Crazy 48TB SSD NAS and Cheap 6TB Version Asustor Flashstor FS67

this Asus store Nas takes six m.2 ssds it has two two and a half gig ethernet ports and a low power Intel processor I wanted to hate this system so much but within a couple days of using it I actually ended up doubling down and getting a much bigger version with 12 drives because even though I find these things to be positively maddening I can definitely see a reason why we're gonna use this one but hold on let's back up hey guys this is Patrick from sth and these are the Asus store flash store fs67 Series this over here is The Flash store FS 6706 T which means it has six nvme ssds m.2 nvme ssds in it and it also has two tune half gig ethernet ports now a lot of folks when we did a short on this said hey I wish it had 10 gigabit Ethernet and that is solved over here with the 10 gigabit or 10gbase T and also 12 m.2 nvme SSD flash store 412 Pro also called the fs 6712x for years I've wanted an m.2 Nas but we've never been able to get one because well frankly the pre-built NASA's uh you know really haven't focused on m.2 but while you could have made your own m.2 Nas one of the biggest challenges was just frankly the m.2 SSD pricing that has changed recently as a crucial P3 plus and P3 ssds have come down in price too uh like they're basically just trying to get these things out the door just to give you an idea this six m.2 system we have the crucial P3 plus one terabyte drives and they were like a little over fifty dollars each this system has 12 4 terabyte crucial P3 plus drives and those I think were about 220 dollars when we bought them on Amazon now if you read Will's main site P3 plus one terabyte review you might see that these crucial ssds are not very good I probably wouldn't buy them however for a system like this I think they actually match the system pretty darn well through the process of testing these systems I have to say it's been a love-hate relationship these do some things very very well they do some things that you would expect them to do or want them to do very poorly and we're going to go over all of that in this video so first we're gonna go through the hardware we're going to talk about both systems and then we're going to talk about the performance we're gonna get into power consumption noise and then in our key Lessons Learned we're going to talk about things like upgrading these or trying to upgrade them with like things like new Ram more Nicks all that kind of stuff it was definitely a journey to get to this point if you want to help support our independent reviews you can always become an sth YouTube member by joining down below with that let's get to the hardware all right so the first thing on the hardware is like let's look at the front of this there is one feature on either of these nasas on the front and that is that you get a USB 3 Port that's it on one side of the nasp you get vent on the other side of the nas you get a power button and this whole thing glows red when you turn it on on the top of the system you get Asus store and you get four status LEDs now looking at the bottom of the system you know you get all your like kind of normal serial number stuff and all that kind of stickers you get these nice rubber feet even though there's no like spinning drives in here so that's uh you know appreciated but it's probably not necessary to have these huge ones but the one thing that they do is they give you extra room under the unit to have a fan and that's right here to get inside the system uh using this panel you have four screws which I think is too many you can see it says uh open and close here and the fan just slides out now you might be asking how do you get a fan to slide out well that's part of the fun engineering of this platform so you have the little fan here and then you see the pwm 4 pin right here and then that goes into a little board which is has a USB type 8 connector and then you'll kind of see this in here like right here there's a little USB and that little USB is what gives you hot swap fan using USB which is just uh it's just crazy right okay so looking at the back of the systems that's uh that's probably what a lot of folks want to see and where these things start to get really different now what these systems have in common is that they have optical audio output they also have an HDMI port they have three USB ports two of them are USB 2 and one is a USB 3 Port they also have their 12 volt DC in and a little reset button but the big difference is of course networking because on the six m.2 SSD Nas you only get two two and a half gig ethernet ports but on the 12 Bay Nas you get a full 10g base T4 now I know a lot of folks are going to initially say Hey you have six m.2 ssds you have 12 m.2 ssds and you only have two two and a half or you have 110 I mean that's not enough we're going to hold that for the performance and the key Lessons Learned for now that's what these have with that let's get inside and see what makes these things work okay so getting inside one of these systems let's just kind of show you this real quick so this system you know you have your four screws you take them off you do the USB fan over here and then you're inside and you can see that we have this one pre-populated on this side we have a total of six crucial P3 plus four terabyte ssds one thing that I really like about this is the fact that instead of making these uh like you know