Asustor 5404T Review
I was excited to get my hands on the Asustor 5404T, as it heralded a new way of doing NAS hardware: combining both 4 HDD and 4 SSD drives (M.2 to be specific). This creates so many new options for setup, implementation, and use case of a NAS. And all of this on a consumer / prosumer level product was quite a surprise. I had been expecting this to come along in much more expensive drives before coming down to this level. But it’s not without compromises, and not without difficulties - at least for me, as a reviewer. Remember how I said it opened up new options for setup?
There was my first problem.
Reformatting/reconfiguring a NAS has never been a fast or simple process. Due to the need to pair and sync drives for redundancy, every time I wanted to test a new config required many hours (10-20) of rebuilding the system. Thankfully you don’t need to babysit it for that process, but it resulted in it being impossible to get this done very quickly, and the review took MUCH longer than I had expected.
BUT, with all that work, I managed to figure out the best config for live editing of 4K footage over the network from a Mac.
I received a lot of advice from many different people, many professionals in their field, and interestingly enough a lot of it didn’t end up working out as expected. Let’s go over what we found worked for the best config in three stages: hardware, software, and networking.
the hardware setup:
The first way in which NAS’s tended to use SSD’s or NVMe SSD’s to be specific is for HDD caching - speeding up ingest and/or read of common files to the slower HDD’s, and facilitating faster Read/Write processes. On an Asustor NAS, unfortunately SSD cache drives have to be installed as Only read OR write. So if you want both, you need to occupy two SSD’s. Thankfully there is little need to make these large volumes with the other choices we’re going to make. I’m using 1TB units, but 512GB would be just fine as well. The vast majority of users won’t be transferring more than a half terabyte at any given time.
Although the one of the purposes of SSD caching is for fast/hot file use, I found there were often hiccoughs with this when trying to do some intense 4K editing in Final Cut. Even when using 2x4TB drives with ample time to ‘spool up’ a cache of the project at hand.
In the future I might even eliminate the SSD cache altogether, since I’m only using the HDD RAID volume for cold / long term storage, little to no random access, with transfer times not being terribly important. That would allow me to expand the next part of our hardware setup: the SSD only volume for hot storage and live 4K editing.
Peaking internal NVMe usage
Max network transfer speeds
Here we’re using two 4TB NVMe SSD’s (I’d like to experiment to see if this supports 8TB volumes, but that’s still a bit out of my price range at the moment anyway). These are paired in a RAID1 configuration for safety/redundancy. Were I to eliminate the SSD cache, I would likely use 4x 4TB drives in RAID5 config for greater redundancy and more efficient use of space.
As a side note, these drives are ‘only’ Crucial P3’s. They’re cheap and reliable. We don’t need some super high speed / high spec’d drives, as the NAS itself is a relatively low powered device, and the NVMe bandwidth has some sharing going on, so it simply wouldn’t be possible to leverage any more speed from them anyway. No need to overspend here! Our transfer speeds tend to max out around 480MB/s due to our network limitations, so the 3500MB/s theoretical max of the Crucial drives is More than enough. Internal drive use for RAID parity and file management seems to max out around 700MB/s (which is a speed well beyond anything sustainable on a conventional HDD).
Speaking of conventional HDD’s, I put 2 12TB Seagate Ironwolf drives in it (leaving two slots empty for expansion later on down the line). I found these to be the ‘best bang for your buck’ when it came to size and price. This is always going to be a moving target, though. These are also paired in a RAID1 config for redundancy. As a side note, I’ll have links for all this stuff at the end of this article. Can you just use ‘normal’ hard drives, not NAS specific drives, and save a buck? Well, yeah, you Could, but I wouldn’t advise it. I’m personally using this for professional projects, and whatever will yield me lowest possible likelihood of failure and data loss is what I’m going to do. NAS specific drives are hardened against continual vibrations of the drives adjacent to them, (the Pro versions hardened against having a LOT of other drives adjacent, which isn’t happening here), and have an overall higher duty cycle.
Another great thing about using a Seagate NAS drive in an Asustor is you can install the Ironwolf software from the Asustor App Store, for even greater monitoring and health support of these drives. Great synergy going on there.
