running out of storage space on your iPhone or for your photo backups I think
is a problem we've all run into but how do you solve it right I don't know about
you but I don't really like subscriptions as much as we end up
having them anyways so what's your other option well hosting the storage yourself
with something like this maybe from Asus store this is their flash store 12 Pro
Gen 2 and I wasn't a huge fan of the
first one I like the idea but to be honest it wasn't fast enough so you're
putting fast storage and you're ending up with none of the performance they
have told me they have solved that problem on this Gen 2 this is now fast
enough to mostly saturate the 10 gbit
ports and we're going to find out if they lied so in the Box here we've got a
power cable power brick 12vt 10 amp 120
W power brake there we've got a actually pretty long power cable so that looks
nice see those in a sec and then the
nas now the cool thing about this unit unlike a lot of the nas units you can
just buy off the shelf you notice it's pretty small this is an NVMe based Nas
so instead of hard drives it uses m.2 ssds cost-wise not as cheap for the
storage for terabyte as you would get with a hard drive but it is in theory
quite a bit faster on the back we've got dual RJ45 10 GB Ethernet ports two 10 GB
USB type A ports and two USB 440 gig
ports ports that's that's a lot of connectivity right here and you could
use that USB 4 for presumably an egpu
you could even use it for like a Thunderbolt to 25 gbit Nick if you want
it I guess pretty cool we've got a reset button and then a power jack over here
there's also a Kensington lock if that's something you need and then on the front
another USB port oh it's also 10 GB that's pretty much up for the iio is
there a power button oh oh oh I'm stupid hey there's a power button I think
there's RGB here so it probably a bit more obvious once it's plugged in but
before I open it I think there's another thing in the Box ah yes cables we've got
propaganda here AI master I guess I'll
leave that here what else do we got oh it actually comes with two Ethernet
cables that's cool look at this LTT Store.com Precision screwdriver kit
perfect thing for taking apart your Asus store Nas If you were to buy one I could
live in a universe where these would be toolless open
close ah yes okay so you can see the fan
there you see they use a USB type a port to be like a hot swap pluggable
connector for the fan and they do still use a normal four pin fan connector on
the board so you could in theory change this to a different fan this is an 80 mm
fan beautiful so if you want to swap that out you could just make sure it's a
thin boy look at all those chickens and by chickens I mean m.2 slots
she being the flash store 12 you can see
that there is 1 2 3 4 5 six dicks slots on this side but then there's also more
slots on the other side which how do I get at
those boom look at that more m.2 slots
the Coss battery is right there if you need to change it so it's easily
accessible it's not like tucked underneath anything and then on this
side we can see our RAM which is also
super easy to access uh by default this kit ships with a ddr5 5600 16 GB CL 46
stick but there is two slots so I guess in theory you could add more you could
add another stick or take this one out and put your own stick now if you've
been looking at this closely you can see that they actually print the speed of
each port on here now this is a newer CPU in this unit that's a lot faster
than the previous one it's AMD ryzen powered uh so there's more PCIe Lanes
from what I understand but there is still not enough to run 12 ssds at all
gen 4x4 so we've got one gen 4x4 uh
three gen 4x2 two gen 4x1 on this side
and then on the other side two more gen 4x1 two gen 3x 1s a gen 3x4 and a gen 3x
two that is a lot of different specs and part of my brain
goes Ah that's kind of funky but I also
understand there's only so many lanes that they get off of whatever chip that
they're putting in here so they have to make concessions somewhere it's probably
not going to matter anyways because the combined performance of that many ssds
is Far and Away going to exceed the amount of networking you have which is
only 20 GB even if you were to put in like a 25 gig Nick that's only 2 and 1
12 plus gigabytes a second which realistically one SSD could saturate so
yes it's a little confusing it's not in my brain my first choice but at the end
of the day for a real world application it probably doesn't matter speaking of
ssds I have
this is so supremely Overkill but uh I
don't really care I do have seven of these saent rocket 4 plus 8 tbte drives
which are just about the beefiest possible ssds you can install in here it
is nice and easy to install ssds in here they got little toolless doohickeys you
just kind of push back and it pops into place which is nice uh that do does kind
of beg the question of why they made it so you have to use a screwdriver to open
it because isz at that point you would have a screwdriver if you're wondering
about thermals I suspect these are going to get pretty hot not as hot as if we
had 12 ssds in there and we're not really pushing these ssds to the max um
but you'll notice there are extra like threaded inserts here and those are for
heat sinks that don't come with this unit you have to purchase separately um
and they're not that cheap to get enough for one side for six ssds is $39
oh I forgot to mention also there is some indicator lights on the top we've
got power what looks like a heartbeat I guess maybe that's like if there's an
error that will light up red we've got networking and a storage indicator all
right let's get this thing plugged in and powered
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your partner we'll have it linked down below after all flowers die magnets last
forever it just says to turn it on that's the end of the instructions oh
actually I guess it says to download Asus control center or AI Master on my
phone maybe I'll try AI master that sounds like fun oh I see lights okay so
we got power I guess this indicator light also shows green if things are
good and no networking because yeah I didn't plug in the networking that makes
sense now speaking of networking I have a ubiquity Flex XG switch over here this
has four 10 GB ports so what we're going to do for our little testy test is plug
both of them into the Asus store and then I have two different laptops that
we're going to connect both with 10 gig so we can test the full 20 gig capacity
of this thing in a few minutes here there we go blue light on networking So
in theory I can now find this maybe hey
