Storage Pool and Volumes

Under the storage manager option in the menu, you'll find all the drive related settings, and as you can see, there's a simple graphical representation of all the eight drives we had installed, you can click on them to go straight to the information about that drive. Moving to the volume options shows us the RAID volume with all the related details. Here you can manage the RAID, add SSD caching and run things like defragmentation of mechanical drives and perform Btrfs file scrubbing. Under the drive section you can get detailed drive information, ADM has no problem detecting all the details, including full information about the NVMe SSDs. Asustor has a plugin specifically for Seagate IronWolf drive health management, which provides additional details in the storage manager for those drives. Finally, there are several iSCSI options here, but this is not something we tested, although one has to assume it works as intended and might not be a feature most potential customers for this specific SKU would bother with.

ADM 5.0.1 defaults to RAID 5 and Btrfs, which should be a sensible enough solution for most users, but as we already pointed out, this is called Balanced during the setup, which is confusing for anyone familiar to the various RAID standards. We tested the AS5404T with RAID 0, 1 and 5, all with and without SSD caching. RAID 1 and 5 takes several hours to sync, something that is common among NAS devices from various manufacturers. ADM's SSD caching is very easy to set up and you can use a single SSD, or configure two or more SSDs in various RAID modes for the cache. A plus, at least in terms of our testing, is that removing the SSD cache was quick and hassle-free, although it might not be as secure way of doing things as TerraMaster does in TOS 6, but since no data should be stored long term on the SSD cache, we don't see there being any real problem from doing it this way.

Overall, we like the storage manager in ADM 5.0.1, it's logical and easy to use. There's really nothing else you'd want from a storage manager, so Asustor gets a plus here.

Disk Configuration

Below is the output from the fdisk -l command on Linux, which shows the disk configuration. Note that the /dev/mmcblk0 is the eMMC.

fdisk: device has more than 2^32 sectors, can't use all of them
Disk /dev/sda: 2048 GB, 2199023255040 bytes, 4294967295 sectors
267349 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

Device Boot StartCHS EndCHS StartLBA EndLBA Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sda1 0,32,33 32,162,2 2048 524287 522240 255M 83 Linux
/dev/sda4 0,0,2 0,32,32 1 2047 2047 1023K ee EFI GPT

Partition table entries are not in disk order
Disk /dev/mmcblk0boot0: 4 MB, 4194304 bytes, 8192 sectors
128 cylinders, 4 heads, 16 sectors/track
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

Disk /dev/mmcblk0boot0 doesn't contain a valid partition table
Disk /dev/mmcblk0boot1: 4 MB, 4194304 bytes, 8192 sectors
128 cylinders, 4 heads, 16 sectors/track
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

Disk /dev/mmcblk0boot1 doesn't contain a valid partition table
fdisk: device has more than 2^32 sectors, can't use all of them
Disk /dev/sdb: 2048 GB, 2199023255040 bytes, 4294967295 sectors
267349 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

Device Boot StartCHS EndCHS StartLBA EndLBA Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sdb1 0,32,33 32,162,2 2048 524287 522240 255M 83 Linux
/dev/sdb4 0,0,2 0,32,32 1 2047 2047 1023K ee EFI GPT

Partition table entries are not in disk order
fdisk: device has more than 2^32 sectors, can't use all of them
Disk /dev/sdc: 2048 GB, 2199023255040 bytes, 4294967295 sectors
267349 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

Device Boot StartCHS EndCHS StartLBA EndLBA Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sdc1 0,32,33 32,162,2 2048 524287 522240 255M 83 Linux
/dev/sdc4 0,0,2 0,32,32 1 2047 2047 1023K ee EFI GPT

Partition table entries are not in disk order
fdisk: device has more than 2^32 sectors, can't use all of them
Disk /dev/sdd: 2048 GB, 2199023255040 bytes, 4294967295 sectors
267349 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

Device Boot StartCHS EndCHS StartLBA EndLBA Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sdd1 0,32,33 32,162,2 2048 524287 522240 255M 83 Linux
/dev/sdd4 0,0,2 0,32,32 1 2047 2047 1023K ee EFI GPT

Partition table entries are not in disk order
Disk /dev/md0: 2045 MB, 2144337920 bytes, 4188160 sectors
523520 cylinders, 2 heads, 4 sectors/track
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

Disk /dev/md0 doesn't contain a valid partition table
Disk /dev/md126: 2045 MB, 2144337920 bytes, 4188160 sectors
523520 cylinders, 2 heads, 4 sectors/track
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

Disk /dev/md126 doesn't contain a valid partition table
fdisk: device has more than 2^32 sectors, can't use all of them
Disk /dev/md1: 2048 GB, 2199023255040 bytes, 4294967295 sectors
536870911 cylinders, 2 heads, 4 sectors/track
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

Disk /dev/md1 doesn't contain a valid partition table