Raspberry Pi vs ASUSTOR NAS Head-to-Head Part 2 - the VERDICT!

Hey everyone! Marco here from ASUSTOR again! As with the last video, we are thankful for the opportunity to collaborate with Jeff and feel free to let us know your comments, questions, criticisms and praise in this comment reply thread. I do get notifications and remain as happy as ever to listen to what you have to say. Can't guarantee everything but everything will be taken seriously.

What do you do to support all these toys, I admire your knowledge, I'm 75 and I love this stuff. Thank you.

Jeff this is really helpful, thanks. I could use newbie help using Mac Terminal to access the Asustor docker apps. I added Pihole and botched the password, snd cant figure out how to get in it.

Yea, that's always something you need to consider. What is YOUR time worth? My employer, depending on the type of work I'm doing or if it's say after hours, charges anywhere from $250 to $800 an hour for my services. On my own personal time and considering tinkering with Raspi and home networking.., being a hobbyist maker... I'd put my time around $200 and hour. I'm cheap but not... eh...who am I kidding. I'm easy too !😝.

So, day you spend and hour setting up the ni e pretty NAS out of the box but.. you spend 4 hours building the Pi NAS...which is pretty damn cool as hell... you're in the a pretty big hole! I would spent 4 hours building the Pi at a rate of $800. He'll, I likely would've spent 4 times that much time considering I'm not even a year into Raspi and still learning.., a lot! That's why I subbed Jeff's channel. He's a good egg.

Regardless, I do have a nice little Raspi NAS now at home running Open Media Vault...which I really like. My transfer rates are nowhere near what Jeff is doing but for now, I really don't need it to be. I'm not doing video or anything like that. Just nice having an extremely inexpensive storage solution that my laptops, other Raspis and mobile devices can easily access. It was also a fun learning experience setting it up. OMV does make it a very easy process. Little bit of video watching and reading to really tweak things.

What I love most it... no more 21U or 42U rack with servers acting like a very noisy space heater. Have 4 Raspi servers running all on a shelf on the wall... in my home lab with a very quiet fan and a fraction of the electricity. It really is amazing what you can do with a Pi! The only limitation seems to be ones imagination!

Cool videos though, Jeff. Another example of what you can do with Raspi. Cheers!

Why not use a low power itx motherboard with 4x sata ports instead of the power.

Thanks for a great video and as always, thanks for including the outtakes. I loved the "I can assure you the kids are walking upstairs right now" line! 🙂

You should try waveshare pcie to sata x4 over asm1064 AHCI controller.

Been looking at building my own nas for over 6 months now, I purchased a Qnap and I was underwhelmed, as with Asustor and with all nas systems I keep hearing you have to backup, so you buy the hard drives to place into your nas these hard drives cost a fortune for 18terabytes per drive. So I came to the conclusion you are just better buying a desktop usb 3.1 gen 2 bare hard drive dual bay direct storage device and just copy data from your computer to the hard drive then back it up to the second drive. I achieve 209 MB/Sec which is 1.5GB transfer speed which is pretty fast for me, doing it this way I dont have to wait 1.5 days for the nas to initialise and I save on space as if I build my own nas I have to buy another pc case which takes up valuable space. If I go with a ready built nas solution like Asustor, Qnap then you are not getting good value for money and if the nas fails you have to buy another nas from the manufacturer. So I went with the OWC USB-C Dual Drive Bay Solution. The best decision I ever made I have all my data stored on one hard drive and then I have a backup copy on a second hard drive I am secure doing it that was, if you buy a nas and you have 4 or 8 hard drive with raid 6 or raid 10 you better hope your hard drives dont fail during the rebuild process as this is when you have the risk of losing all your data. I dont have the cash to buy a nas then buy a second nas to backup up the fist nas tot eh second nas does not make sense to me to do it that way. Either way I have what works on a budget way of backing up my data. A nas sounds fantastic but from what I gathered it is risky especially with hard drives with 18Terabytes of storage space over 8 drives I could not stand to lose 130.4 Terabytes of data if say 3 hard drives failed all at the same time I would lose the whole array and your hard drives are plotting against you.

Ù

Not knowing much about NASes I wonder what performance gain you're getting on this monster vs just regular USB desktop hard drives plugged into the Pi's USB ports and the built-in ethernet.

You find the Asustor is super reliable. I have a AS 604T on a network lagg for over 8 years with no problems.

A stock NAS is great, if you want to have an out-of-the-box solution. It will work fine for many years and you have many additional features. When it becomes too old, you have to buy a new one.
The Pi solution needs much more manual effort but you get a full computer and you can easily upgrade a view years later to the next gen Pi.
If you really just need a NAS for data storage, buy an external hdd storage for 200 bugs and you have everything you need.

Isn’t the #2 in 321 for two types of media not 2 locations the 1 covers the second location.

