Asustor Drivestor 2 review | TechRadar

Our Verdict

For its price tag, the Drivestor 2 offers quite bit for home users. The 2.5GbE offers great change speeds for home users who have compatible networking, and the tramp of applications available is enough to satisfy most uses. Where things will struggle is when you stream content higher than 1080p, which is held back by the ingress-level specifications.

For

Affordable price point
Strong net change speeds
Good for entrepot or light media streaming

Against

Won't handle more than 1080p content
Can't be upgraded
Doesn't support 2.5" drives

TechRadar Verdict

For its price go after, the Drivestor 2 offers quite a trifle for national users. The 2.5GbE offers with child transfer speeds for home users who have compatible networking, and the range of applications available is enough to fulfil most uses. Where things will struggle is when you teem content higher than 1080p, which is held back away the entry-level specifications.

Pros

+ Affordable price point
+ Strong network transfer speeds
+ Good for storage or sparkle media streaming

Cons

- North Korean won't hold more than 1080p subject
- Put up't comprise upgraded
- Doesn't bread and butter 2.5" drives

One-minute review

Having a NAS at home is becoming much commonplace, American Samoa information technology functions as both a private network memory space also A a William Christopher Handy media center for communion and streaming music, photos, videos, and more. The Asustor Drivestor 2 is an affordable 2-bay NAS that will tick most boxes for those looking for an elementary-to-use home NAS.

There are several habitation-friendly apps that can comprise well installed, and the two drive bays should be enough for about storage needs. Whether you're look for a intelligent meshing backing solution or want to stream and share home base videos and photos, it's easy to set up cursorily.

Where things mightiness be a bit rainproof is if you're superficial to stream video content that's high quality than 1080p. This puts quite nisus happening the Drivestor 2's C.P.U., and transcoding files takes several seconds to finish before files will kickoff to play again. 4K content is even harder to scout, so if you've got any of these files, information technology's non going to play binding smoothly, given the limited internals of this NAS.

Price and availability

The Asustor Drivestor 2 is available at present and is priced at $169, just pricing may depart slightly by region.

At that price point you set out a NAS with 2.5GbE connectivity, two drive bays for plenty of storage, and a number of media-friendly apps as swell A fast network storage and substitute solutions. It's a good price point to start from, and the fast Ethernet connectivity is a huge boost if you have the infrastructure in situ to support it.

Design and Setup

In keeping with the home aesthetic, the Drivestor 2 has an all-disastrous figure with a elflike footprint. There's a patterned cover in the front along with LED lights for power and take bodily process, a individual USB 3.0 port, as well the Asustor logotype at the top. The plastic outdoor is easy to wipe clean, and overall looks very simple to the naked eye.

At the back you have a mightiness connective, other USB 3.0 port, and a 2.5GbE ethernet port. There's also a circular power clitoris near the top, along with a small pinhole reset push button. That's more or less it – the Drivestor 2's no-nonsense design makes IT as plain as possible while still retaining all the features that most home users will need.

Asustor Drivestor 2 — (Image credit: Asustor)

While most NAS make it easier to get to the hard drive bays, the Drivestor 2 firmly locks its drives off inside, so getting to them is a little tricky. The possible reasoning behind this is that Asustor assumes that location users won't need to hot-swop drives like advanced NAS users, so you can only admittance the drive bays by shutting down the NAS and unscrewing two screws at the back. While Asustor does advertise the Drivestor 2 as 'tool-less', the flip screws at the back are quite a firm, so you'll motivation. A screwdriver to undo them up first.

Once internal, you'll go through the two drive bays that fit two 3.5" hard drives. Included in the loge are four screws to secure the drives in put across, and that's the extent of the drive away installation. IT's important to note that the Drivestor 2 doesn't support 2.5" drives – while technically you can slot them into the bays, the included thumbscrews don't fit, so you'll either need to pose a 3.5" drive caddy prototypical, or just go with native 3.5" drives to begin with. This also way that you can't put in an SSD drive to serve as file cache, if that's a feature that you were hoping to tap into.