all you had to like screw them in or something like that the Asus store folks I do have a tool-less mounting option which I love I love the fact that they did that in this because you know even though we still have four screws to be able to undo this case which I don't know why we have that we still have the ability to add drives very easily and no matter if you get the 12 m.2 or 6 m.2 system well either one this is where you go and put the first six drives so at this point you might be wondering well if that's the access panel how do I get to the other six drives in the 12 Bay unit and that was only two screws and with those two screws you can take off the entire top of the system so just taking a quick look at the six SSD one something that you're going to notice is that we don't have the m.2 slots populated on the side and while we have the as media I think their ASM 1480 pcie multiplexers we don't we have those populated on here we don't have is any pcie switches you also see that we have a four gigabyte ddr4 so dim and a second slot that's available personally I think that four is a little bit light for a system like this this retails for about 450 dollars and I just kind of think that these days you know a gig dim you can get them on Amazon for like 17 18 bucks I just kind of feel like you know a gig you know you can't add more than 18 for something like this now in the 12 SSD version we did upgrade this to you can see two eight gig dams for 16 gigs total we tried some other things that we're gonna talk about but I do think that this is a good idea idea and I would certainly recommend it especially if you got the 12 SSD system the other thing that you'll notice on like these two lines of components right here is that you just have pads here while you have the pcie switches here these are as media pcie switches and the reason that this system needs pcie switches is just it ran out of pcie lanes because these systems use the Intel n5105 but that processor only has a total of eight pcie Lanes so while the processor is decently fast especially for a Nas when you look at it from the other perspective and you just kind of look at like you know how much pcie connectivity you have pcie gen 3 and you only have eight Lanes to work with so on a platform like this you can have a PCA link go to each of the two and a half gig ethernet ports and then have one lane each to all of the ssds and and that's your eight ports right there you you don't have any new connectivity and while that's all well and good on the 10 gigabit one well well it's even worse right because now you need at least two or four lanes for the 10g base T Nick and then you also would need a total of at least 12 Lanes to give each drive at least one lane and so you know you're talking about you need at least 14 to 16 Lanes minimum but if you're going for full bandwidth you would need 48 Lanes just for the nvme ssds and then you'd need at least four or two or four for the 10g base T Nick and you still would have a massive imbalance between your performance of your ssds and your networking and if that sounds silly to you I totally get it because I empathize with that that's exactly what I thought and that's why originally I went out and purchased the six SSD version instead of the 12. and I know we've probably already gotten some rage comments saying like why would you have so many m.2 ssds and then so little networking or whatever I totally get it guys like I understand I have that same thought but I think that the other way to think about it is think about it from the network side and that is like this is a 2.5 half gig dual two and a half gig ethernet Nas this is a 10 gigabit Ethernet ass and then the m.2 ssds they're just there for storage they're really there for capacity and once you start thinking about it like that it makes a lot more sense what Asus store is doing here but with that let's get to the performance okay so let's talk about the performance and I want to just kind of start we'll start with the CPU because that's the easy one and it's common to both of these so with the CPU we have the Intel n5105 that's a quad core processor it's not particularly fast but it's it's actually not too bad and so we ran a couple of dockerized benchmarks on these systems and we saw the performance is pretty much equivalent to what we would see on the fanless firewall versions of the n5105 so we got performance that we would just normally expect okay so to test the network storage performance because I think that's really what you're doing on the NASA in most cases what I want to do is that we're going to use this qnap switch over here that's the way you can tell that this is not a sponsored one because it's not an Asus store switch but we have two 10 gig ports and we also have four two and a half gig ports on this one by the time you see this we should have the sth main site review of this switch up and we'll go into our overall archive in the ultimate Roundup that we have on the sth main site and for the clients of this we're we're going use two we're going to use this b-link EQ 12 Pro which has the N 305 processor so it's an 8 core atom or e-core processor kind of like the next generation of what's in this and then we're also going to use this HP Elite mini 600 G9 where we put a 10 gigabit Ethernet Nick in and while those are the clients we're gonna set these up kind of similarly because on this we're going to use a raid 