Asustor Flashstor NVMe SSD NAS Drive Review – Should You Buy?

Alongside the hardware, when you purchase the Flashstor 6 or Flashstor 12 Pro, it’s also worth remembering that this includes a full NAS operating system, Asustor ADM. This software allows you to completely manage the system with its own dedicated graphical user interface that can be accessed via a web browser locally or remotely over the internet with the right setup. There are also numerous mobile client applications and even desktop applications to create better-tailored interaction and file transmission with the device, depending on the chosen file types. The GUI of this software is comparable to that of an Android, tablet, or even Windows desktop, with options to add further first and third-party applications via the app center. Alongside this, the GUI allows you to configure your main storage configurations, configure and access shared folders, manage a multitude of different applications and also allows you to create hundreds of users with their own bespoke access and tailored levels of secure access.

Finally, there are the little things such as support of BTRFS for the chosen file system, the wide compatibility of a number of third-party software and hardware services that can be integrated and managed by the software, and finally, there is a wide variety of first-party apps and services available. Asustor provides their very own surveillance platform that allows you to monitor numerous compatible IP cameras, several multimedia applications for photos, videos, and audio, and multi-layered backup and synchronization tools for managing data between you and your NAS, as well as NAS to NAS and NAS to Cloud backups. The software may not be quite as evolved and polished as the likes of Synology DSM, but it is certainly a good platform to get your teeth into and given the system already arrives at quite a fantastically well-placed price point for hardware, this software might well be a fantastic bonus too. Lastly, lest we forget as shown on our YouTube channel, if you wish to, you can install popular third-party software such as TrueNAS, unRAID, and Open Media Vault on this system if you wish. That does somewhat invalidate your warranty, but it does mean that you can install these fantastic open-source or low-cost NAS OSs to take advantage of the fantastic storage media inside the Flashstor 6 or Flashstor 12 Pro.

I cannot stress enough how impressed I am that the Flashstor 6 and Flashstor 12 Pro are priced at $499 and $860, respectively, given the level of hardware on offer here. These are by no means enterprise-grade NAS server solutions, nor should they be thought of as such. However, given the cost of typical fully featured 4x HDD solutions from their competitors and the brand themselves, which often start at $550 and above, it is quite remarkable that the six M.2 SSD system with comparable internal hardware comes in at $499. As long as a user keeps their expectations in line with what this cost versus its capabilities, it’s really tough to argue with the price point that these two devices have arrived at on the market.

The CPU inside both the Flashstor 6 and Flashstor 12 Pro NAS systems is something of a contentious point. Now, we have to bear in mind that this system needs to maintain a certain price point, as it is chiefly designed to allow home and prosumer users to access a full M.2 flash NAS system affordably. Equally, the CPU inside this system, the Intel Celeron N5105, has already been featured on numerous other devices by both this brand and others. So the brand already has a decent amount of experience as to what they can achieve with it on a hardware or software level. However, this CPU also means that the range of PCI slots that the hardware configuration has access to for its supported ports, connections, and storage interfaces has a glass ceiling. Now, I appreciate that they want to remain within a certain price point, however, there are other processors on the market in the form of Pentiums or AMDs that would open the door to more lanes being used. This would mean higher performing storage and better potential for connectivity. Again, that may have raised the price a fraction at retail to accommodate a more expensive CPU, but as this device’s price point is already noticeably below most of its competitors, I think perhaps the brand could have decided to up the choice of processor a few notches and increase the price by $100 or so.

One of the earliest consequences of this choice of CPU, as mentioned above, is that each of the PCIe Gen. 3 slots that are occupied by an M.2 NVMe, are capped at Gen. 3 x 1. This is a shame because the majority of Gen 3 M.2 SSDs on the market are PCIe Gen 3 x 4. This ultimately results in each of these bays having an approximate 1000 megabytes per second bottleneck compared with a regular Gen 3 x 4 deployment, which would allow bandwidth of up to 4000 megabytes per second. Once again, this is the result of that CPU choice having fewer lanes to play with, but also this in turn means that the potential internal performance of these SSDs will likely cap at around 3000 to 4000 megabytes per second. Even with all the SSDs in an appropriate RAID.

This is still a phenomenal amount of internal performance and for those running complex virtual machines or databases from the system, these benefits are still going to massively outweigh the performance of traditional hard drives. Nevertheless, there are going to be some users who may not realize that SSDs installed inside either the Flashstor 12 Pro or Flashstor 6 are going to have this bottleneck in place. So do not assume that installing 6x WD Black SSDs rated at 3000MB/s each in a RAID is going to result in tens of thousands of megabytes per second performance.

Another victim of the choice of this CPU and trying to remain within an affordable price point is that the network connectivity of both the Flashstor 6 and Flashstor 12 Pro is something of a mixed bag. In the case of the six-bay device, the system arrives with two 2.5 gigabit Ethernet ports. These can be aggregated in a number of different ways to achieve 5Gbps, and there is even support for USB to network adapters that can be used to increase this further still. However, that is still a tremendous difference in external throughput compared to what the SSDs are capable of inside the system, even with this modest CPU.

In the case of the 12-bay device, the system arrives with a single 10Gbps copper connection and support for USB network adapters too. This still leads to something of a bottleneck when you consider what 12 M.2 NVMe SSDs, even capped at Gen 3 x 1, are able to achieve. Again, I appreciate that the CPU choice here and its impact on the rest of the components has been made to keep the system at an affordable price point and to allow lower-tier users to access flash storage when the bulk of flash systems on the market right now are squarely aimed at enterprise users. But users need to be aware that the throughput of the storage media inside this device is subject to a little bit of compromise in order to remain affordable.

Though not directly connected to either the Flashstor 6 or Flashstor 12 Pro device, it is worth highlighting that this brand was one of several targeted in 2022 by the ransomware group, DeadBolt. This ransomware attack resulted in numerous users finding their systems encrypted via a remote access attack that resulted in them either having to accept the loss of all their data or pay a ransom to the attackers in order to retrieve their data. Now, we could spend days, weeks, and months discussing who is liable for a user’s backups, managing regular system updates effectively, and who is responsible when a system is rendered insecure at the point of the ports!

However, there is no avoiding that Asustor definitely needs to take their share of the blame. Since the ransomware attack, they have significantly changed a number of system defaults in their inclusive software, altered a lot of the system setup choices, and numerous network protocols within the software have been changed to ensure that they cannot be rendered insecure to the same extent by the end user without significant manual override. Nevertheless, there will always be users who will be suspicious of products from this brand, at least for the next few years until they are able to shed the stigma of being successfully targeted by ransomware. It’s worth highlighting that they did manage the ransomware attack significantly better than rival QNAP. But then again, the scale of both of these companies and the sheer number of products they have deployed is also widely different too.