Asustor Flashstor 12 Pro Review - A Truly Affordable Flash NAS? (FS6712X)

hello and welcome back and before we start today's video come join me by the fire a moment and let me tell you a story the year was 2008-2009 Rob from the past was there trying to kick out his old PCS old alien PC clunking around in a corner with a new hard drive and he didn't have a lot of money on me but he's looking around online and look Beyond luck he sees this this Seagate Barracuda 160 gig p-a-t-a or IDE R Drive knocking around online for about 250 or 260 knicker I was absolutely elated now obviously I haven't got the economic index in front of me but I think back in about 2008 2009 250 knicker was about a billion quid in today's money and right now the energy and excitement I had for that drive more than a decade and a half ago I'm now talking about this and my it's like my eyes are going to melt this thing the Asus store flash door 12 Pro this is a 12 Bay nvme Nas with 10 GBE knocking around for 850 knicker give or take there there is a six-bane model that doesn't have 10 GB but it's still got six m2mv and ebays and that knocks around for about 499 knicker that is absolutely insane in the today's video we're going to put this thing through its Paces a little bit we're going to talk about the hardware talk about the software talk about the brand itself and ultimately help you decide whether this fantastically affordable flash system probably the most affordable flash system I've ever seen is worth you and your data yeah foreign fs6712x also known as the flashdore 12 Pro no we're not doing that joke again we've already done that before you buy that's right we've already done a video on this very system and the six by all ready go so before you buy a short form review before we get to really dig into the system so if you're looking for a much shorter review because you must have looked along the time bar by now and gone how long well we did do a much shorter version of this when we went through the five things we liked and the five things we weren't sure about in that video should be linked to the description but this is a much deeper review than that in this video we're going to go through it all but before we go any further what is this such a big deal why am I going on all like that about it well it's because when it comes to most users be they home be they proceamer be they business the minute you hear the word flash server which predominantly means a server like any other Nas but utilizes uh specifically SSD storage media the word Flash stories immediately adds zeros to the price tag normally if you look at most even relatively affordable flash server Solutions in the market the bulk of them start off in the thousands they definitely arrive with four figures attached and that's why in early 2023 when Asus store first revealed that they were going to be utilizing m2mvme targeted flash Solutions in their lineup in a 6 and a 12 by and it started at 499 for the 6 Bay and 850 for the 12a that was very and that was a huge deal in a storage Market because notwithstanding the fact that it completely smashed what the actual understanding of what Flash servers cost on top of that this device now challenges the price tag of the bulk of hard drive related now solutions to put that into perspective if you look at say qnap solutions that we've got around here dotted around the majority of those run on a not dissimilar CPU combination and memory combination of this device further still we can look at that this is Asus store's own six by Deluxe store gen 2. it's got the same CPU as this the same kind of memory upgradability and although it doesn't have 10 GB on board it can have 10g added and it's got four into nvme base along with those main six maze this cost as much as this give or take about 50 knicker this device here arriving with that scalability in terms of storage in 2023 but only supporting M2 and vme is genuinely game changing but enough of that for a moment let's talk about what we get for our money if we unbox it again quite swish packaging I would say Asus door very rarely disappoint when it comes to the packaging of their Solutions there um we've got the device itself all bagged up right there and again I have already opened this for testing in previous videos so again normally it's presented everything's slightly better than I'm showing you right now um inside with our accessories got inside there we've got an external cable here and again I'll double check the cat rating on on that one we are looking at that is what we got ourselves a Cat6 cable lovely stuff for 10 GPU we've got our cable lock we've got our instructions and first time information and the information on the three years of inclusive warranty also inside our accessory spot we've got our external PSU a 90 watt PSU again it's not surprising at all that this is going to be an external PSU device given the scale and you know concerned about temperatures and stuff like that moving forward we've got an external Mains cable but that's enough of the accessories right you came to this video to look at it let's have a quick look inside overall the accessories pack is fairly standard there and overall I'd say the complemented package that this arrives with is fairly standard particularly when you compare it against most domestic hard drive it even proves humor Nas systems moving forward but I think it's time we talked about the design of this a little bit [Music] now I've said this in a previous video already but the design of this I genuinely like I really really like it but there's no denying it this looks so much like a PlayStation 4. it's unreal this looks more like a PlayStation 4 than a PlayStation 4 but there's no denying that for 12 Bays of storage this is absolutely tiny and although it is arguably bigger from a certain perspective than these other devices behind us if you actually worked out the calculated volume and mass this thing is really small and really light but moreover it's portable as hell this currently has or it's not fully popular I think it's like 8 or 10 m2mv amazing inside this this weighs nothing and if you were to include the weight of that the PSU there it still doesn't weigh that much you're probably looking at somewhere around 1 to 1.1 kilos give or take which means taking this on the go and setting this up on site is going to be very convenient especially when you work out with the 10 GBE more on that later now the ventilation on the device and again this is a plastic chassis you can kind of feel the creep of that plastic a little bit for the price tag that shouldn't come as a huge surprise I would have liked to have seen some elements of metal uh if not for heat dissipation than anything else but overall the rounder course of the design of the device it looks quite swish they've gone for the kind of brushed steel effect plastic on that side a normal Mac plastic that side on the base we have got an active fan there that's plugged within the system uh quite a unique USB connection we'll talk about later on and on top of that they are active oh sorry there are passive heat sinks a huge one on the CPU and uh these six um m2mv Amaze on one side and six M2 NVM ebays they're on the other side now accessing those Bays isn't hugely straightforward but at the same time this is not going to be supporting hot swapping so you're never really going to have the facility just just pop drives in and out with conveniences isn't like utilizing a hard drive bay because you can't hot swap m2mvs you can you know e1s and those newer range of adaptive ssds you can't with this but with this kind of solution and the target audience it's aimed at with that price tag in the hardware architecture you will probably never going to be going down the road of hot swapping without a reboot involved anyway now ventilation as mentioned we've got a ventilation pad there at the top you can just make out there again as we rotate it we've got a ventilation base there on the side on the back