The last part of the internal hardware we’re looking at is the RAM. It comes with 4GB preinstalled, which Sounds like a very small amount, but ultimately is enough for the vast majority of users. Although I’m ‘pushing’ my NAS pretty hard with my editing use case, what I’m pushing is the data throughput, and RAM and processor don’t seem to be in Any way a bottleneck. The quad core processor here is not even remotely taxed when I’m pushing things as hard as I can. the 2x 2.5Gb network connection coming out of this NAS is ultimately the largest bottleneck, unfortunately.
I did, however, install 16GB of RAM just to see if there was any difference, and there wasn’t. All this does is create a larger amount of RAM cache, something of rather debatable utility when there’s already SSD based hot storage, SSD cache on the HDD, and a network bottleneck in place. Most of the time my unit is sitting under 2GB of RAM usage. The OS is Very light and runs quite clean. But that’s just for My use case. This NAS is capable of running a Lot of other services, cloud hosting and media server functions, and in Those cases the RAM and CPU speeds will actually come into play.
One of the most important (and tricky!) notes regarding the hardware setup is that if you want to have the OS installed on your SSD volume, to speed up responsiveness of the system just a little, and not have to wake up the HDD’s unnecessarily, you have to install your SSD volume specific NVMe drives First, with no other drives in the NAS, set it all up, THEN shut down and install your HDD’s and SSD cache SSD’s. Otherwise the machine will Always default to installing the OS on the HDD volume, which is perplexing and annoying.
The software setup:
Moving on to the software side of things, the Linux based Asustor operating system, Asustor Data Master, or ADM for short, is Reasonably intuitive, if not the most full featured NAS OS on the market. It’s also a much newer system than ones from Synology and QNAP, so that’s understandable. My original intention was to set up the system as BTRFS, as that is the most data-safe NAS file system possible here, but I was having what turned out to be unrelated issues, and my final install ended up being EXT4, which is the default file system. I won’t get into all the differences, but EXT4 tends to be a Little bit faster, but is a Much older file system that lacks some modern bells and whistles that BTRFS incorporates.
As previously mentioned we’re looking at a RAID1 separately on both the SSD volume and the HDD volumes, and once more HDD’s are installed in the future, I’ll be switching to RAID5 (which requires more drives). For additional redundancy, I actually have the contents of the SSD RAID volume set to automatically back up to the HDD RAID volume every night. So not only do I have individual drive redundancy, I also have entire volume redundancy.
When it comes to file system services, in the past one would use AFP for accessing a NAS from a Mac, but support for that has been deprecated by Apple, and it is now recommended by Apple themselves to use SMB Multichannel instead. Many would say this protocol is unstable or unreliable, but the kinks seem to have been worked out at this point, as I’ve had no issues whatsoever with it. I have had other issues, for certain, but those will come up in the networking section.
Many recommend NFS for greater compatibility (with windows specifically), and ease of use. But after extensive testing I found that enabling any of these other modes, or enabling them concurrently only reduced overall performance, or introduced little bits of instability. SMB Multichannel all the way here.
Moving Towards networking setup, but on the software side, there are several ways of bridging / trunking / aggregating the two network ports together, but I found that using Round-Robin to be the best balance of speed and reliability.
The network setup:
While everything else we covered seemed rather procedural, that’s because we ended up with some very straightforward solutions - at least after a great deal of testing. The networking side of things is where we encountered some trouble that needed a lot of troubleshooting. Unfortunately the biggest limitation and bottleneck on this NAS is the dual 2.5Gb network ports. Although it’s possible to use link aggregation to ‘combine’ the throughput of both ports, this is a protocol mostly designed for multi-user connections, not for high bandwidth to One user. The addition or option of a 10Gb port would Tremendously increase the capabilities of this NAS. Unfortunately 10Gb networking hardware is still rather expensive, and would have increased the price of the device. But I think that would be well justified, given how powerful the rest of it can be.
After testing Many different configurations, I was having occasional file corruptions and transfer failures. Not often enough to be easily identified as one thing or another, but it didn’t seem to matter what I did or changed. Then I replaced the two cat5 cables that came in the box for some cat6a cables, and nearly all my problems went away. While cat5 is perfectly capable of handling a 2.5Gb connection over short distances, my NAS was plugged into a cat6a network jack, and Then into the switch, resulting in two ever so slightly sketchy 2.5Gb connections. Now that the review time is over, the NAS is sitting next to the switch in my networking closet, with no extra jacks or plugs between them. Any additional connection points that can be removed are best removed to reduce points of failure.
