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With respect to the Flashstor, use of the word silent is merely adjectival funny business, or perhaps fanny business. What I mean is this. A useful practical description of an object ought to align itself with the uniformly objective convergence of common experience and yield to independent measurement and verification. Thus, silent is probably a non-starter as there is a ball bearing attached. Unless that fan is off, that is, or running on mag-lev oil bearings below the bar of a gentle draught, which User Account Control – Supporting over 4,000 accounts, each with its own bespoke privileges and access levels, as well as grouping methods to automate the process easily The Asustor FS6712X Flashstor 12 Pro NAS offers a range of ports and connections, both typical and unique to NAS devices. At the rear of the unit, you’ll find the standard power and USB ports that are commonly found on NAS units. However, the FS6712X goes beyond the ordinary by providing additional ports typically associated with desktop computers. These include an HDMI port and an S/PDIF port, catering to users who seek media distribution and high-quality digital audio output. I want to live with my NAS, not to have to listen to it when I require to hear a pin drop. A little more commitment to acoustic performance could easily have resulted in a silent Flashstor. Misanthropic marketing motivated by the boundless wonder of public imagination supposes why produce something good and well-engineered straight off the bat when you can sell it again, and again, and again. To the tune of a waltz.
Currently, we are working on a dedicated video benchmarking the Asustor Flashstor 6 and Flashstor 12 Pro with range of different RAID configurations and SSDs (as well as temperature testing). However, between RAID builds and sourcing the M.2 SSD media, this is taking longer than expected. These dedicated performance/system running tests should be live in the next week or so, but in the meantime below are a few early results from initial performance testing with a RAID 5 of half the available bays. We were hitting 1674MB/s (333291 4K Random IO/s) seq Read and 885MB/s (176919 4K Random IO/s) Seq Write. However, this was with small cap Gen3 drives that were not on the compatibility list of the system (that doesn’t;t mean they are not usable, just that Asustor had not verified them yet and there are literally hundreds of thousands of different SSDs in the market). We will be running tests with more established SSDs soon. Once it reboots, it should boot into Ubuntu (or whatever Linux distro you had installed) instead of the built-in ADM OS.Asustor's new all M.2 RAID NAS units are in short, where things should start going as SSD and M.2 drive prices have made them accessible to most of the public. Seems a bit of a wasted opportunity to use high speed NVMe drives, limit them to 1 GB/sec each (PCIe 3.0 x1) and then further limit them to 0.5 GB/sec total, through a couple of slow 2.5 Gb Ethernet ports. I would understand if there was such a thing as large, slow NVMe drives for bulk storage but at this point everyone still seems to be focusing on small high speed drives.
The Flashstor 12 Pro has a much greater potential capacity by a factor of three. Alternatively, the Flashstor 6 is cheaper than the TBS-464 and has the potential for more capacity. Although, QNAP does include 8GB of RAM by default. Highly desirable, a silent domestic NAS device is a simple and clear objective concept. A design goal. Not a missed target. Not an Asustor. Not even a Flashstor. Not yet, anyway. To this day, the only silent NAS is a NONAS.However, while the price seems reasonable, the unit itself is surprisingly cheap and all plastic for the most part. Plastic has advantages in some instances but something of this sort might have been better served with some parts being metal. Perhaps one of the most annoying yet trivial facets is the series of screws that must be removed to access RAM and drive areas of the internal board. Having to go through a few phillips screwdrivers to find one that would fit and do the job was well, annoying. I never ran into this with other NAS units or similar Flipping the unit over, two screws can be undone and give one access to the top of the chassis with the SODIMM memory and the other six M.2 slots. One can see that we have 4GB of memory installed as standard. Asustor FS6712X SODIMM Side Motherboard Unpopulated This will take a few minutes, but once it's complete, consider storing that ADM .img file somewhere safe so you can re-image the eMMC if you ever need to. Optional, but recommended - Disable eMMC One of the big challenges with 12x M.2 NVMe SSDs is that the drives each need to connect to the system via at least a PCIe x1 link. With 12 drives, plus 2-4 PCIe lanes usually reserved for the 10Gbase-T NIC, that is a lot to ask of the Intel N5105 with only 8 PCIe lanes total. Asustor is using ASMedia ASM2806 PCIe switches and ASM1480 PCIe mux devices to help tame the PCIe needs in this system. The ASM2806 switches were not present on the FS6706T version since it only had six drives. Asustor FS6712X NAS ASMedia Switch Chips I simply couldn’t justify the jump in price between the FS6 to FS12 for an extra 6 drive slots and the 10Gb LAN.
The hardware is also powerful enough to run a seperate virtual PC using VirtualBox. This allows me to have a Windows 10 computer running all the time the NAS is on if I want, which is handy if I need to leave software such as Zimmwriter running. I really like the choice of a 10Gbit network port and choice for HDMI. M.2 would be awesome if the PCIe lanes were there to support it. We really wanted to make this quiet. Otherwise it defeats one of the purposes of an SSD NAS.” ASUSTOR TV on Flashstor thermal design. If you want to install more than six or upgrade the RAM, a further three screws allow the topside of the FS6712X to be removed.We really wanted to make this quiet.” Really. If by quiet you mean to some extent noisy, you succeeded. You didn’t. You did otherwise. Strange, but true. In doing so, as vouchsafed, you defeated one of the purposes of an SSD NAS. The distinguishing purpose presumably being to follow through silent (not quiet) solid state disks with a silent (not quiet) solid state chassis. You know. Silent storage. Instead of quiet (to some extent noisy) storage. I'm still trying to convince them to add it to ADM alongside EXT4 and Btrfs support, but until that time, the 2nd best option is to just run another OS on the NAS! This is now permitted, but you won't get technical support from ASUSTOR for other OSes. The sole USB 3 port on the front of the box is an interesting choice. The USB is mostly for external storage. During testing, we tried hooking up an external USB 3 2.5GbE NIC to the port, but Asustor’s management software would not give us another interface. Asustor FS6712X NAS Front Next, let us get inside the system to see what kind of magic Asustor used to get this all working, and it involves a lot of Asmedia. Asustor Flashstor FS6712X NVMe NAS Internal Hardware Overview
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