here there's a very small amount of ventilation but that's actually a covered for Seer there and we've got the power button really odd location actually for the power button being there I'm sure there's a design reason for it and when it light when it's on there's a nice little red light when it's powered on but it's quite an odd place for that power button whether that is for you know discrete uh nature someone touch it accidentally but you can have a big red light coming off I'm not sure but I'm not really going to critique it too much for that at the base of it is ever so slightly raised with that fan working there to draw air over the dissipation the heat dissipating heatsinks inside and of course directly over the ssds themselves probably the primary concern of airflow there correct the whole system again bear in mind with the heatsink panel uh the heatsink over the CPU here and I think the memory just underneath you're still gonna have got a lot of warm air moving through this device so although um Asus Don I've talked about this later on in the video we've again I've been talking to Asus store about heat dissipation on this device in a few specific ways I would still highlight that this needs to be in a slightly more ventilated area because notwithstanding the ssds you're still going to have warm air traveling through this device and you've got the vent panel directly behind that larger CPU heatsink there so do not think you can just put this nice closeted area I would still highly recommend some kind of open air environment this is going to be installed within not just some closed isolated cupboard where it's not going to get cooler air introduced into that ecosystem all the way through now if we look at the chassis there and accessing those drives we talk about the design because I do think within this section Design Within my review it is worth talking more specifically about the design and the implementation of those M2 nvme Bays inside you've got four screws here on the base these four screws cover I believe Bays one through six oh my God that the wrong way around it slides out like so nice and easy and the fan itself is connected via a USB slide mechanic there which I think is actually quite Innovative the way that's been introduced again that fan could be controlled with an ADM or you can set it to automatic highly recommended and that introduces us to the first six Bays as I mentioned I'm not fully populated this and I've actually got three different raid groups for this review spread across from there each one of those and again we'll talk about this more in the internal Hardware section but each one of these are limited by their performance down to three times one again that will become clear later why and as you can see there at the back that is our heat sink there for our main CPU into heatsink it occupies quite a lot of space but all of that warm air working through once again we're not going to be as worried about internal heating internal temperature increases that we've discussed before more on that later but still nonetheless at somewhere nice and open in terms of airflow is going to be pretty vital for at least the external air that's going to be working through now the other side comes off quite simple by removing in two screws here and again when it comes to design implementation of accessing those individual Bays this isn't too bad again because the lack of hot swap support on this but still nonetheless slight off like that it is still a little clunky there we've got another six base of storage that I've installed remember when you get it will be unpopulated but overall that's still quite a clean implementation of each of those and I think if you were going to go down the custom Road or even the way it's implemented in other narrow systems it's not quite as cleanly laid out as this one as well certainly give them credit on the way that has been laid out the other thing worth touching on again later on we'll talk about it is that little component down there but for now we talked about the design let's talk about those ports and connections a little bit shall we [Music] ha [Music] report and connectivity on this device given its price tag I would argue are pretty darn good it's not perfect and there's a couple of critiques I've got for it but for the most part I'm really impressed with what I see here now to bring that closer as you can see there on the bottom of the device there's actually quite a lot of space in there and there's a couple of things I'm surprised aren't present now let's get straight into the you know the leading the lead of the show this has got 10 gig there on the rear it's a copper base Port 10g base T and that means you're looking at a thousand thousand twenty four megabytes per second of external performance now on the one hand 10 GBE 12 by Nas yum yum 850 nickel where's the checkout but there's only one port now I'm not going to be foolish enough to argue that this should be able to let me realize 12 days of m2mv in the external throughput notwithstanding the price tag and the hardware architecture this was never really going to allow me to realize you know the full spec of those ssds I'm also not going to give this too much hassle for just being a single 10g given its price tag my critique really is there's only one most 10g systems that I see arrive with 10g but also at least one one gigabit Ethernet port there sometimes 2.5 g maybe a couple of ones and the 10. now the reason being for that is because a lot of users want to dedicate that 10g to something more proactive maybe they're running um direct 10 GBE adapters maybe Thunderbolts 10g adapters maybe their system has a 10gb port already inside their system maybe they want to edit directly on the device or run you know pretty comprehensive editing machines over 10 GBE with this system or other 10g Nazis but what they don't want to do is you utilize some of that 10g port to less prioritized connections than the local area network so other devices that might be connected via another networking switch other devices that you know provide in you know incoming internet or an internet or another um uh virtual land or VLAN that it's connected into and only having one network Port is weirdly limiting just from a topographer sense not so much in terms of bandwidth and the idea that that 10g is where everything's coming in and out it's going to start you know kind of partitioning when things get busy so I'm kind of disappointed that there's only one port when you look at the flash store 6 that doesn't have 10g but it's got 2.5 g it's got a couple of them on there so realistically this is going to be a bandwidth limitation isn't it because I've never seen a system that's had to spread its available PCI uh Lanes the eight that the CPU supports so thinly I mean it achieves it but there's no denying that it is spread super thin so I'm sure there are a lot of reasons why there's only one port on there and that makes sense within the architecture and the price tag but there's just be aware that all of your in and out of this device is going by that single Channel there and yes you can assign priority of service yes running into a 10g switch allows you to use a manage twitch to kind of divvy up that network connection but just be aware only the one network connection now and when it comes to the USB the device has two USB ports we've got a USB there and a USB there both of them 10 gig USB ports so USB 3.2 gen 2. that means each of them not only can you utilize lovely super fast 10g USB drives I've got M2 nvme's inside to a thousand mid backup drives but on top of that you can use certain network adapters whereas the local network adapter usb network adapters now the range of support adapters for first and third party is not you know comprehensive because obviously certification and verification processes are slow but I do know you can at the very least you 2.5 D adapters on this but that does mean you can can theoretically add more