He did it
And very fast
My files are back

He did it
And very fast
My files are back

Lmao, when you powered those drives in the last video, I heard the dead drive and had to do a double-take: surely that noise was coming from the all-too-familiar GreenPower! But i also can't pretend to be surprised by Doa seagate, just thought they mighta tested the ones they sent you.

OMV may be a pretty good product, but their support form is kinda hostile to simple questions or issues

awesome series on nas. LEarned so much, cant wait to explore NAS

Raspberry Pi NAS.
Pi NAS.
PiNAS.
Penis.

suggestion for redshirt jeff slogan - "the logs never lie"

if you could guide please,
we are looking to setup a setup where we want atleast 10 connections using the client/server model, a 1 TB SSD, 32GB RAM Xeon server. and 10 raspberry PI connected to it as clients.
We want to setup an obser setup for our ongoing googlemeet live classes. will this setup work?
would appreciate insight on this idea.

HEY LISTEN HERE MISTER, YOU WANNA HAMMER A HARD DRIVE, YOU SEND IT TO ME! BECAUSE I AM STARVED FOR STORAGE,

Just kiddin, but really just send them to me, thanks for the videos you are awesome

Thanks!

I feel like it's quite a poor hardware set-up with the Pi. Sharing a single (pair?) PCIe lanes for ethernet and all the storage is a huge bottleneck. Something more recent with dedicated lanes for networking and storage respectively would probably give you a significant performance boost.

Interesting video tho heavily in favour of the Asustor unit considering there is hundreds of dollars of free upgrades over the quoted purchase price 😂 hardly a fair comparison by the end

Enjoyed your video. Just using desktop G3900 and truenas. Wondering if it worth getting those 2.5 Ghz ethernet cards. Also probably need another backup besides nas. Don't understand 10 hours initializing. Would raid 1 take this long ? Seems file transfer speed depends on ethernet as well as hard drives. Have to learn how to use bandwidth and transfer programs. To increase speed you would probably have to go to SSDs. 4 8 TB ssds=$$$

An alternative is to use another SBC, like the ODROID HC4 (ideal if you only need 2 drives and GbE), or a Rock Pi, which has PCIe Gen2 x4, and official SATA extension boards. Using these, you could build a NAS for about $100-200, much cheaper. They also have the advantage of having AES acceleration for encryption, unlike the RPi 4, which delivers poor AES performance.

Another alternative would be to build a PC with an Atom or Celeron motherboard, and that would still be cheaper and more flexible than most ready-built NAS (as low as $200), and easier than the SBC. This is also the cheapest way if you want ECC RAM.

Seagate drives are shit. Never ever use Seagate for critical data

1 Question: What Issues you ran into by using the Mikrotik SFP+ Switch? (since i have the same in my environment)
2 Question: You know anything about issues with Ironwolf NAS drives when using raid (especially zfs) - according to some reddit posts "Ironwolf Drives are not suitable for ZFS"

That's Seagate for you. DOA! lol I wouldn't trust my worst data on a Seagate!

How would your speed test results have changed over a 1gbps network connection?

I prefer open source, it's fun to tinker.

Awesome content!

"pinas" sounds remarkably like a body part, when you say it quickly.

Fun to watch but too much work for me! My NAS build is going to be a AMD Ryzen 2200g since it cant run windows 11 hoping free nas isn't to hard to setup!

Hi Jeff, I have been following you for a bit. I have learned a lot from you. Thank you, !!!! I wanted to ask you what was your take on QNAP as a NAS. I did see you speak about Asustor so I wanted to know if you had to say anything about the performance of the QNAP. I do see most people seem to buy Synology but with the "close architecture" they are trying to build - my assumption - they are making things more difficult for the prosumer or standard consumer. What is your take on this ?again, thank you. I appreciate your feedback

I showed you my Pi NAS, plas respond

Asustor sounds like a Wish ASUS wanna be, and looks suspiciously much similar to Qnap both on the outside and the software 😂

My Head Hurts

Did you compare the Asustor nas with two nvme cache drives to the raspberry pi setup without cache ? If this is the case you did not compare apples with apples...

I love the bloopers at the end!!! Please continue to add them :-)

Thanks for using firefox

whole day raid system disk initialization times aren't the thing that you probably want to have as an end user. there should be smarter ways doing it - an empty disk is just empty. no need for checksums until there is data that has to be stored.

ASUSTOR is at about 280 € for German sales right now.

For my own purposes I made a NAS of similar size out of a Raspberry Pi 4 and a Terra Master USB 3 DAS. So far it works quite well - with RAID5 (ext4) speeds are pretty much enough to saturate the Rpi Ethernet interface. Beats over the counter NAS systems in configurability.

Lol. PiNAS in a Box! That's what I want for Christmas!

I need to know more about this disk shouting thing.

PiNAS lol. 8::::::::D