AS-304T first impressions (from a former Synology user)

[marq]

Debated which forum to put this in, so moderator may want to move this...

Anyhow, I decided to take the leap and go from a 2 drive bay to 4 drive bay. I am a big fan of the Synology UI. It's very polished. However, I was hit with the Synolocker exploit (found an entry in my rc.local but system wasn't otherwise affected as far as i can tell), but more importantly wanted to go from a 2 bay 212J to a 4bay NAS so that I could add drives rather replace drives in pairs every time I wanted to upgrade storage. I also wanted better performance and transcoding support would have been nice to support more clients (e.g., Plex) so that I could have more options (I have an Apple TV and Fire TV running XBMC, which replaced a Roku).

I debated btw the 415play and 414J from Synology and the 304T and 202TE from ASUSTOR. I pulled the trigger on 304T as I found a good price for a refurb on Amazon.

I'm only a couple of days in and here are my thoughts:

First the odd/negative stuff:
- ADM is definitely a lot rougher than Synology's DSM. A lot of odd gui quirks. Here's what I miss the most:
- Download station supports multiple users with their own preferences. Download Center and the 3rd part uTorrent implementations have more options, but also aren't as polished. Maybe I just need more time to get use to their quirks. AiDownload can't handle .torrent files from ios. This was a great feature on Synology's DS Download
- I've had XBMC, Download Center, and File Explorer crash on me.
- Going from a single drive (my newly purchased drive) to a RAID 5 (with two new drives) was a bit wonky. It was a two step (automated though) process where it'll go from a single drive to a 2drive RAID 1 and when that's done, then it'll add the third drive and start migrating to RAID 5. Would have been nice to go directly from single drive to RAID 5 migration. However, I understand it would have probably taken more coding and handling all the raid migration variations has diminishing returns. So rather than a single pass 24hour+ migration for a 3TB drive, it ended up being a 48hour+ two step migration.
- Community forums isn't as developed as Synology.
- Having issues using my Harmony remote with XBMC. It works fine in the portal, but as soon as I figure up XBMC, it goes dead.
- I believe power draw is greater than similar Synology unit.

Some positives:
- NAS performance is good. I haven't measured but it can definitely handle more load than my 212J as expected.
- Definitely good price/performance ratio.
- More app options. Again, not as polished though.
- I used rsync to copy from Synology to ASUSTOR. It's a much better gui implementation than Synology's. So I ended up setting up rsync server on the Synology and using ASUSTOR's rsync as the client and ran the jobs off of the ASUSTOR. Make sure to chose "incremental" so that you can stop/start your rsyncs at any time and it'll just pick up where it left off. The default option isn't to use incremental.

Overall, glad I upgraded to RAID5. Got 3 x 3tb in raid 5 and have another slot available to add a 4th drive. Hopefully I can iron out the remote issues with XBMC, but for now I have the fire TV for playing XBMC.

My biggest concern is that ADM won't continue to develop and "catch up" to Synology DSM. It does feel a little bit like buying an Android over an iPhone: specs are better, interface/software is less polished, more open app store.

[Shawn.S@AST]

Hi Marq, thanks for the candid and neutral comments. We will keep improving our ADM and we will for sure bear all the comments in mind with our best efforts.

[marq]

Wow, glad to see folks looking at the forums. Encouraging!

I did throw in a few good points (in addition to the neutral and candid comments)

[marq]

I think I figured out the remote issue. Remote Center, I believe, sends commands to XBMC via XBMC's web interface at port 88. I was changing this to 8080 to be consistent with my other system. Changed it back to 88 and it works just fine.

[Kerry]

I have Synology 1513+ also. To move from single to Raid 5, it will also go through raid one then to raid 5. I think this is a common practice in Linux system.

[Auberon2k]

Regarding the RAID migrations, were you keeping data on the drive during the migrations? That might explain the process. When I purchased my AS-608T I tossed in three new, blank drives and went straight to RAID5.

[marq]

Yes, I was going from an existing single drive to raid 5 by adding two more drives. My migration process from my synology:

- Install new single drive in ASUSTOR
- Rsync from synology (rsync server installed on it) raid 1 drives to ASUSTOR single drive
- Remove raid 1 drives from synology and add to ASUSTOR
- Start migration from single to raid 5