network adapters if you need them but then you are going to start losing USBS on this which can also be used for supported KVM devices cable video Mouse and controllers and Bluetooth dongles and DPT um TV antenna State UPS's office appliances as well you can use all of those but then you've got those two USBS doing a lot of workload there now to be fair there are a couple of USB 2 ports there there's a couple of USB 2 ports there and these allow you to use less priorities USB devices so if you're going to be using a ups for a heartbeat you can use one of those you're not going to need 10 gig USB for that same goes for office peripheral devices like printers and scanners same goes if you're going to be utilizing keyboard and uh mice in conjunction with the visual output on this but I still believe you've only got two of those hyper USBS which is fairly standard it has to be said for the hardware architecture of this device and it's um price point there so do pick and choose what you're going to use those for quite carefully overall using one of them for a nice high speed backup and another one for a network upgrade makes a lot of sense but it's also worth highlighting with the USB sport it's broader than any other brand out there in terms of the USB compatibility list with a lot of brands starting to clip down the old range of USB devices being supported for security Isis Still Still maintains a much broader USB compatibility and support now for those that have the word security and are slightly worried that's a bad thing and fundamentally disagree in a number of ways largely because for a lot of threat actors to take advantage of the USB to inject any kind of hacking implementation into the device and take advantage of it don't have to be on site and at that point the threat act has such an insane amount of capability and opportunity that the discussion around USB security is 50 50. there's arguments to and fro on that now another thing you can do with that is take advantage of many of Asus store's expansion devices there is an eight by expansion I believe but more importantly a more recently showed at computex they have a four by expansion device um that take I think it's the aes500 for you if I've got my model ID wrong I'm sure someone will tell me in the comments but that four by expansion device is USB 3.2 Gen 2 so again you can really take advantage it is a jbod but fully take advantage oh now 1000 Megs directly from an expansion chassis into this they currently from what I understand don't have any kind of flash expansions and I'm not sure how we use that but still nonetheless it's nice to have a good range of expansion options open to you finally when it comes to multimedia not only does it have HDMI my 2.0 B again 4K 60 frames per second and I would argue better bandwidth management for visual data into this than other versions of HDMI but there's also the SP div Port there for audio and audio files that really really want to keep a substantial high quality multimedia selection of audio that can also also be interfaced with existing premium audio playback devices and again direct output there with control and indeed third-party control of some of the applications on there to enjoy your audio on this and all of that combined with just a better kvn output than a lot of devices out there and support for multimedia makes this very very attractive now the hardware inside it's not groundbreaking and more on that in a moment but still for most you know modest users or any even people that take multimedia seriously but not on a high-end professional output editing level this is more than enough right now for you to enjoy your photo video and music files and for those of you that want to take advantage of that 10 GBE thanks to a bunch of m2mvme storage space inside this there's good options there although again we'll get onto that internal Hardware in a moment but overall I quite like what we're seeing here on this device and again once you realize this is arriving at a not dissimilar price tag to a lot of those Solutions next to me which you've got fewer bays and our hard drive only with the odd M2 inside for caching for the most part a little bit of storage pool this is still a huge amount of external connectivity to take advantage of in this architecture but let's crack on with that internal architecture right because it can't all be great right [Music] foreign we're getting onto the part of the video I would like to title that's the catch because I think most users who have looked at this and its price point and particularly those users that I referenced at the beginning of the video with regard to what the word flash storage means to most users this part of the video is where you're going to feel a little bit more validated than that is that this system running on an Intel n5105 quad-core Celeron Processor inside with the CPU underneath there this has got that quad-core 2.0 gigahertz CPU that can be burst up to 2.9 it has four core 4 thread it's got integrated Graphics I think it Peaks at 750 or 800 megahertz and this also arrives with four gig of ddr4 memory that can be upgraded up to 16 gig across two slots there the memory inside that it arrives with is a pacer memory and it is 3200 4 gig sodium they're non-ecc so what does all that mean well that CPU is home plus it's early SMB the majority of people that take flash storage incredibly seriously wouldn't give that CPU the time of day but these are also users that either have the capability or are ordering behalf of others with a budget in the thousands you could not get a Xeon for that price tag inside this you certainly couldn't have the scale of this device with a Xeon given the uh um the necessary heat dissipation factors that CPU would bring into the fold now that CPU is going to be good for Plex it's going to be good for all of the iso store ADM applications that we'll talk about later on in this video it's very good for General 10 GBE access it's not quite going to have the file um server oomph of a Xeon or even some of those embedded rhizons which trade off against graphical manipulation in favor of just fast transmission and sustained performance but this is a very good CPU for General now use and there's a reason why the majority of Nas Brands I just thought included have opted for that CPU in the last 18 months or so however because that CPU has only got eight Lanes to play with as mentioned earlier on all of these bays are three times one even then it's insane that they managed to get 12 Bays of three times one SSD inside this and a lot of it's thanks to a PCI Bridge that's been introduced there which although it enables those extra bass once again goes down the road into whittling down the maximum performance this is going to to be able to achieve now we've already discussed external performance and how having a single tingy there means you know in the right setup with the right drives particularly you're going to have to go maybe one TB at least per Drive maxing out that 10g is going to be an absolute piss uh piece of piss but when it comes to internal performance you're not really going to have that external bottleneck right what's the performance numbers you're going to be hitting well although our own benchmarking video is still in progress and I will do some preview of that later in this video as well as highlighting that it'll be very surprising if you can exceed to maybe two and a half thousand Megs not impossible if you gear it right with the right drives in the right environment but don't think that just because each of these values are three times one cranking out a thousand Megs each and 12 of them instantly means you're going to be getting 12 000 Megs that is not the case it's just simply not possible in this device so you've got to remain relative now on the subject of m2mv Amaze because these are gen 3 but they're going to be gen 3 times 1. the usual culprits that you would buy online for m2mvs and when it comes to Nash you've got wd's sn700 