The market for NAS servers is highly competitive with names like Synology, QNAP, Netgear, Thecus and ASUSTOR being the more known brands in the consumer segment.

They all have one thing in common though, NAS servers are expensive for your average end-user. With that in mind ASUSTOR decided to fab a price competitive product. They ripped out the removable trays, there's no LCD display, you get only two USB 3.0 connectors, no HDMI, nope ... you simply get the basics. Remember for a decent NAS server that actually performs well you have to pay anywhere from ? 400 to ? 600, for this AS1002T you pay, and read it well, ? 199,- (189 USD).

And guess what? It's performing just as fast as a high-end NAS. Read/Write speeds over your Gigabit connection are in the 100 MB/sec range, and thanks to clever software caching of the ADM management software, the NAS OS remains very fast as well. Heck even a quick try with NZBGET (inside the NAS software suit) resulted into 17 MB/sec downloads while the content unpacks and PARs as fast as my PC does. Crazy stuff to observe really, as this little NAS unit only has 512MB RAM and a 1 GHz dual-core ARM (Marvell ARMADA-385) ARM v7 processor.