The rear of the Drivestor 2 sports one large chilling fan, which generally is quite silent during cognitive process. Information technology's able-bodied to pull tune in from vents beneath the system, so overall the Drivestor 2 operates with barely any noise, making it easy to set upwardly even in a meddling living distance.

Operation

Powering the Drivestor 2 is a Realtek RTD1296 CPU along with 1GB of DDR4 Random access memory. That's non very much of wriggle room to play with, given that a petite chunk of Mainframe resources is going to personify holy to running the OS. Thusly, what you're left with is just enough succus to race few scop apps and care file transfers. The Drivestor 2 cannot be upgraded with more Force in any way, and it seems that Asustor were clear that they didn't privation users tinkering around too much with this mould.

Once you've got drives installed in the bays, you'll need to power upwards your NAS and download (and put in) the NAS espial software to see your NAS on the network. Information technology's an annoying special step to have to install and download software just to exist fit to connect to your NAS, when companies equal Synology can detect a NAS victimisation just a criterial web browser.

The setup process is quite a painless, and you stool opt certainly advanced features during whatsoever parts of the setup. Nearly of the time, users will simply click direct to position up a basic partition, username, and that's it. The file organization supported is only ext4, and you stern set upbound your disks in JBOD, RAID 0 operating theatre RAID 1.

The Drivestor 2 runs ADM OS, a screen background-style interface that makes it easy to navigate around, install apps, and learn what's stored along your NAS. It's boost increased by App Central, where you can access common applications to download along your NAS. In that location are single programming and database apps, every bit considerably as media players and media streaming services such as Plex. Of naturally, the more programs you put in and run on your NAS, the more system resources are taken raised, so we'd give notice only installing apps that you're going to habit.

For us, we chose to install Plex as our independent testing ground, since the Drivestor 2 is in the main designed for file sharing and media moving. Plex was quick to discover and catalogue our video collection, which has a mix of video files in all kinds of formats and bitrates.

Playback via the Plex app on our Samsung TV was pretty much flawless, with the Drivestor 2 being fit to easily teem 720p and 1080p files encoded in H.264. Where things got a bit bit sticky is if you attempt to play back files encoded with H.265, which Plex has to transcode to display decent. A test 1080p H.265 file was scarcely able to gambol, with Plex furiously difficult to transcode and cache the file in the background.

Similar execution occurred with a 720p charge too, so we'd stay clear of trying to play any files encoded with H.265. Even when we unsuccessful to transcode a video file encoded with H.264 (sooner than playing natively), Plex had few issues making this work smoothly. In brief, if you're playing back files natively via Plex, you'll be pulverised. But if you essay to transcode any of them to different resolutions, you're going to be spending a great deal of time staring at a blank screen. When we attempted 2K and 4K videos, Plex didn't even trouble loading the file's 1st few frames – the whole system came to a halt, with almost 100% CPU custom.

Asustor advertises the Drivestor 2 as having smashing H.265 playback, but at that place's a slight fascinate – this is lonesome inside their own media software, LooksGood. We tested this software program out and didn't find it as prosperous to use A Plex, though it is able to teem to Chromecast and DLNA devices.

The Drivestor 2 besides has a dedicated 'Media Mode' in the settings which reserves 512MB of RAM for multimedia system, supposable to allow for smooth streaming when other activities are going on such as files being accessed of derived. Even with this feature, we didn't notice much of a change in overall performance.

Outside of media streaming, the Drivestor 2 is still a great option for mesh backups and file storage, with several backup apps available that commode integrate into popular fog solutions for seamless file syncing. The 2.5GbE Ethernet port is certainly ready to hand to have if you've the network bandwidth to support IT, and steady with regular Gigabit Ethernet, file out read and written material were at acceptable speeds.

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A quondam IT & Marketing Manager turned full time Editor, Chip enjoys reviewing PC components, 3D Printers, projectors, and anything shiny and expensive. He can also be set up baking up a storm in the kitchen, which we are more happy to further.