WD red series or seagate's Iron Wolf series of now space ssds if you go down that road these ssds being Gentry or Gen 4 in some cases they have the potential to go to three four even five thousand Megs depending on the drive you go for and none of that is going to be possible and notwithstanding because it's gen 3 versus Gen 4 or whatever but on top of that that you're going to be buying ssds where you're never going to get that performance threshold and if that is a deal breaker for you it's the reason you were gonna go for a flash server is because you heard performance numbers in the thousands if not tens of thousands this might not be the device for you and it's the reason this is so affordable but it's also the reason why those other systems that you know have maintained the record rotation of flash up to this point are so so expensive but why is the store of done here is allow users to be able to take advantage of decreasing costs of m2mvmes in the market right now and give you a means to further improve upon the potential of hard drive speed but unfortunately you'll never fully realize the performance benefits of 12 nvmes now there are ways there are ways and means to still Bridge closer to that as you can see across these 12 bays and I mentioned earlier on I've not fully populated it this system's running three different storage pools inside here we got ourselves a couple of raid ones in a raid five The Raid one being the system o s one that I targeted and the other two running for just general shares for the performance benchmarks and we've got other drives being tested too for that video coming up soon within um but when you use those multiple pools that does allow you to create smaller pockets of higher performing areas of storage pool in Each of which can capitalize on their own kind of parallel running pools on top of that remember you don't have to fully populate this on day one and I think that is a real deal breaker for a lot of users who have been looking at these systems because one thing this brings to the party which I don't think it's anywhere near enough credit in other reviews I've seen online is if you only have a finite budget to spend on your own private Nas solution you've already decided it's going to be for Plex or whatever maybe you've got Grand to play with and whether you go for the 6 or 12 by this you can go ahead and only put one or two nvmes in this and then gradually over time add more drives as the price of M2 and vmes continues to drop and you can scale up that storage so you can keep this within your budget on day one when had you gone for a hard drive Nas yes you had the potential for more storage capabilities but spending a grand on a four by you're going to lose half of that immediately on the Nas and you can scale up and get those extra bigger hard drives but this with 12 Bays gives you a huge scope for expandability as the price of ssds drop combined with the fact that right now we're even starting to see M2 and vmes rocking out an 8tb and those are TLC nand ones if you go down the road of qlc named ssds which although drop in performance not so much of a problem here because you've already got that CPU and the limitations in place you have the potential to go insane with your capability and the price per terabyte of those m2s once you break into qlc land with durability unless you've got a high frequent daily refresh rate of your data isn't really going to be anything to worry about as efficiency and development in qlc9 has improved overall I can't really give this too much sugar for its um handling of the pcie Lanes on this and to keep within that price point and arriving with Celeron Bravo overall but for now let's get the lid back on this get it booted up again and start talking about the software and capabilities of this system to you [Music] all right so to really dig deep into the software you get included with the flash talkers remember it is a full first party Nas OS you get rolled in with this device despite its modest price tag there it would be longer than this video indeed I've already covered it into other videos I've done a full dedicated video on the surveillance software and although we're going to touch on the surveillance later in this I will highlight that this video here Linked In the description go through a lot of stuff from the mobile applications all the way down to the desktop tools you're going to use and indeed we've done two full reviews of ADM version 4 on two different now systems in the last 18 months so although I'm going to do another dedicated video for the software on the flash door which is just ever so slightly here off camera it's worth highlighting I'm gonna have to skim over things a little bit in this video when going through it but I will touch on a lot of these details throughout the video and also as I alluded to earlier on benchmarking for this device is still ongoing and right now Eddie as you can see from a recording here from earlier in the week is still conducting a lot of benchmarking on this device along with temperature sensing stuff and this is going to be going with a multiple a multiple different raid arrays across both the flash station 6 and the Flash station 12 Pro going with different combinations of hard drives different oh sorry um ssds different combinations of Brands and different raid profiles there and the problem is that is taking substantially longer to allocate the ssds from different brands as well as utilizing and creating those rate pools every single time but I will say that at the moment um the hardware um configuration that we're seeing here in front of us is just more and more showing us that that kind of modest CPU we're seeing inside this device it resulted in performance as you can see here on the left-hand side even early provisional raid 5 testing with some very low end OWC ssds with still hitting around 1 676 megabytes per second sequential read and we did get that as high I should say as about 1850 but I think we'd have to go for a more bulkier ssds and really fully populate the array to get higher than that and once we got down to the 4K randoms that's when we saw three thousand oh sorry 333 000 um 4K random iops in read but right it's where it really suffered because in the terms of right not only because of that three times one lane allocation and whether you're going to go through that um uh PCI Bridge there but on top of that just simply that CPU um even if we had bulked up the ram to maybe eight or 16 gig we were still not really seeing the performance numbers um going high we were we were barely breaking into the 1000s until we started looking at larger raid configurations but as I say what you're seeing on screen there was some testing in the background and some back and forth with different SSD combinations and I'm going to be a much more Fuller video on that and temperatures coming up soon we didn't want to hold up the review much longer but it is in progress right now but onto ADM so ADM I would say is better than it has ever been and although I've talked about Asus Stores um Nas software several times here on the channel I would say in this system it's the best it's ever been notwithstanding the range of applications and services that are included both on the first and the third party but they have removed a lot of that third-party chaff in their App Center that has been there year on year in the past they've every year minimized it down or although they definitely exist something I'll show you later on there's nowhere near as many as they'd used to be there and also because of the hardware architecture of this device not only does that mean you get access to the full array of applications and services that may not be included in like an arm-based Nas like the uh Drive store Series where they have to remove some of the more comprehensive applications but on top of that because this is running on nvme the performance of those individual applications is substantially higher now we've