 44

Sequential write was similar with RAID 0 and 5 touch 118 MB/s and RAID 6 115 MB/s.

Benchmarks - Mixed Workloads

Asustor AS7004T-i5 Consumer NAS Review 45

RAID 0 workload testing showed quite clearly, the Asustor excels with database reaching over 3000 IOPS. File Server topped out at 1750 IOPs and Email just under 1500 IOPs.

Asustor AS7004T-i5 Consumer NAS Review 46

RAID 5 or SHR1 for Synology units had flipped File Server to the top reaching a peak of 1900 IOPs.

Asustor AS7004T-i5 Consumer NAS Review 47

RAID 6 or SHR2 for Synology devices, had database at the peak once again with the AS7004T-i5 reaching 1400 IOPs.

Final Thoughts

As we found in testing, the AS7004T-i5 certainly has its place in the market as a pure storage appliance. When compared to previously tested platforms the Asustor solution was consistently near the top of our charts, particularly in sequential and database workloads. Build quality is solid and on par with expectations for a prosumer unit. Like many appliances that use this same enclosure design, the 7004T is easily disassembled allowing for easy memory upgrades.

Asustor AS7004T-i5 Consumer NAS Review 07

Going into more detail, the performance of this platform is solid and certainly top notch for the four-bay prosumer market. The power of the Core i5 processor eliminates any and all slow down you would experience from a lesser powered platform. In single client testing, we found this NAS to perform amazingly well in playback and record scenarios and sequential testing, proved this solution to reach peaks of 118 MB/s with lows around 110 MB/s in RAID 6. Moving to workloads, this platform seems to excel with database and file server workloads with those two being at the peak during testing.

ADM has grown so much over the years this platform has now come into its own with a full app library, extensive storage options both internal and external. With the HDMI port, you have a full multimedia experience available to you and Surveillance Center enables a high-quality security solution for your home or business.

TweakTown award
Performance 93%
Quality 90%
Features 90%
Value 87%
Overall 90%

The Bottom Line: With the AS7004T-i5, Asustor leaves nothing on the table deploying quite possibly the best prosumer four bay appliance we have seen.

PRICING: You can find products similar to this one for sale below.

USUnited States: Find other tech and computer products like this over at Amazon.com

UKUnited Kingdom: Find other tech and computer products like this over at Amazon.co.uk

AUAustralia: Find other tech and computer products like this over at Amazon.com.au

CACanada: Find other tech and computer products like this over at Amazon.ca

DEDeutschland: Finde andere Technik- und Computerprodukte wie dieses auf Amazon.de

Tyler joined the TweakTown team in 2013 and has since reviewed 100s of new techy items. Growing up in a small farm town, tech wasn't around, unless it was in a tractor. At an early age, Tyler's parents brought home their first PC. Tyler was hooked and learned what it meant to format a HDD, spending many nights reinstalling Windows 95. Tyler's love and enthusiast nature always kept his PC nearby. Eager to get deeper into tech, he started reviewing.

Newsletter Subscription
We openly invite the companies who provide us with review samples / who are mentioned or discussed to express their opinion. If any company representative wishes to respond, we will publish the response here. Please contact us if you wish to respond.