Asustor took advantage of its participation at CES 2018 to introduce the NAS AS4000 series. This one will have two SKUs, the AS4002T and the AS4004T. Although there are many 2- and 4-bay NAS devices on the market to choose from, this series stands out for one unique feature. These are the first ARM CPU units to be equipped with a 10GBASE-T interface, which practically marks the appearance of 10Gigabit in home equipment.
There are ARM CPU-based NAS devices with 10G ports (usually SFP+ connectors) already on the market at various price points. Almost all of them are based on SoCs from Annapurna Labs. The current batch of SoCs from Annapurna Labs uses the Cortex A15 ARMv7 CPU. 10GBASE-T has typically been limited to high-end x86 devices. The Asustor AS4000 series changes that. It uses the Marvell ARMADA 7020 dual-core Cortex A72 processor (88F7020). This makes the Asustor AS4000 series one of the first ARMv8-based consumer home/SOHO NAS devices on the market.
Asustor has a new industrial design for the AS4000 series, with screwless installation for hard drives and hot-swapping support. The front panel has also been redesigned to prevent dust from entering. The units feature 2GB of DDR4-2400 memory and there are 2 extra 1Gbps ports in addition to the 10GBASE-T port. On the software side, Asustor continues to improve the features of its operating system – Asusor Data Manager (ADM). ADM 3.1 is still in beta but it has support for SSD encryption, RAID and several other new features.
The AS4000 series is set to be released in the next quarter. Pricing has not been announced yet, but it is likely to range between $250-$300 for the AS4002T and $400-$445 for the AS4004T. 10GBASE-T NAS at these prices are almost certain to increase the adoption of 10G Ethernet in the home.