already created the login for this again we've done setup videos for you to check out and I would say a good line has been found between the first and third party applications they're notwithstanding as mentioned the Asus store apps several of which we've installed in during the installation you are invited to utilize their own kind of preset combos of apps if you're a multimedia user dedicated to backup business or all you can go into all of those and have them all installed and again the full range of applications there that are available is pretty massive um if we were to focus for example just on the installed applications these are ones that I've installed with the presets and a few ones that I personally would utilize on this system and again I'm running a lot of apps here something we need to bear in mind later when I talk about the temps and when I talk about this system being utilized in a broader and larger fashion there so for example going through here these are all of our kind of multimedia performance and backup applications we've got readily available via the Asus store ADM range of applications and services so so for example you've got your inbuilt kind of remote access backup Services there and again this is where a slightly more technical options that have been presented pretty darn well and it is a nice Snappy GUI that we're utilizing there next up if we want to kind of ramp things up a little bit we've got application tools and services for the synchronize of course if we want to synchronize between our local client device and the system and again that's when you've got your file pin in that's when you're using your OS um your own Windows or Mac OS file manager to Integra interact with the nas if you choose to then if we go to the next page we do have the cloud backup center tool that allows you to create um a remote backup to a supported third-party cloud services then this actually is the kind of the standard ones you would expect and there's even some proprietary applications for some of those Cloud providers in the App Center rather than using this broad one portal interface which arguably a lot of you would probably prefer now things like um container management and virtual machine utilization these are the area where Isis store being arguably a comparative comparatively smaller platform than the likes of Synology or qnap out there in the market are a little bit more reliant on third parties now you may like or dislike that but for example they utilize the likes of Docker and Paul Taylor if you're choosing you're going to need that to run a lot of those apps indeed a lot of the third-party applications are run on this system are in of themselves containers with a glossy little GUI on the front so a lot of the time you're going to be using containers on this system not even realizing you're doing it and when it comes to the virtual machine utilization they do support virtualbox so if we go into the categories menu there and we're going to a little bit more want to go into a virtualization um we can go into there and you can see a lot of those first and third party wins and the Nook Center of course to three click install a an Ubuntu VM there and of course virtualbox ready to rock when you need it and again if you've used virtualbox you'll know that as when it comes to open source it's probably one of the best VM tools out there to have an on nav hypervisor that isn't first party if you were going to go third party you might go a virtualbox perhaps proxmox but even then proxmox running within this system on a Celeron man alive you're going to hit a wall pretty darn quickly there now when it comes to multimedia fair play to them although they don't have some of the real killer stuff of Solange or qnap what they don't have they do bridge quite well with those first Parts third-party tools like Plex Media Server Like jellyfin and MB all of which can either officially unofficially be installed on this uh via supported apks in the App Center there but when it comes to multimedia as I mentioned Plex Media Server is available straight away and if we were to do just a quick Benchmark there and I before I do that I do want to make a note of the system temps because that is going to be relevant later on because we've been running this system now for just shy of four weeks because we wanted to get extensive testing as I mentioned with Ed and I want you to just take a quick look at a system and CPU temp because we'll be coming back to that later on and I didn't want what we're about to do to skew the discussion later on there 56 over 69 for system and CPU attempts there Plex playback on this device again is going to come down a lot to that cell aileron process there thanks to having into great graphics it does mean that you are going to have a little bit of oomph when it comes to those conversions now to put that into perspective here is a 4K file right now and I'll open up at the bottom there this is a 4K file with quite a substantial amount of uh kind of quality to it dare I say it's 24 frames per second 1200 megabits per second but it is h.264 and we can skip forward and it will absolutely play back this file beautifully we can skip back and forward and we can go in and it's running great and that's because it's in the original quality there and as you can see while we're doing this we're using a quarter of CPU we've got some memory utilization within Chrome however what if we play back this file but this time we want to enable some transcoding there so again we'll go into the file we'll move forward even though transcoding is becoming less relevant these days there are still users via remote access utilizing devices that maybe do not have sufficient or even enabled licenses for h.2 5 or on side or client side conversions if we go for a conversion there and we convert it down and we convert it say down to 1080p we've still got the file converting but we're definitely seeing a change there in how much of the buffering was available and we're seeing no pauses but if we go into the system resource utilization which we can do via the activity monitor here or utilizing one of the third-party tools here we're able to see that utilization I know that bad is still um kind of biting just a little bit there in terms of available buffering happening there in the background but what if if we go for something a little beefier and again you'll see more of this when we do our dedicated Plex transcoding but if we look at the roast up file which is a pretty substantial h.265 file and we try to play back this one and again bear in mind while we're doing that that again we're not fully utilizing my whole system settings remember and also if we look at my system config we're running an i512 gen um you know fill substantial CPU and it's got GPU card in on board utilization we're still not getting immediate playback yes we're playing it in the web browser which will always cap a little bit of that performance but when it comes to conversions on this although it supports it I would still argue that that CPU is never given the chance um or at least the ability to do more in terms of conversions and we're seeing a slight pause in again we'll get into more detail on that on our dedicated Plex vid but for example if we go into the native application for Plex Media Server here on the Windows system we go in and we play back that same file so again there is the row stuck file there we'll go to 4K trailers we'll find the um the roast duck playback and again if we play it on a device that does have hevc support and therefore conversion wasn't necessary buffering just like that it's running like a dream so just bear in mind that system architecture we are talking about here does mean that some actions and this isn't really isos thought although I would argue that they're not being as efficient with Plex as we've seen from other brands who have got more out of that CPU to play back this file I would still argue that CPU is really the cause