Speaking of the switch, I started out with an unmanaged 2.5G/10G switch, a cheap unit ordered from Aliexpress. I initially thought that the cause of my networking issues was this switch, as it’s unmanaged and not capable of static link aggregation / port trunking. So I bought a New switch and set it up to trunk the two 2.5Gb connections together and this made no difference at all (after that I discovered my cat5 ethernet issues). So now I’m back to using the cheaper unmanaged switch and it’s working Great.
On my computer end, I connect any of three different ways, depending on the use case. At my desk I have a 2m Thunderbolt 4 cable running from my computer through the wall and into my networking closet (again, eliminating failure points, and moving clutter to other places). This was a surprisingly cheap cable, again from Aliexpress, plugged into the OWC Thunderbolt 3 10Gb ethernet adapter. I figured using a long and cheap Thunderbolt 4 cable should be pretty safe, given that it only has to work to TB3 specs. Then that adapter is plugged into the 2.5G/10G switch on the one 10Gb SFP+ switch port. With this connection I can edit in Final Cut Pro X with very nearly the same speed as I would normally on a T7 external SSD, which used to be my usual setup. Multicam 4K work is no problem at all, even when the viewer is set to High Quality.
My second setup is in the living room on the other side of the house, where I ran a cat8 cable. This was totally overkill, but I went with cat8 because I wanted to future proof the connection for the day when 10Gb network adapters come down in price, or even when 40Gb Thunderbolt 4 adapters become available. Yeah, I’m completely out of my mind, but I digress. This is plugged into another one of the 2.5Gb ports on the switch, and on my end I’m using a very cheap Anker 2.5Gb USB C network adapter into my computer. If I turn off the Multicam viewer in FCPX, I can edit as normal. Once I enable that pane, though, things can lag and get a little dicey. I regularly saturate the whole 2.5Gb / 300MB/s connection when working like this. But it works, and works Very well.
Now, I’m not just lazy in wanting to edit from the recliner in the living room, but my studio/office is Very cold in the winter, and it’s just so much easier to edit in the warm and sunny living room on colder days. It’s also nice to have other options for locations. I intend to one day hire a video editor, and having more connection locations will be advantageous when that day comes - they can have my office, and I’ll take the living room ;)
The third way I connect to it is simply through wifi. I have a wifi6 router, not even 6a or 7, which allows for decent throughput. Editing video or photos over this connection is Possible, but not really advisable. There are random lags and drops, even when in direct line of sight. What it Is perfectly great for is basic file transfers and backups. Also checking on what is saved where, the status of projects and backups and general NAS maintenance works great over this connection. I’m looking forward to wifi 7 bringing much greater link reliability and throughput to our wireless connections, and would love to see what will be possible for remote editing work at that point.
Conclusion:
And there you have it, the Asustor 5404T or Nimbustor 4 Gen 2. A NAS with a shocking amount of power and configurability, which is seriously held back by its 2.5Gb network connections. Even so, this NAS is easily the best bang for your buck for a consumer or prosumer, and also outperforms a Lot of far more expensive enterprise-grade options.
If you want to pick up or check out any of the stuff mentioned above, feel free to use my links, to help support this channel, and feed my fat cats:
Asustor 5404T / Nimbustor 4 Gen 2:
Amazon US https://amzn.to/3tvrXHV
Amazon CA https://amzn.to/4azfDHh
Seagate Ironwolf HDD:
Amazon US https://amzn.to/3GXdw2v
Amazon CA https://amzn.to/488QuS2
Crucial P3 M.2 SSD:
Amazon US https://amzn.to/3tq90q5
Amazon CA https://amzn.to/3ve7jMS
Crucial RAM:
Amazon US https://amzn.to/3TYzf1N
Amazon CA https://amzn.to/3vhvSst
Cheap Cat6a Ethernet Cables:
Amazon US https://amzn.to/3tFAlo3
Amazon CA https://amzn.to/3NJUyAd
2.5G / 10G Switch:
Amazon US https://amzn.to/3RHDNXz
Amazon CA https://amzn.to/3RAO33L
2.5G Ethernet USB adapter
Amazon US https://amzn.to/4853SXn
Amazon CA https://amzn.to/47dlD5v
10G Ethernet Thunderbolt adapter
Amazon US https://amzn.to/3NNQejd
Amazon CA https://amzn.to/3RYyjZF
Thanks for stopping by. Now go take some photos!
