Asustor AS6202T
VERY EXPENSIVE, BUT ALSO POWERFUL AND CAPABLE.
ALTHOUGH THE PRICE has come down in recent months, the hefty price tag of the AS6202T is still by far its biggest problem. It’s substantially more expensive than most of the competition, and there’s not quite enough here to justify that.
That said, it does pack in a lot of goods. It has among the fastest processors you’ll find in a two-bay, as well as 4GB of memory to drive it. It has a total of five USB ports (two 2.0, three 3.0), as well as two eSATA ports for expansion bays. Like the QNAP TS-251A, it also comes with an HDMI port, as well as Kodi in the app library, so this can function very well as a media player, as well as a server. Unlike the QNAP, it doesn’t come with a remote, however.
Asustor’s firmware is very much in the mode of QNAP and Synology’s firmware, with a full windowing interface and a large suite of Linux apps available in the App Center. Its suite of first-party tools is perhaps not as comprehensive as those, but it still covers all the things that most people will ever need: cloud backup, surveillance (with four camera licences), caching, IP telephony, live streaming and much more. Like Synology and QNAP, it supports Docker and virtualisation, so pretty much any Linux app will run on it.
It is, without a doubt, an impressive NAS. It’s easy enough to use, and installing drives is straightforward (you will need a screwdriver, though). The mobile apps are solid, and the performance is excellent. Unfortunately, the Asustor costs just too much to make it really competitive.