Asustor Launches Marvell-based AS4000 Series NAS Units with 10GBASE-T
by Ganesh T S on January 13, 2018 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
- Marvell
- NAS
- Asustor
- 10GBase-T
- Cortex A72
- CES 2017
Asustor took the opportunity at CES 2018 to launch their AS4000 NAS series. It will have two SKUs - the 2-bay AS4002T, and the 4-bay AS4004T. While there are plenty of 2- and 4-bay NAS units in the market to choose from, this series stands out for a unique hardware feature - we believe these are the first 2- and 4-bay ARM-based units to come with a 10GBASE-T network interface. 10G has finally started to appear in home consumer equipment. Switches such as the Asus XG-U2008 and the Netgear GS810EMX Nighthawk Pro, 10G add-in cards such as the Asus XG-C100C, and even non-workstation enthusiast desktop motherboards with 10G capabilities built-in (eg.: ASRock Z370 Professional Gaming i7) are slowly, but surely, bringing 10G mainstream.
There are ARM-based SMB NAS units with 10G ports (usually SFP+ connectors) already in the market. Almost all of them are based on SoCs from Annapurna Labs . The current crop of SoCs from Annapurna Labs all use the Cortex A15 ARMv7 CPU. 10GBASE-T has typically been restricted to high-end x86 units. The Asustor AS4000 series changes that. It uses the Marvell ARMADA 7020 dual-core Cortex A72 processor (88F7020). This makes the Asustor AS4000 series one of the first ARMv8-based home consumer / SOHO NAS unts in the market.
The Marvell 7K Embedded Processor for Gateways and Network-Attached Storage Units
Asustor has a new industrial design for the AS4000 series, with screwless installation capability for the hard drives. Hot-swap is also supported. The front panel has also been redesigned to make it dustproof. The units come with 2GB of DDR4-2400 memory. There are 2x 1Gbps ports in addition to the 10GBASE-T port.
On the software side, Asustor is continuing to improve the features of its OS - the Asustor Data Manager (ADM). ADM 3.1 is in beta right now and features support for SSD caching and RAID scrubbing amongst a host of other new features.
The AS4000 series is set to come to market later this quarter. Pricing was not announced, but it is likely that it will come in-between that of the AS31/32 series and AS61 series. That would put the AS4002T between $259 and $290, and the AS4004T between $395 and $460. 10GBASE-T NAS units with those price points are sure to increase the adoption of 10G Ethernet in the home / SOHO market.
Source: Asustor
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rapster - Sunday, January 14, 2018 - link
Why doubt this? This is very common, and my Synology unit is definitely bottlenecked by its 1Gb connection.Xajel - Sunday, January 14, 2018 - link
1GbE has a theoretical maximum speed of 125MB/s, the actual speed is lower but it varies.Modern HDD's can reach 130~150MB, some can have even over 200MB/s...
And this is for a single HDD, if you have RAID0/5/10 things get pretty high.. that's why more and more NAS now comes with dual gigabit ethernet to Link Aggregate the connection.
iwod - Sunday, January 14, 2018 - link
I guess it depends, since those speed ( and higher ) are only sustainable for large files. With small files in between the average transfer speed will be lower. But given enough buffer, the 1Gbps can still be bottleneck at times. I think 2.5Gbps would be perfect fit, but that is if we actually have those controller on the cheap. Otherwise currently it doesn't make sense to support Nbase-T, they might as well jump directly to 10Gbps.iamlilysdad - Sunday, January 14, 2018 - link
With enough Plex usage in the house 1Gbps can easily be a bottleneck.Lolimaster - Sunday, January 14, 2018 - link
We really need 2.5Gbit base for all consumer ethernet. 5Gbit would be ideal.It's pretty laughable that pretty much any hardware is faster than 1Gigabut ethernet, a low end SSD, cheapo SD card, phone storage, even people can get 1Gbit or more for internet access.
The current consumer ethernet is frozen at a time were slow ass 5400rpm ata100 were the main storage people would get with 10-40MB/s on average and internet on the 128-512Kbps.
Right now it seems better to just upload and download over internet from 2 pc's at your own home if you got 1gigabit access or better over fast wifi.
mpbello - Monday, January 15, 2018 - link
@Lolimaster the problem with 10Gbe is that 10GB Base-T needs too much power and has incompatibility problems. So everyone that has moved big time to 10Gbe did so with fiber and SFP+ ports and now most networking gear focuses on SFP+ ports and not Base-T. And if you insist in staying all copper with 10 Gbe you will very soon regret it unless your network is really small.Then, if 10Gbe requires fiber to be practical, it means a lot of rewiring and this time rewiring is no longer a simple job anyone can do like it is with twisted pair ethernet cables.
Therefore, what is holding 10Gbe today is not cost, but the need to change the medium/cabling.
Fiber cabling is very common today in server racks, but you will not find many sites where fiber runs to people's desks in an office.
About "fast wifi", not sure what you mean but fast ac wifi is always much slower than 1Gbe.
oRAirwolf - Monday, January 15, 2018 - link
I have a Dell T320 with 8x8TB WD Red's running FreeNAS using RAIDZ1 (RAID 5) and I can sustain about 700 MB/s both ways between the Intel X540 in it and the Aquantia AQC107 in my desktop. Its not hard to saturate a 1Gbe connection, even with a single high density drive. 2 or more will absolutely be bottlenecked by a 1 Gbe connection.bigboxes - Sunday, January 14, 2018 - link
What is the heat output on this device? I thought that 10GbE runs hot.thomasg - Monday, January 15, 2018 - link
Even at the worst of times, when a 10 Gbase-T PHY would put out 10 Watts, it would not have been a problem to dissipate that in a device like this.The current generation PHYs at 28 nm are around 3-4 Watts peak (i. e. transmission at full speed over 100 meters).
This is clearly too much for a laptop, but quite manageable on any stationary network device, even without fans.
We'll probably see a new generation of PHYs shortly, since the production companies should have some 20 nm generation lines with capacity now that most SoC/CPU/GPU production has moved on to < 20 nm.
Lensin - Tuesday, January 16, 2018 - link
I am going to try this Asustor 10G base-T NAS ($259) + Asus 10G nic card ($99) + Asus 10G switch ($219) for my home when the NAS is available!