Asustor AS7008T 8-bay Intel Haswell SMB NAS Review
by Ganesh T S on November 30, 2014 5:05 PM ESTSingle Client Performance - CIFS & iSCSI on Windows
The single client CIFS and iSCSI performance of the Asustor AS7008T was evaluated on the Windows platforms using Intel NASPT and our standard robocopy benchmark. This was run from one of the virtual machines in our NAS testbed. All data for the robocopy benchmark on the client side was put in a RAM disk (created using OSFMount) to ensure that the client's storage system shortcomings wouldn't affect the benchmark results. It must be noted that all the shares / iSCSI LUNs are created in a RAID-5 volume. As expected, the more power platform in Haswell enables the unit to shine in almost all the single client workloads.
We created a 250 GB iSCSI LUN / target and mapped it on to a Windows VM in our testbed. The same NASPT benchmarks were run and the results are presented below. The observations we had in the CIFS subsection above hold true here too.
In a few of the benchmarks, the Rangeley-based Synology DS1815+ manages to take the lead over the AS7008T. This can be attributed to the fact that Synology's DSM is much more mature compared to Asustor's ADM.
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Lycoming360 - Sunday, November 30, 2014 - link
I'd love to have that rebuild speed in my Synology unit. But, you certainly do pay for that speed!Jcowley - Sunday, November 30, 2014 - link
Maybe I don't understand but what are you getting for your $1500 over building your own NAS with equivalent/better hardware?I understand the whole off-the-shelf and it just works aspect is worth a bit but $1500 seems extortionately high for what is essential just hot-swap bays on top of anything you could build yourself.
bill.rookard - Sunday, November 30, 2014 - link
I agree, I have my NAS, rackmount case (no hot swap sadly), and 5 2tb drives for a total of about $1000.00. (Drives were purchased at a slight premium to what they can be had for now).DigitalFreak - Monday, December 1, 2014 - link
Here we go again. Not everyone wants to spend the time to research, build and install their own NAS. Having a single point of contact for support and software updates is also worth the $$ to some people and especially businesses.That being said, I do think the Asus is overpriced compared to a Synology, even taking into consideration the Haswell hardware.
bill.rookard - Monday, December 1, 2014 - link
I don't disagree at all with that, there certainly is (as evidenced by the expanding options by various companies) a market for a one-stop, plug in the drives, connect the ethernet cable and power it up units. People are even willing to pay a premium for such a device in a space efficient package.However, any decent tech guy should be able to put together a decent simple Linux-based box (which is what FreeNAS is based off of) for file servicing. These days, with the hardware which is available, the bar to putting together something small, or large, power efficient, and rock solid is much lower and much less expensive than many people realize.
PrimozR - Monday, December 1, 2014 - link
FreeNAS is based off FreeBSD. Still Unix, not Linux though.bill.rookard - Monday, December 1, 2014 - link
Yes, I know it's based off of FreeBSD... technicalities... :) I guess I should have, since I was just using a basic generalization of the type of OS, that it was 'based of *nix' since they share very similar underpinnings.Black Obsidian - Monday, December 1, 2014 - link
I don't think anyone is disputing that SOME premium is justified by the value of a pre-built, supported machine. The question seems to revolve around how MUCH premium is justified, especially in larger NAS boxes like this one.Having recently built a media server with virtually identical specs, I can say that with Asustor you're paying a 200% markup for the convenience of pre-built and support. Which seems a bit steep, especially from Asustor, which doesn't have the brand cachet of Synology.
peterfares - Monday, December 1, 2014 - link
Here we go again. People thinking these insane markups are justifiable.peterfares - Monday, December 1, 2014 - link
I'm sure it makes sense in SOME cases to buy these prebuilts but some people seem to really over-value their time.