5 array with our one terabyte ssds and on this one we're going to use a raid 5 with all the four terabyte ssds that we didn't necessarily get crazy performance by any means but on the other hand it was fast and it was pretty decent on the sixth system you need to do one thing before you even start this right there's a little checkbox that says enable SMB multi-channel the difference between enabling and not enabling that is like doubling the performance of a client accessing this because you don't have to do things like set up lacp or any of those kind of features you can literally just take the two ports here plug them into a unmanaged switch and you'll be able to get about double the performance we did that same file copy and we got over 500 megabytes of transfer and that is pretty darn good frankly so a lot of folks say there's only two and a half gig Mass even if you're just going to a client that has a 10 gig Nic you're still getting more than two and a half gig you're getting closer to like five gigabits per second but you do have to click that checkbox now if you're sitting there and you're thinking like oh I need the maximum VM random read random right iops performance like 4K apps for these are the wrong nasas for that guys they are not for performance you're using m.2 ssds for capacity and also not having any moving Parts with that let's go see something cool which is the power consumption and Noise foreign consumption and I already have one of these units set up and I let's kind of go through some of this real quick so the first unit that we have is the six m.2 SSD unit and then we have the 10 gig 12 SSD unit on the bottom now I've already set up this six Bay one with two two and a half gig ethernet links to our qnap one over here our qnap switch and then the other thing I just want to point out is that this unit has crucial P3 plus one terabyte ssc's now these are not great ssds by any means but I feel like it's a pretty good low end configuration for a system like this and frankly like the larger ssds don't really take that that much power more than a one terabyte drive so I just kind of figured you know let's use this as a baseline one big difference between these is actually just their power supply so you're going to see that these power supplies are a little bit different they're both from Delta this is a 65 watt power supply for the six m.2 ssd1 and then we have a 90 watt power supply for the 12. and when it's running like this in its normal operation mode this one is only at about 34 and a half DBA so only about a half deep be a higher than our just noise floor in the studio with all the lights and stuff and if you have it like on the other side of your office or something like that you're just never going to hear it now in terms of power consumption you can see here that we're just in about 18 Watts at idle with two two and a half gig ethernet links you know ready to go so now we're going to do is we're going to use SMG SMD multi-channel I'm going to use both links to go to this over here which is the HP Elite mini 600 G9 that we reviewed you can see that's part of our tiny mini micro series it's awesome and that has a 10 gig nickname and what you're going to see is uh just the power consumption doing that transfer and we have the crucial P3 plus SSD setup as raid 5. okay so it's now in the middle of the copy right now and power consumption has definitely gone up a pretty significant amount I mean we're at 22 or so Watts there's probably a bit more that this could go beyond that but I think that that's a very reasonable range and the fan I can tell you is not spinning up at all just doing this okay now the 10 gig one is booting and so we have plugged in our 90 watt power brick to our power meter and you're gonna see a couple things like first off you know we're already in that 23 to 30 something watt range so that's one and then the second one that I think is really interesting is that this is actually picking about 36 DBA whoa that beep was uh that means that the system is now booted and ready to go okay so now we're at idle with 12 4 terabyte crucial P3 plus ssds and uh and you know we also have the 10 gig link you can see is active and it's linked up to our qnap switch this unit is also about the same where we're getting about half a DBA over the noise floor maybe about one DBA so it might be a slightly louder but it's really pretty darn close and then on the power consumption side you're gonna see that we're a little bit higher as well we're now in the like 25 ish watt range so it's definitely a lot higher than we saw with the six Bay unit I mean it's like twice the idle power consumption but maybe that makes sense because we have twice the number of drives twice the amount of networking okay we've now started a transfer and what you'll see is that we are at about 800 megabytes a second or so and we're in that maybe about 43 to maybe 50-ish watt range which is a lot more actually so I guess that's something that we probably should have expected that if you have twice the number of ssds plus twice the you know networking bandwidth that maybe you're power consumption is about 2x I wouldn't have guessed that that exactly just because I think that you have the CPU always that's the same plus you have like RAM and so those two things you would think would be the same plus you have pcie switches in here so maybe maybe it works I guess anyway let's get to key