AMD NASes give us everything we ever wanted
two new AMD powered nases are here and they're giving us features we've been asking for for years but do they cost too much that's the question I set out to answer in this video a Nas is a network attached storage server traditionally you stick some hard drives in one of these boxes and just store a bunch of data but nowadays you can use one of these to self-host anything like with nexcloud you could have your own personal Dropbox or Plex or jelly fin lets you self-host all your movies TV shows and music so you can break free from greedy streaming Services running all this extra stuff and even just storing your files requires more Hardware performance and features than ever like now in addition to hard drives you might add multiple ssds for caching so the machines inside these boxes each offer a unique twist traditionally outside of high-end or DIY builds you couldn't get things like upgradeable motherboards and CPUs or you couldn't get reliability features like ECC Ram to protect the Integrity of your precious photos and other files there's no such thing as a Goldie Nas but 45 drives and Asus store are both trying new things and I like it the main disclaimer for this video besides the fact both of these systems were provided for review is they're both expensive especially from the perspective of someone who enjoys DIY or buying used the Locker store 6 gen 3 costs $1,500 in the hl4 the fully built and burned in option I have here costs $1200 and we're not quite comparing Apples to Apples the hl4 is a 4B Nas for up to four hard drives and the Locker store 6 is well six both companies sell other versions too but I wanted to cover these two models because for the narrow part of the market willing to drop a th000 plus bucks on a premium Nas these two models are pretty compelling to be clear neither company paid anything for this video they sent me these nasas for review but have no control over what I say so take what I say with that in mind but first let's focus on the Asus store I've been running their Gen 2 Locker store for a couple years and it's been a Workhorse let's tear this thing down and see what's new this chassis is pretty much unchanged it looks in fact identical to the one that's in the Gen 2 so I'm not sure exactly what all changed inside so this cover pops off and we should get inside this thing there it goes yeah so there's an 80 plus bronze Flex ATX power supply there's uh a pre-installed Pizza Express card this one has four 1 2 3 4 m.2 slots which is why I have four m.2 nvme ssds some kokia xg8 which kokia has provided it looks like for in terms of user accessible parts that are quick and easy to get to you have the power supply of that card and there's a little flap back here and this little flap allows you to install another sodm these are ddr5 uh 4800 megat transfers sodm and I actually have one here but there's something interesting about this so this is a ddr5 16 GB 4800 MHz sodm but it does not say ECC on it so the ECC sticks of these are a little bit harder to find and they're a little bit more expensive than plain vanilla ones but I could install this in here physically and it would give me more RAM but it would basically disable ECC I generally prefer it but it's not a hard and fast thing for me like the one that I run at home doesn't have it so I I you know debate that in the comments but anyway so that's the ram that's upgradeable and then this is the uh little PCI Express slot which it must be secured somehow because it's not just popping out oh okay so they have little stickers over these little screws that are holding down this card so if I peel these two stickers off you can see that there's two screws that are holding this card down to the board yeah so that comes right out there's a little shield on the back side I guess to cover up some of the ic's back there uh but there is the m.2 expansion card there's no uh it doesn't look like there's a switch on here so it looks like it might just use bifurcation see there's no there's no PCI Express switch chip in here uh but you could put in another card but like I said it's a little bit limited because there's just this tiny aperture back here for ports so a PCI Express card would slot in and you'd have you know if you had four ports the four the third and fourth Port would be over here you wouldn't be able to access them so that's one thing that would be nice if they improved this enclosure so it could take an actual like full half height uh P Express card instead of just these tiny ones and I'm not going to tear it down all the way there's actually other videos that have gone into that so I'm going to plug this back in and I'm going to put four nvme drives onto this card and then we're going to put the four hard drives in one thing I do enjoy about these cards is Asus door has this uh little you know toolless design where you just pull these back and it snaps the the card in then you pull them back to release it and these are xg8 I believe their PCI Express Gen 4 uh nvme drives installation for these you just pull back on that and push and it retains it so I'm going to put four of these in each one of these is 2 terab so you can use them for caching and you could also use it for an actual storage volume so I have 8 tabt of storage installed here and then on the back side here uh this is the the major upgrade at least externally from the Gen 2 that I have this has dual 5 gig ports at the bottom and dual 10 gig ports up here there's two uh super speed ports I think these are USB 3.1 or 3.2 Gen 2 or whatever it is I think these are 10 gig and then there's two USB 4 ports and I am not set up to test these out today but apparently you could use this as a Das as a direct attached storage device like with a Mac using Thunderbolt 4 at least that's what Wendell was testing in his video covering the same generation of of nasas so that's pretty cool and uh makes this box a lot more flexible than uh than it would be otherwise because that gives you 40 gbits uh This is 40 gbits in one port versus 10 gig 10 gig 5 