for Collective transcoding this scale of file not being quite as smooth as some might like but just bear in mind if you're not going to be using convention conversions you're not really going to be using transcoding this whole point is moot anyway and they'll play like a dream but moving before uh moving forward from Plex Media Server some of their own applications unfortunately aren't quite as polished and I do think if you're looking at this system then chances are you're going to be looking at those third-party tools it's not that they're bad they're just not as featured as some of the other ones out there but again you've got to scale the size of Acer store versus the size of some of the other brands out there and that longer they've got to throw at it from the two audio applications one of which is incredibly analytical I might add in terms of the information you can Garner from a lot of the files you're trying to play the video application there although it does play back these files and there's two different the lni or UPnP playback apps out there um it doesn't really have the same level of presentation and Client app support that some of the other bigger brands have got allplex media server the photo tool doesn't really have ai photo recognition does have tag recognition although it supports different file formats including GIF and live photo it's not quite as established as some of the other ones out there and again moving across all of those multimedia apps if you head into that App Center there is a whole range of third-party applications out there for you to play with for multimedia just go through the categories and you'll see what I mean now talking those applications and talking about multimedia and utilizing the hardware for you we've got to talk about the data store portal Outlook now for again I mean mentioned earlier in the video but the system has an HDMI output it has that special audio output as well but ISO store portal is what allows the system to have its own parallel GUI via the HDMI and you can utilize a keyboard video keyboard and mouse you can use a USB dongle equipped to Bluetooth remote there's even an application you can use on a mobile phone to control with that and with that HDMI output you do have a degree of control I would say and when you go through you can choose what the default applications are to use change all of these things from the nas side but the Acer store portal is a completely separate GUI you're not just mirroring what you're seeing here via the network or remotely over the Internet which is good I would argue there because you don't really want that from the comfort of your sofa now going back to what I mentioned earlier on about applications and services that are included um within the system between the first and the third party I would argue this is one of the areas where Isis store could really cling things up a little bit because the range of apps they've got available in the Asus store portal area there's a lot of third-party stuff in there that need to cleaning up look at this range of applicant like for example when you want to add on your third-party tools for media streaming so whether it is the Disney plus your Amazon Prime instant your Netflix and more now it is good I would argue that they've got these apps because if you are if you're running a system where you've only got one your monitor has one particularly high-end HDMI out like some TVs have got one HDMI 2.1 and the rest HDMI 2.0 or that ilk it's good that you're going to be able to utilize that high performance interface of your visual output but still have access to your prime your Netflix your whatever but it's still a very messy lineup of apps they definitely cleaned it up they definitely have and there are more applications with HDMI out but some of them I think could require more updates or better management and I know their third pie but a lot of the emulation tools to run consoles from Within These user interface and attach you know your you know your emulator controller of choice but still nonetheless the range of third-party applications does sometimes lead to a slightly consistency of the services that are available to you you know enthusiasts home labbers might quite like that as well as the utilization of using a lot of those third-party container things there but the more novice user is going to get overwhelmed very very quickly or just start installing things willy-nilly leading to a very inconsistent experience variant overall and of course we've got to talk about the storage management itself because if you're going to be owning your own flash system at this affordable level and the dropping prices of m2s nvmes in the market it's incredibly important that you're able to um Monitor and utilize your storage as best you can and in the storage manager here I would say it's one of the clearest uis for this I've seen in a very long time it's straight to the point of right there we I've already created three independent volumes on this system that are spread across different disc combos there now the storage pool volume relationship is not quite the same as other brands when you're setting it up and you're creating new pools um I would argue it's a lot more streamlined and again whether you think that's a good or a bad thing is really down to you and your level of experience as an end user but I will add that when you are creating individual storage pools yes we're using nvmas but still nonetheless it does feel quicker it does and you've got the choice of ext4 or of course btrfs and the benefits that they present there but as you can see we've created for our performance benchmarks or at least the first round of them before we start using other ssds um we've created different pools of BTR fs ext4 and we've gone through a different raid combinations as well and it's very easy to set those up and start creating your snapshots and your back end backups or the other tools I've shown you just now now if we look at the individual ssds we can see the temps there because we should talk about the terms because it is something I talked about in my previous video when I did my should you buy before you buy video on this and I did show concerns about the system and its temperature and particularly with reference to those ssds because I was concerned that ATA store did not include m2mvme heatsinks on a 6 and 12 base system despite the fact they were um kind of throttled or bottlenecked if you will to three times one because the CPU architecture there now massive credit to Asus store because they did after my videos you can see here hopefully YouTube doesn't get on my case about this did do a follow-up video on their own channel highlighting my concerns there and addressing how they were put in the system with some raid scrubbing in their own temperature monitoring area and just ultimately showing that these ssds during raid scrubbing how they Captain remember as long as your SSD doesn't go over about 70 c you should be fine but another part of my concern I touched on which is why we're doing another video in the background and honestly we do not have the full answer in time for this video at all um what's to do with and it's closed out there um just the general system temp when I was talking about utilization uh of cooling in this system and we're going to bring it up here um there is that base level fan underneath but we have to bear in mind that we've got 12 days of storage and a CPU fan inside this system which has an enormous heatsink but we're quite heavily reliant on active airflow on this system and again it's not a system that's feeling out of this world hot but I think a number of people myself included were wondering about the general system temp of the device now when we do our temp video we're going to be pulling the ssds that have been inside this for weeks and using Crystal disk to look at their temperature over that extended period to see how they all did but it's also worth touching on