ASUSTOR AS5008T Review

When it comes to the NAS itself, the AS5008T follows the ASUSTOR recipe. This NAS looks identical to its older sibling the AS-608T with only a few differences. First, we already mentioned that it shed the LCD display and the controls that go along with it. The rest is pretty much the same.

ASUSTOR-AS5008T (3)

Up front you find the familiar ASUSTOR drive trays configured with four trays in each of two columns. ASUSTOR drive trays are still my favorite design to date. Each tray is sturdy, constructed of steel, and garnished with plastic. The drive trays remove easily, sport LEDs for activity and power, and feature an easy release locking mechanism. Again, there are no visual ques anywhere that suggest which drive tray is which drive number in your storage pool, and thus the recycled image from our AS-608T review.

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ASUSTOR-AS5008T (16) ASUSTOR-AS5008T (13)

ASUSTOR-AS-608T-(8)

Outside of the drive trays, there really isn’t much going on in the front. You have your Power button and LED indicator, your activity LED, network activity LEDs, a One Touch Backup Button, and a USB 3.0 Port.

The sides are barren of any detail, the bottom has feet.

ASUSTOR-AS5008T (18)

Around back we find two large 120mm cooling fans, the PSU, S/PDIF port, dual eSATA, four Ethernet Ports, two USB 2.0 and two USB 3.0 Ports, and an HDMI 1.4a port.

About Joe D

I have always had a passion for everything computing. In early 2000, I decided to take my passion to the web. Thus, C.O.D. was born. Through the years we have made many great friends at C.O.D. and hope to continue our journey for years to come.

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14 comments

  1. William Pemberton

    Well Joe I was going to build your “Build a NAS for Affordable Storage – The Complete Guide” until I saw this. I couldn’t build that for this price and with the upgradable RAM it’s perfect for me. Thanks for this review, the NAS and 8 5 Tb hard drives are on the way.

    • William, I am happy to hear that you will not be following our guide… for this reason alone :). This is a strong NAS at a FANTASTIC price. Please let us know how you make out with it.

      • William Pemberton

        For sure Joe. As happy as I am with my Qnap 4 bay, this unit will be faster and with the HDMI I’ve finally found a use for my old Samsung monitor. Thinking about a bluetooth dongle also for a keyboard and mouse setup.

      • William Pemberton

        So,now that I’ve transferred my TV collection from my Qnap NAS I have to say, this is one fast NAS. I’m sure the 8Gb ram upgrade makes a big difference. When I stream to my WD TV Live the buffering is a lot faster than the Qnap. There’s also a noticeable difference when I’m searching through the different folders from the TV Live.

        Transferring files through the network from my Mac is faster and I haven’t had any error messages like I do with the Qnap.

        I’m not trying to put down Qnap here but these boxes aren’t really comparable. 512 Mb’s of ram vs. 8 Gb’s. Single core processor vs. dual core and so on.

        The Qnap has been good for my needs and I honestly never thought that I’d need more than 8 Tb’s of storage, but I am a bit of a digital media hoarder it turns out. It’s also a little more reassuring to be able to use Raid 6 and have that 2 drive fail safety with tons of storage still.

        So the Qnap has been relegated to just movie storage and hopefully now that it’s no longer sitting with less than a Tb free it will perform a little better.

        Altogether the AS5008T with 8 5Tb drives and the ram upgrade came to just under $3.000 Canadian but I’m very happy and I’m sure this will be the last NAS for years to come. But who knows?

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