gig 5 gig I'm going to put the cover back on and I think this is one area where they could really improve this box if they had a new enclosure style this is I think three generations now they've used the same enclosure and it's kind of showing its age in terms of you know even even just getting it back together so you got the nvme drives inside and uh there's also I noticed a little ventilation along the top here so you can see that there uh and it looks like for air flow there's there's a little ventilation on the side I guess to bring in some air behind the motherboard some ventilation on the top for those nvme drives in that slot and then there's a giant fan in the back and it pulls a lot of air through all these slits in the drive Bays so should be adequate ventilation um it it would be nice also to have maybe an option for a fan up here if you did put in a card that needed more cooling or if you you know there's no there's no heat sinks on these m.2 drives so they could overheat
if they're Potter Potter running drives I don't know but I'm going to plug in the drives themselves so I have I just have four today I'm not going to plug in all six because four 20 TB hard drives is enough for anybody right but the design that they have is also unchanged for two generations three generations now uh this is not a tooless design so these caddies actually have four screws for each drive and you could just do two screws if you really wanted to some of their other Nas models have tooless Drive trays so I'm not sure why those haven't kind of made their way into this line it would be nice to see those uh because it just is it's one more annoying thing to have to do especially if you get a six or eight or 12 Bay version you're ending up having like tons and tons of screws just to get started there's a quick install guide here which I will be promptly ignoring because I have set one of these up before and it should be pretty quick and uh then there's screws these are for 2.5 in which screw into the bottom uh and then there's 3.5 in which screw in from the sides okay we have four hard drives and I'm going to get these plugged in and uh since I'm setting this up new it doesn't matter which Bay I'm putting any of these into and I just gave myself a little cut First Blood always good on a home lab project okay we got four drives in and I will do the peel for people who want to hear that looks like there's two peels on here so okay this is this is a nice feature uh that Asus store has on their more premium nases they have a little screen and you can actually do setup from here and you can change network settings you can shut it down it's uh it is nice and they also have a little USB port here you can plug in for a oneclick backup they have the power button up here and activity LED so overall I mean like I said it's it's a good enclosure I I just think that with some refinement this thing could make it even nicer more toolless uh that would be a appreciated so maybe in Gen 4 but before I get this booted up the uh the big feature in here is it uses an AMD ryzen embedded V3 c14 which is a lot faster and a lot more capable and has things like ECC Ram support than the Gen 2 and the Gen one of these uh but there is a trick to this it doesn't have an igpu it doesn't it's not an APU so it doesn't have the ability to have like an HDMI port on the back so there's no easy way to install an alternate OS so I actually will refer you out to a hardware Haven video uh he actually does install an alternate OS uh I think he installs tress on here and that seems to be supported it'd be nice if there was an official way that you could do that without having to plug in an external monitor like through through remote access or serial console or something like that but I'm going to plug this in and set it up and show you how quick and easy that is and uh then we'll do some performance testing for later in the video so I plugged it into my power meter and press the power button on the front the first time it boots it takes a few minutes but I think one underrated feature here is that front display using it and the buttons next to it you can actually completely set this thing up without having to do anything in a web UI at all and once it's booted you can grab the IP address here too it just makes setup a lot simpler also I noticed besides the hard drive noise which is going to be different depending on what drives you put in the system is pretty quiet they have a giant fan in the back which seems to do a good job of moving air without making too much noise it's not silent and if you put it next to you on a desk you might go nutty with the hard drive noises but it's a pretty refined box three generations in in terms of power draw it pulls down between 45 to 65 Watts depending on how much you're using it and what drives you're using that's not great and it's not terrible my Gen 2 uses a little less but it also doesn't have 30 GBS of ethernet and 80 gbits of USB 4 bandwidth builtin but the Asus store also has a pretty mature management interface adm5 is their n SOS and it has most features covered you can set up shares extra apps containers and VMS it's pretty manageable though some things like SSH and fully remote configuration outside of the web are more of an afterthought but it is running Linux kernel 6.6 so I'm happy to see them put some effort behind keeping ADM up to date and their UI also makes storage test pretty easy even if it hides away some of the more technical detail I put two ssds into a read write cache for my hard drive volume and I also created a separate raid one volume with the other two ssds just to see how fast they could go Asus store also has their own cloud-based remote access but I skipped that and used my own VPN I'm not going to get into a full review of the Asus store data manager system or anything like that if you want to know more I can't recommend raid Al's video enough but before I get to Performance bench marks and my final thoughts on the Asus store let's switch gears and tear into the 45 drives unit and this unit has a few party