Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Is The Asustor 4 Drive Enclosure Perfect for Home Server Storage?”.
Usb storage for my home network media server with raid and everything, but it’s not the enclosure – is not doing raid you’re still doing raid and software 10 GB USB media nass yeah, it’s more likely than you think, and this is not the first video in that series. All right, so what what the I got going on in my desk here, we’re going to take a look at the Asus store. Four drive: 10 gbit USB enclosure. Previously I took a look at this.
This is the cheapest one that actually works from prob box. The cooling leaves a lot to be desired, it’s a little louder than it needs to be, but it works and it has a fan. That’S basically replaceable, it’s okay, one of the things we also took a look at was our Asus store, flash-based, Nas, flash-based storage.
It’S great flash-based storage is perhaps not great when, when we’re talking about surveillance, because flash memory wears out faster than mechanical hard drives and for surveillance footage, you really don’t need to be recording surveillance footage to flash. So if you plug a USB enclosure like the pro box into this, it works and you can set up a rad toay on it in Linux. Just the same way that you always did. But there wasn’t really a clean way to do that in the Asus store. Gooey well the as store box. That’S it does do work that way you plug it in and it knows, and it can set it up, so it actually unlocks some functionality in the software that is otherwise not there when you’re using a regular device.
But before I get ahead of myself, let’s take a closer look at the device itself. This is the as500 for you for me. Yes for you.
If you’ve never done this before that’s one of the reasons you buy a name brand mass is cu. There’S all kinds of help and instructions and technical support and QR codes to get you there. So the first thing you notice this enclosure is much larger. Physically, it’s got a much larger fan. That’S both appealing and fantastic. In here we have a Delta Electronics. That’S a good brand power brick. It is DC 12, volts, 7/, 12, amps, 90 wats. Oh, it’s the same exact kind of power, brick that comes with the uh AC store, flash Bas.
Nass H, it’s got a whole bunch of mounting screws. I think these are for ssds, though 2 and 1/2, in a quick, install guide and they’ve got a USBC cable that you can actually screw in. That’S fancy now this unit costs more, but you get more get a much nicer power, brick and the nicest USBC cable. I’Ve ever seen: okay, it’s a to c, but still I will be using dual actuator 18 tbte seate hard drives.
The Mach 2 drives that I’ve reviewed separately be sure to check that out. These drives are wicked, fast and they’re, also hard mode for an enclosure like this, because they use a little bit more power than normal SATA drives. Asus store was right in their storage management software. The external enclosure does show up differently than just a run-of-the-mill USB disc enclosure, and you can use their software guey to create a rad toay.
The guey still doesn’t detect these as dual actuator hard drives to set them up optimally because basically there’s a front half and a back half of the drive that work independently of one another. And so, if you, you run a benchmark like a crystal disc Mark. At the same time, on two different partitions, you double the speed which normally you get less than half the speed on a normal mechanical hard drive, because you get a lot of overhead having the read rodad move mechanically back and forth between two different areas. But with this you’ve got two different: read: Rod head groups on the same set of platters well they’re on different sets of platters, it’s on the same spindle, but each group head group has its own set of platters.
That goes with it, and then the software sort of logically makes the drive a appear as if it’s one drive but to use it efficiently. Your operating system has to be aware of that. Well, Linux is aware of that.
The Linux, dis scheduling and all that other kind of stuff has been set up to be able to deal with that Linux. Md will use this no problem, but it’s not exposed in the guey. So you still going to be relegated to going to the command line. To set it up, but with four drives and the 10 gbit interface four drives is going to saturate 10 gig anyway. So as a practical matter, it doesn’t really matter now in terms of whis super quiet operation and temperatures wish there was an easy way to set the fan.
Speed to run a little higher. These dual actuator drives do run a bit warm uh. Even with this fan setup about 50c give or take, but you can hear the fan ramp up a little bit. I have a feeling. The set point is around 55 or 56 C uh for what it’s monitoring, I guess for the drives. This uh case does have Superior uh, sound and vibration damp happening it’s going to hold the drives in place. These are full sleds, it’s not a it’s toolless, but it’s not a. You know drives on bare metal situation.
This is actually a far better setup in terms of a mounting solution for four helium filed hard drives, spinning, really fast right next to one another. Surprisingly, I do think this is quite. I was not expecting this, but I do think this is quite enough to use with mechanical hard drives. Even in a living room, you can hear the hard drives accessing more than the enclosure, but if this is in the floor or somewhere that it’s not right. Next to your ear, you’re going to be hardpressed to hear this across the room and, of course the flash Bas nass itself is whisper quiet. So this really does give you the best of both worlds. I mean with those tcreate nvme in here. If you didn’t see the last build video that I did with the AC store solid state Nas, this Nas has uh 12 m.2 slots in it, so you could get a bunch of one terby, inexpensive, m.2 and run.
You know 10 terabytes of flash storage with redundancy and everything’s going to launch lightning fast. You can run applications containers we put tail scale on this. We put you know some Docker stuff on it, you’re going to want to add more RAM to it.
If you do that, but it does work well, you got two Ram slots, so this setup works really well. If you want to DIY a Nas, we did a video on that as well. This USB disc enclosure would work really well. If you do decide that you need lots and lots of computational horsepower, you want to run ZFS, you want 64 GB of memory plus eight or 12 or 16 cores. Then you can get a mini PC and use it in conjunction with this external disc shelf. We get the sc7 here and it has got a multiplicity of high-speed 10 gig and usb4 ports on it. It has eight insanely, fast cores, and so you use this in conjunction with that and we’re talking 60 terabytes of redundant storage plus whatever you’ve got in here. It’S pretty crazy world we live in and all of it’s whisper quiet, so insane horsepower, plus gobs of storage or just whisper quiet 28 Watts at idle. That’S been a quick look at the Asus store, as500 foru.
Unless there’s a pinned comment below this thing is still going strong. This is part of our long-term testing, with our external USB disc enclosures. Basically, I run these forever in a torture test kind of scenario to see if ZFS throws errors on these drives.
So I take these drives that make a raid Z1 pool and then I just sort of ride a whole bunch of data to them over a period of 3, 4 weeks 5 weeks. Something like that see what happens so far, so good on this thing, but we’re only like a week and a half into the burn in for this. So we got, we got some more time. I ran the other one. I was really expecting the pro box to die and it it hasn’t yet so far and it’s made it like 3 months. So it’s it’s fine, I’m with this level, one I’m signing out.
You can find me in the level one forums if you have any questions, or I don’t know, we want look at other stuff, USB disc enclosures. Anybody got a lead on some more good 10 gbit, USB disc enclosures, this one’s actually really impressive, build quality features, etc, etc. Nice good job as store all right right, I’m signing out, and you find me the forms, see it .