the CPU temp as well because when we look at the system information during that time we're able to see the CPU temp is at 71 here now if we ignore the system temperatures to tiny bit we won't but it's still a little bit high I would argue for a system temp it's not bad height it is definitely not bad 56 is fine but it's at the slightly higher ebb of fine now when I've talked about um other systems say this qnap here that we've had on for quite a while and here we can see the CPU tent at 46 uh sorry the system temp at 36 and the CPU temp at 46 we can see that again the CPU template is markedly higher that was why I showed you the temp earlier on before we did our Plex test I wanted you to know that this system has been running in the background of a lot of videos in the last three weeks you've probably seen it about there in the background running and during that time we've seen that CPU temp live between 60. I was at about 55 and 70 consistently which I know seems like a large margin there and again I have to you know we have to articulate that that is not a game over temperature indeed if we go for this article this has been a consistent kind of observation celerons are fine up to about 85 so it's still well within the remit of that temp for it to be absolutely fine running at that CPU tip there but I will say it when it did spike it spiked quick and a lot of users like to have their CPUs closer to the 50 or 60 Mark there so this is not a bashing critique of of that system template but I will say that on average the system does run a higher temp than most other Nazis and definitely I would argue slightly higher than other flash based systems I've reviewed definitely not in any kind of danger zone but if you are an absolute stickler for temps just be aware this will run a little hotter than some of the other devices out there and finally when it comes to client applications again for mobiles and desktop as I mentioned earlier on there's actually quite a few available if you head over to their own site they've got downloads there for the most recent version of ADM but on top of that you've got some of those client applications for desktop I will say that it's much more skewed towards windows at the moment than it is Mac no Mac is a little trickier to develop for and get licensing for in some cases but if you're going to the app area you can download pretty much everything straight off the bat there some services on the flash store I would argue definitely run better when you're using the client app case in point the most common example and it's one that I touched on in my uh surveillance video when we are looking at the desktop client and the mobile client for their surveillance applications well when it comes to their desktop surveillance tool and again we've got that there running let's get my hand in shot [Music] they do tend to run a little better with the desktop applications overall but still I think a lot of users would quite like to see kind of an improvement on a lot of those apps because some of the design is just ever so slightly dated in cases and again I know there's an extension to what a brand can spend on upgrading and kind of flourish with a lot of their apps and services there but there is definitely a feel a lot of the design of the applications that they could serve to be just a little bit more modern than they are but let's wrap things up when it comes to the 10 GBE performance of The Flash station 12 Pro again it's going to be very hard to give you a realistic interpretation of it because of the drives that we're utilizing for this section of the review because we were doing lots of benchmarks there in the background and as you can see all of these drives that we're utilizing are much much smaller OWC drives for the most part although we've got a couple of mid-size drives and the bulk of which within the ray configurations we've gone for a combination of smaller drives which is the only ones we could secure for the review at this stage so at the moment what I've done is gone ahead with this device and I'm utilizing a thunderbolt to 10g adapt factor that is directly connected to the single 10g interface here of the Acer storage you can see there as I desperately try not to disconnect it hence why you can hear that background hum while we're doing this now again that's the solo 10g connection there we've gone in and reallocated our connection to the device within the Asus store configuration there's our new 196 169 IP and on top of that moving forward if we go into the network settings of the device we go into the network as you can see not only are we utilizing that 10g at full 10g bandwidth all along but on top of that we've set the MTU to 9000 sangos for the network adapter here on the local side of things but because we've got the different raid configurations there on these drives we're not really going to fully realize the 12-bait performance potential of this device but needless to say even if you did fully populate this device you've only got one 10g connection up to a thousand maybe a thousand twenty four Megs of transmission to play with there so even then you're never really going to be able to fully realize externally the performance potential of this device perhaps utilizing USB to network adapters there but again I will say the performance numbers you're going to see are very weak compared to what they could be because of the drives we're utilizing case in point if we go for the raid one configuration there so that's the two drives on the right ground for configuration and these are just two 250 gig gen 3 ssds that have been capped down to three times one and again we're not using any kind of background caching that we're going to go for continuous running we're not using any localized caches read write test there on a 256 Meg file and if we run that test again we're getting only 6 oh 600 over 700 or so there let's go for a run continuous there while we're rabbiting so although that performance number doesn't seem great for this flash door one you've got to bear in mind the drives that we are utilizing for this stage and again we're going to do better ones better drives for the full benchmarking but on top of that you've also got to factor in this is a Celeron based system this is a system that's going to be running on a quad core Celeron with that four gig and you already start to see some of that throttle in there while we're over saturating those drives in this testing there and while it's doing that again I will touch on again when it comes to the temperature of this device running in the background we're going to start seeing those Rises but I would argue not as high as they could have been given we just did sustained activity which is two of those drives there so although those numbers are high they're still welding the parameters of healthy and if anything they're not quite as high as I thought they'd be for just 45 seconds of benchmarking now if we move over to the raid 5 test there so this is the raid 5 and that raid 5 would go into the storage manager there as I mentioned at the beginning of this I'm impressed the combination of ADM that Celeron and these nvme's for how Snappy this OS is being um if we look at the raid 5 configuration there and you can see that raid 5 configuration there is made up of five of these lower capacity low performing ssds there and it is running on an ext4 configuration so if we switch over to that for our raid 5 test same thing and we scan that through again relatively modest numbers overall but unfortunately because of those drives we can't really overtly test that and as mentioned at the beginning meaning of this software side it's doing more comprehensive and detailed breakdowns that we'll put on the channel later with different SSD combinations different rate combinations and all of that hopefully with the temp testing in that video and more not breathtaking numbers it has to be said these are large blocky data as well so even if we scale that up