tricks the first one the front cover thing has retained screws which is nice Hing is open and you have four Drive Bays this is a completely tooless design which I enjoy quite a bit uh but it has some other party tricks too that we'll get to very soon uh first let me go ahead and install these hard drives and I'll show you how how nice that process is um I just noticed though that it doesn't hinge down quite flush I don't know if that's just you know the the tolerances on my model or what uh but let's see if we can still get these drives in there we go still goes in there if the fan weren't on here this would actually be a little bit easier but we're just testing this out of the box how is the experience right out of the box the drives are certainly in there pretty tight and I'm guessing the fan will just be touching them so that'll kind of provide a little extra rutens there we go they're all four in there and uh that's it so this one is they say it's completely built and burned in that means that it already has an OS on it uh usually when you buy a 45 drives box you might do some some extra setup work but this one is meant to go out of the box with their Houston UI system and the other party trick in here is actually this is toolless as well which is very cool uh this also has retained thumb screws just two on the side here and you'll notice that it just sprung up a little bit this is actually just a mini ITX motherboard inside of a hinge system this is actually a joy to work on the cabling is a little bit concerning uh just because it's all kind of tied up pretty tight and you you have a few a few bends that are a little bit alarming but if you're if you're not rebuilding this thing on a daily basis I don't think that's going to be a problem uh but this model I I have the base model fully built and burned in with an AMD ryzen 5 5500 GT which has an igpu it's it has Radeon Vega 7 graphics and so AMD actually calls this thing an APU not a CPU and so things like GPU accelerated trans coating should work on this support for that on AMD platform is a little bit better in jellyfin and Plex and even if that is not the case there's a full PCI Express slot now you're not going to be able to fit fit a two slot card or something like that in here you could just do one slot but that is very cool and and I did notice that shipping somehow even with the great packing that they had shipping has damaged the corner on here it's a little bit bent one downside to this particular platform the one that they have is it doesn't have ECC support but it does have full-size sticks of ram this is it's basically a PC in a box that's the size of an ass it's it's very cool this design and I just noticed they even have this very very nicely detailed laser etched hl4 logo that's on both sides here uh there's no exhaust fan but there is space for one so it looks like there's space for 120 mil exhaust fan back here they have the thin fan in the front for the drives they have the fan on the CPU Cooler this is a slim CPU Cooler because they don't have a lot of vertical space here and then they have a little fan over here that kind of I guess intakes some air for the motherboard and and whatever card you might have and the top is fully ventilated so that you have air flow uh coming through the bottom into the top there's there's just a lot of speed holes as they are and uh from 45 drives the cabling all looks great the the hinges all seem to work well I've opened this and closed it a couple times already and nothing has had any issues let's see it uses another Flex ATX PSU this is a 500 W 80 plus gold it's interesting both of these have AMD but both of them have a lot of differences and you know some of those differences might matter more to some people than others uh but let's get this one put back together and we'll see how it works and one more thought too as I'm closing this up and making sure that I don't pinch that cable down there uh there are probably this is their first ever uh you know consumer Nas box type thing it's an expensive consumer Nest box but it is their first one and there's probably a few little things like that Cable cable routing and cable management that could improve just like with the other uh 45 drives Hardware I think that this this box itself is going to far outlive the hardware that's inside of it today people are already 3D printing little things for it you know little mods and stuff you could probably fit eight or 12 uh smaller 2.5 in drives in here this is just a very solid wellth thought out well-built box that will be able to run anything including maybe like a Raspberry Pi 5 on a on an ITX motherboard running its own little storage server that could be interesting to try out in here be the most overkilling enclosure for that on the entire planet but that doesn't mean it's not fun to do but it's just cool to see you know a North American manufacturer making these boxes that we don't have to ship across the entire planet uh for storage and it's it helps that it's a great high quality enclosure when I turned on the hl4 the first time the fans all ramped up to 100% and that was pretty loud but even when it settles in at idle it was still 4db louder than the Asus store seems like a lot of that noise was coming from this front fan and maybe if they update the front front design they could optimize the airf flow a little more and get this thing a little quieter because unlike the Asus store I could hear the fans on this thing louder than the hard drives it it isn't terrible especially if you're going to run the thing in like a closet but it definitely isn't as quiet as I had hoped seeing all the noctua fans also unlike the Asus store there's no front panel status at all the power buttons on the back and the only thing that you can see from the front if you move your head around and look through the ventilation holes are some RGB LEDs under the motherboard now score one for RGB I guess but it is a little Annoying having no front panel IO LED or power button it's not the end of the world or anything but right after setting up