wow that was quick instantly found it on the same network cool oneclick setup oh
boy do I dare I don't want to like reset it and have to do it again but I'm
curious what the oneclick setup does let's do it cuz like okay that was not
one click brother look at all this stuff I have to do that's not one click you
liars I'm going to go with Max Capacity
Oh cannot connect your server oh NOS I I can't imagine what possibly
happened oh I just unplugged the power
no well right off the bat we have an ass here I don't know how it set it up I we
got activity monitor you can see our process usage Drive usage oh here we go
total capacity is 50 terabytes and it oh
my God it did a raid zero I guess that is maximum capacity but
like to allow in the oneclick setup
somebody that picks maximum capacity to do a raid zero is a little sketchy raid
zero is striping all of the discs that means if you write a file say like a 1
Gigabyte file it's going to split that
one gig file into however many drives you have worth of pieces and store a
piece on each drive this is great for performance and great for lots of
capacity but if any of those ssds die
you lose everything I would not recommend anyone configure their Nas
like that but let's jump over to an actual computer so we can get all the
settings in the web like computer version it tells you what type of raid
is going to be used depending on what you pick so maximum capacity is raid
zero balanced is raid five which means you have one disc worth of data
protections so you can have one of your ssds fail and you'll you won't lose data
and then Superior data protection is raid six which means you can have two
drives fail and not lose any data that being said they really need to add like
a big red warning like raid zero is not
safe if I'm a consumer and I don't know what raid zero is and that's the default
option maximum capacity sounds great I'm just going to click that right I don't
care I got the system reset up as a raid five and I'm ready to copy some files
from our single client so we've only got one 10 gig connection we'll try it with
a second client in a sec but I do just want to look at the power consumption
it's drawing 34 35 Watts let's copy some
files I've got this Sonet Thunderbolt to 10 GB dongle plugged into this MacBook
Air and we should be able to saturate 10
gig speeds no problem so I've got addo
dis Benchmark writing to our Network share it's writing random data on a
block size of 1 Megabyte in four streams so it's opening four separate
connections of the device it seems like it can handle writing at 1 GB per second
consistently looks around 55 56 Watts
let me grab the other laptop while I let this run and we'll see what it does at 2
GB a second I think the previous version that we tested on LTT would cap out at
like 500 megabytes a second so this is already way better so that's cool that's
a lot slower uh it might be okay this might be
a little bit much sauce to be honest cuz I'm doing like four streams per client
but let's try two streams per because that's what I was doing honestly I'm a
little confused okay it can do 20 gig
reads look at that we're doing it right now that's pretty cool 10 gbit works out
to be like 1.2 GB a second and we're doing 2.4 GB a second on the dot read
speed I made it work it actually can do
20 gbit right speed we're doing 2.1 2.2
GB a second it's just that I had to use Raid zero to do it which is
not great it feels like they should be
able to do 2 GB a second in raid 5 we
were capping out 1.6 1.7 GB a second
under optimal circumstances with our two clients in raid zero mode I was able to
do pretty much 2 GB a second consistently right speed but overall it
seems like the problem comes more from a parody calculation being slow read
performance is great right performance I really it's kind of the same problem is
last time with the original flash store it has a lot of networking but it can't
quite use it all to be honest for most people if you only have one client that
you're ever going to connect with 10 gbit or maybe two it's probably fine even if you
consider our office here where we have a crazy Nas we're usually only reaching 10
maybe 20 gab in a given day uh with 10
editors working off of it so maybe maybe it's not that big of a problem it just
feels like the hardware is not quite specked for the networking it's
especially when you consider the price the original flash store which could do
1 GB a second read and I think around 5 600 megabytes a second right was $800
for the 12 Bay or $450 for the 6 Bay at
least that's what the pricing on B&H shows right now the Gen 2 is
,000 for the six drive and
$400 for the 12 drive that is not cheap
$1,400 is a lot of money that's gaming
computer territory even if we ignore the 12 drive one and go let's let's talk the
six drive one 1,000 us at that point I
might as well just build a desktop computer and put some m do2s in it like
yes they made it better it can read at 2 GB a second it can almost write at 2 GB
a second but it's really expensive they also kind of cut some features out of
the old one it no longer has an igpu you notice there's no HDMI port so we can't
have a display play output sure you can run Plex but you're not going to be
using any sort of Hardware accelerated transcoding and you can't install a
different operating system on it at least as far as I can see and they don't
advertise it on the product page because before they would tell you to do it by
booting up into the BIOS with a monitor and stuff but no HDMI port how do you do
that you do get the benefit of their fancy Nas operating system and the stuff
that goes with that but there are ways around that there's true Nas there's
open media Vault there's some other projects that you can use to install Nas
operating systems that are more like what you would get on something like this I'm not going to say the name like
yes they did fix the problem I identified in the old unit it can
saturate a 10 gig connection read and write and if that's enough for you great
but then they added a second 10 gig connection and didn't make it fast
enough to handle that I guess if you want an m.2 SSD Nas and you don't want
to have to fuss about building your own and installing your own operating system
the user experience was not bad they do need to fix some things with the default
selections maybe it could work for you I probably checked out the first gen one
unless you need crazy performance but man I don't know I don't know it feels a
bit like price gouging and it feels like this is the end of the video so hit like
get subscribed let me know what you think about this thing I don't really
get it I would build my own but maybe
you think differently let me know goodbye