Power

The Realtek RTD1619B SoC is quite power frugal with its four Arm Cortex-A55 cores, although we don't have an official power consumption or TDP for the chip. With the two Seagate IronWolf 4 TB drives spinning, the AS1202T was sitting at around 11 W, which seems quite reasonable, but that's almost 1 W more than the Ugreen NASync DH2300. Likewise, power draw under load was about 1 W higher than the DH2300 for both light and heavy loads. Idle power draw was around 4.6 W, again higher than the Ugreen NASync DH2300, which was quite surprising, considering that the Realtek SoC has fewer and more power efficient cores compared to the Rockchip RK3576. It's possible that the RTD1619B is manufactured on an older process node, resulting in higher power usage. The Delta power brick was also not as efficient in standby mode at 0.5 W, but this is still well within the EU standby power regulations. We should note that the power brick appeared to behave a bit oddly at times, since when we powered off the NAS, the power brick would draw 1.5 W in standby, something we haven't noticed on any other NAS we've tested so far. Overall, the AS1202T was using about 1 W more than the DH2300, which is a fairly small amount of extra power, and it's not something we'd factor in as a disadvantage for the AS1202T.

Noise

In general use, the AS1202T is quiet, not as quiet as the DH2300 maybe, but keep in mind that we couldn't really measure the noise right above the fan, as we normally do with the DH2300. The fan speed normally rotates at around 900 rpm, but it peaks at 1060 rpm if you turn on the high speed fan setting. This results in a lot of noise, as the noise meter peaked at above 51 dBA, which is quite loud. However, during normal use, it never really went over 38 dBA and the fan speed was stable during our testing and even though it was set to the default auto mode, never spun up. Overall, we wouldn't worry about the noise that comes from the AS1202T in a normal home environment, but its traditional NAS shape means you get a bit more audible noise than something like the vertical design of the DH2300, as there's nothing in the way to muffle the fan.

Temperature

Unlike some of its competitors, Asustor offers full on system monitoring with multiple temperature sensors, and during our testing, the system never seemed to get particularly hot. Idle CPU temperature sat around 36 degrees Celsius, with the hard drives at 29 to 30 degrees, with the fan operating at just over 900 RPM. This didn't really change under a light load, but the hard drive temperatures went up towards 35 degrees during more intense testing, but we never saw the SoC temperature go over 36 degrees. As such, this is the coolest running NAS we've tested to date, despite the rather small 70 mm fan.