the Asus store it was a bit of a letdown in comparison and networking was the second letdown now let me preface what I'm about to say 45 homelab is a pretty new thing for 45 drives and they're a small company I'm willing to give them a little slack as they navigate selling to Consumers when they traditionally just sold to Enterprise or business customers but when I first set this up I was expecting it to pick up an IP address for my router but the actual process to get this thing connected to my network took me about an hour I posted my experience on the community form but I eventually figured out the default Rocky Linux install they had was basically blocking the ethernet port from making any connections that's not a very convenient feature for a h lab sure in a corporate environment that kind of feature might come in handy because you can kind of lock the thing to your network but in a home lab it's nice to just plug in a box and get connected this probably isn't a problem on the latest version of their software but I think they're bur in process might still need some refining once I was in the Houston UI 45 drives has let me do just about anything on the system in fact I could do a lot more out of the box than I could on the Asus store the only caveat being it's all a lot more Linux than ADM which is a mixed blessing something like setting up a storage volume enabling Samba and adding a user took a few more clicks in Houston than in ADM and there are weird quirks like if you enable SMB shares in ZFS volumes that kind of n the regular s share settings and that wasn't obvious in the UI and when there were problems I'd have to kind of figure them out myself there aren't a lot of guides from 45 drives for common issues you might run into but like I said 45 drives is new to this Asus store has been in the game for over a decade now so I don't expect the software on the 45 Drive side to be quite as polished they have been improving though I noticed they even have personalized Hardware overview Pages like this one showing all the storage or even this one showing the entire motherboard and you can hover over things and see the specs it's a nice touch and I like the direction 45 homelab is heading for an excellent overview of the 45 drives lineup check out craft computing's video where crafty Jeff walks through everything including the backstory to why this thing is so kind of different seriously he goes way more in depth on the HL servers than I can go into here and if you want to dig into Houston the software that 45 Drive supports check out this Lawrence systems video before I get to my final verdict on these boxes I did some brief performance testing other reviews go more in depth but I mounted samb shares on my Mac a Linux box and windows and in all three cases I was able to max out the bandwidth on the nas which isn't that much on the hl4 ierf shows 2.5
gbits and file copies also max out the pipe at 2.5 gigs but in 2025 that's like the bare minimum for an ass the nice thing is I could either install a 10 or 25 gig Nick in the open PC slot or I could even upgrade to another motherboard if I need more bandwidth like this ASRock rack board but overall the Asus store I tested copies to and from both the hard drive and SSD arrays ierf 3 shows a solid 10 gigs up and down and real world on the SSD side I got over 800 megabytes per second wres and over a gigabyte per second reads copying actual files and folders that translates into like 300 to 500 megabytes per second with a single client and benchmarking Network shares is a little annoying because performance is different between Windows Mac and Linux and it also differs depending on what you're copying but I also tested the hard drive array and I noticed something interesting and I'm not 100% sure the reason yet but when it's writing to the array it starts off around 800 megab per second presumably writing to the SSD cache through the ram but after a few seconds it consistently slows down to 500 to 700 megabytes per second so I'm not sure if there's something like a ram cache filling up or what in any case I didn't have any problems with the bandwidth and for a four-drive hard dis array with raid five and an SSD cache that's acceptable I think the ryzen CPUs in both these systems are adequate for all the io they have I do wish the hl4 had more networking bandwidth out of the box though for a system that's more than 1,000 bucks I think 10 gig networking is a bare minimum now so there's a lot to like about both of these approaches a lot of my gripes with the hl4 are with the software but you know what I could just install Windows unraid traz or whatever else I want on here without much hassle on the hardware side I'm a little nervous about Cable Management especially if it has to be open and closed a few times that fan cable will definitely get crunched at some point but despite the fan noise and some of those design quirks I think this chassis will far outlive the Asus store and having a full-on ITX motherboard means you get tons of little features you don't normally get in an ass like full-size pcie and built-in Wi-Fi and who knows maybe I could downgrade this chassis and build the most Overkill raspberry Pine nass on the planet but in terms of just buying a Nas to use as a Nas I think I'd stick with the Asis store it is a little more limiting for non-storage juuse cases though no igpu means no built-in trans coding so it's not as useful as a media server an adm's app store limits you to just the built-in VM and container Solutions which aren't bad but if you want to get more advanced they definitely don't grow with you as you go the proprietary Hardware design means upgrades besides maybe faster drives or more RAM are out of the question because there's no easy way to upgrade the motherboard or CPU this whole box is going to be obsolete in like 10 years I have links to both of these boxes in the description and I'd love to hear what what you think DIY or buy are these just way too expensive or do you think they'll find a niche until next time I'm Jeff Kling
2025-02-19 15:09