to maybe a one gig file to get a truer representation of sequential read write these numbers are still not going to blow you know five ten Grand Flash servers apart but the point is it was never supposed to this is supposed to be an entry-level flash system as the cost of entering vmes come down and users want to be able to see is there viability in getting a Nas and ditching slower hard drives and opting instead for faster and near slightly more affordable M2 and VMAs let's head back into the studio and summarize today's review [Music] so what do we think well the design I really really like I would have liked to have seen metal I would have liked to felt like maybe something to feel a little bit more robust but at the same time for the price tag of this 12 about around 850 and again that's six by for a 499 this is insanely good value and I think the construction is easy on the eye I think it has got a good amount of ventilation there and although we're still on you know that we're still on the fence and the jury's still out for us here on the channel about long term temperatures on this device there's a huge a compelling argument from both Aces store and just our general use for almost four weeks that the temperature on this is not going to go into any weird Dodge indeed when it comes to noise on this device we have this in the background for ages running for other videos and none of you heard it running in the background which shows that this is definitely low noise we didn't have to remove it from the audio here with the mic or anything and if you're someone that's looking forward to taking advantage of the HDMI out or that specialized um SP div they're on the rear for the audio you're someone that's going to want something powerful quiet and fast to enjoy your video enjoy your raw intense audio Flac files and this is going to be very appealing to you this arriving at that price tag again that price tag again about 850 860 with 10 gpe on board for 12 days of nvme storage come on that's insane whether you're looking at the 6 or 12 Bay there's never been that kind of value even in hard drives if you saw a 12 Bay hard drive Nas with 10 gpe do you think that will be rocking an 860 price tag outside of DIY it definitely wouldn't trust me I didn't know um ADM is better than it's ever been and although it doesn't challenge I think completely the likes of Synology DSM cleanup qts or true Nas I think it does make a very good compelling argument for itself in terms of inclusion in this package as a genuinely nice feeling now software that it includes and although it's a little bit more reliant on third-party apps than developing their own I think the core structure and framework and Foundation of ADM is still pretty darn solid with everything from cloud synchronization and multi-tiered backups to multimedia application support BTR fs and a robust networked back end to play with there finally again moving beyond that price tag the cost of M2 mvmis has dropped to a point now be the qlc Nando TLC and that makes getting this and partially populating it and gradually upgrading over time a great deal more palatable and raid expansions are a thing that are supported on this device although things like hot swapping are not now not it's not going to be for everyone I think most of you that think this is some quick fix get out of jail free card I own a flash now I want super performance have to keep things relative there's a reason for that price tag and that CPU is a big part of it this ain't no Intel core or Xeon you've got eight lines to play with and this thing is squeezing the living heck out of those particularly with those gen 3 times one slots for those drives and six of those running through that bridge there now the single port up there on the rear that 10g is good that it's 10g I don't like that it's only one port but I'm sure there's lots of reasons for that and on top of that we have to at least acknowledge that Acer store were one of the brands that were impacted by the deadbolt ransomware group I reckon they handled it better than a lot of Brands out there with the range user base but there's also the counter argument that they don't have the sheer number of units in the wild as other brands so even then we sh we have to at least discuss that they did they were impacted by deadbolt like a few other brands they weren't the only people that were targeted by the deadbolt ransomware group and they took their lumps and they've integrated a lot of increased security defaults within this system and do not allow system users to just brush past a lot of that security without full understanding of the choices they are making in a number of cases right the way down to the initial um uh initialization of the device where it prompts you and goes right we recommend you change these ports if you're not going to change them that's on you and that for a lot of users and those default ports was this first step towards getting hit by ransomware having default ports but overall I really like this device I think it's if not the most exciting Nas that is the store have released in their entire history in my opinion is probably one of the best Nazis it's potentially one of the best Nazis of the Year for me but I'm going to hold off full judgment until we do our full benchmarking and temperature testing on this but apart from that I hope you've enjoyed this video if you have let me know in the comments as mentioned there is a shorter form review link below where we I think that was about three weeks ago that went out and I recommend you check that out if you want to learn more we've done a full review with lots of close-up photography and we'll be issuing The Benchmark as they happen in that article below if you want to learn more there's links towards more Acer store reference stuff and some of the other videos and previous stuff that we've done with regards to the software the surveillance and more that you can check out soon we're going to be doing another dedicated video on flash service that I recommend you check out and on top of that if you're on the fence about buying an air solution you're still not aware where your money can get get you these days or what's the best solution for your needs use the free advice section the big blue button on the right hand side of Nas Compares or use our free community Forum ask Nas competitors for answers to your questions or you can use our Discord to get answers from other members of the community and me and Eddie I'll be honest more Eddie than me if I'm honest I'm busy doing this um on top of that if this video has helped you decide on a product that you were going to buy and you're going to shop at Amazon scan b h Newegg any of those websites if those two things are true then please use the links in the description to take you to those stores notwithstanding it's not going to cost you anything to click that they don't Harvest your information but when you use those links anything you buy and I mean anything you buy results in a kickback to me and Eddie here at nascarves is just the two of us doing two now close to three articles a day and a video every day so that allows you to passively support other content creators it's just us here and we love doing what we do and that really helps us but apart from that this has been the review of The Flash show and I'll see you on the next video

Channel: NASCompares

Views: 7,740

Keywords: Asustor, Asustor 2023, Asustor FLASHSTOR 12 Pro FS6712X, Asustor FLASHSTOR 6 FS6706T, Asustor FS6706T, Asustor FS6712X, Asustor NAS, Flashstor, FLASHSTOR 12 Pro, FLASHSTOR 12 Pro FS6712X, Flashstor 6, FLASHSTOR 6 FS6706T, Flashstor 6 NAS, FLASHSTOR FS6712X, FS6706T, M.2 NVMe SSD, M.2 NVMe SSD NAS, NVMe, NVMe NAS, NVME NAS DRIVE, NVMe SSD NAS, SSD NAS, Asustor Flashstor REVIEW, Asustor NAS Review, Asustor Flashstor 6 review, Asustor Flashstor 12 pro review, asustor review

Id: uV_Qp75rWcw

Length: 63min 0sec (3780 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 12 2023