This review first appeared in issue 358 of PC Pro.
As its name suggests, the Flashstor 6 is an all-flash NAS enclosure, with space for up to six NVMe SSDs. It’s aimed mostly at enthusiast use in the home, so comes with useful multimedia features such as HDMI and S/PDIF audio outputs. It’s well specified elsewhere, too, with a pair of 2.5GbE network ports, two USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 ports and two USB-A 2 ports. The supplied 4GB of memory is upgradable to 16GB.
It doesn’t have any hard disk slots, but you could add bulk storage with up to two Asustor AS6004U expansion units, each accepting up to four 3.5in SATA drives. If six SSDs isn’t enough, for £744 inc VAT (from Amazon) you could choose the 12-slot Flashstor 12, which is otherwise broadly the same.
Most NAS enclosures offer tool-free setup, but you’ll need a screwdriver to pop off the cover here, while each NVMe just clips in. The FS6706T supports the same range of RAID formats you’d expect from any six-bay device, though we tested it using two 1TB WD Black SSDs, arranged in a RAID1 array. Asustor’s ADM software defaults to the EXT4 file system, but you can choose Btrfs.
It will come as no surprise that the FS6706T performed strongly. We tested it with a single 2.5GbE connection, over which it comfortably outpaced any NAS limited by a 1GbE connection. That said, it didn’t eclipse disk-based 2.5GbE devices, with Asustor’s own Nimbustor 4 Gen2 proving slightly quicker. As with the Nimbustor 4, this NAS was inexplicably slow on the PCMark 10 Data Drive benchmark, but made up for it with quick real-world copy times in Windows 11. It’s worth pointing out that this device might have been even faster if we’d been able to test it with a six-drive RAID5 array.
While you could use this NAS as the hub for a small business, it’s far more likely to see use as a multimedia store and server for demanding home users and gamers. It’s well suited to this role, with Asustor’s App Central offering an amazing 273 apps, spanning everything including content, download and media management, along with productivity, surveillance and streaming.
This NAS has the horsepower to transcode video content without getting bogged down, so it’s even suitable for a household with a few power users. However, its lack of disk support makes it less flexible than the Nimbustor 4 Gen2, which accepts up to four disks and four NVMe SSDs, and proved just as fast in our tests. In most cases, we’d pay the extra £80 for that.
We also rated the best software for small businesses.
Read the full article here