Lessons Learned okay with all of these reviews I love to have key Lessons Learned and there were a lot of things learned I've already kind of talked about a couple of them like using smb3 multi-channel and like enabling support on this one that's a good lesson learned but I want to talk about the Journey of uh of just playing with these things right because these are not just you know getting bought and put into you know service right away we're playing with these and seeing like what can we do with them so the first thing I want to talk about is the ram upgrade these systems come with only four gigabytes of memory even on the six Drive model I think that four is just a little bit too little so we did upgrade these and just the ones that we used are the crucial I don't know why we use all crucialness I have no idea uh they're not sponsoring this video maybe they should have crucial if you do want to let me know but this is a 16 gigabyte kit and in the 16 gigabyte kit we get two eight gigabyte Esso dims and these worked fine in both systems we'll leave a link to these in the description but we actually had to go order those eight gig dims because we just don't use AK dims anymore we don't even use 16 we only use 32 and we put them in our tiny mini micro nodes and a lot of the Mini he sees all that kind of stuff and so we just didn't have him around well we did have around however was we did have two 32 gig dims we said hey well why don't we just go put 232 gig dims in there and see if it works and it booted up fine and then while we were doing our footage just file test uh it crashed and we had it crash on both the six Drive Unit as well as the 12 Drive Unit we tried three different brands of Esso dims and we got the same thing where all of them all the 32 gig or dual 32 gig configurations all of them crashed I would not recommend that to anyone just stop at like 16 gigs that has been working fine for us but that's also why I wish that these came with an 8 gig sodim because that way you could just for 17 18 bucks double the ram capacity have 16 gigabytes of RAM and go do some fun things in here Asus store does have a pretty nice web UI on here and you can do things like add not just apps from their App Store but you can also do things like have Docker containers and go run things there okay and for our final Qs doesn't learn let's talk about the pricing and the journey of how we started out with a six terabyte Nas and ended up with a 48 terabyte one so the first one I I purchased this because I thought like it would be cool to have an m.2 Nas Where like you're using much more reliable media than hard drives and you know it hopefully is low power and so the idea with this was you know we got the this unit which is 449 and then with the P3 pluses being about 50 bucks each that was about 300 of drives for about 750 total so then I realized what the biggest limitation of this one to me was was I just wanted more SSD capacity right and using one terabyte ssds was cheap but it wasn't necessarily efficient because it was 125 dollars per terabyte to connect it to two two and a half gig ethernet Nicks so that is why we ended up getting this one which had 12 drives at about 200 say 225 dollars pops that's about twenty seven hundred dollars the 10 gig ethernet s is more expensive it's about 750 and that brings the total cost of of the system at about 3 450 dollars excluding the extra 35 memory cost but because we're using using larger drives not only our Network performance by having that 10 gig Nic versus two two and a halfs but we also managed to lower our cost per terabyte because now this thing is only at about 71.72 dollars per terabyte to put it on the network and not only that because these things use such little power we can battery power these things if we go and travel and need a Nas so overall do I think these things are great absolutely not one thing I do wish though is that these things were a little bit smaller having these angles may look cool but we did use it for like a travel Studio or editing or something like that it would be handy if it was smaller to put it into a Pelican case especially since m.2 ssds will probably fare a lot better in travel than hard drives hey guys I hope you like this look at these crazy Asus store flash store units they are definitely uh definitely interesting I think a lot of folks are gonna have the same reaction that I had and say like hey I would have architected these things differently or I want to see them architected differently I totally get it but on the other hand if you just look at it like hey what do you need to go fill a 10 gig link or a two and a half gig link and then how much capacity do you want I think these things actually make more sense than when I first saw the spec sheet and guys I hope you like this video if you did like this video why don't you check out some of our other videos and you can always give this video a like click subscribe and turn on those notifications so you can see whenever we come out with great new videos as always thanks for watching have an awesome day

Channel: ServeTheHome

Views: 279,716

Keywords: servethehome, serve the home, asustor, flashstor, m.2 ssd, m.2 nas, m.2 ssd nas, 10gbe nas, 2.5gbe, 2.5gbe nas, crucial, crucial p3 plus, fs6706t, fs6712x, asus, asustor flashstor, flash nas, ssd nas, qnap, qnap switch

Id: Oy71_f7LOUI

Length: 19min 42sec (1182 seconds)

Published: Fri May 19 2023