Back in 2010 or so if you wanted to reproduce your media collection on your TV set the best choice was to get a hardware media player since no only they were cheaper compared to HTPCs but they also took up far less space. Nowadays however things have changed and so really demanding users no longer turn towards hardware media players since current NAS devices are far more powerful and have a far wider range of usages. For example one of my friends uses a NAS both to reproduce his media collection on his TV set but also to stream music to his home audio system and download files from the web. Other people i know use NAS devices again as media servers but also to host their pages, filter their emails from spam and record live feed from IP security cameras (something i also use our lab NAS for). 4k media content may not be widely available currently (and with 8k on the horizon i don't know if 4k will ever have a chance to shine) but quite a few NAS servers are capable of reproducing it including the 8-Bay AS6208T model by ASUSTOR which we've been using since mid-August.

Founded in 2011, ASUSTOR Inc., a subsidiary of ASUSTeK Computer Inc., is a leading innovator and provider of private cloud storage (network attached storage) and video surveillance (network video recorder) solutions. ASUSTOR is devoted to providing the world with unparalleled user experiences and the most complete set of network storage solutions possible.

The AS6208T may actually be the 2nd model to reach our lab from the AS620xT line by ASUSTOR but it doesn't share the same specifications as its smaller brother the AS6204T so this time over under the hood we find the Celeron J3160 Quad-Core CPU by Intel clocked at 1.6GHz (64Bit, 14nm, 6W TDP, 2.24GHz Burst speed, 2MB of L2 cache, AES hardware encryption, 8GB DDR3L Max) and the Cherryview integrated HD Graphics 400 graphics processor (Mesa 10.6.7) which fully supports DirectX and OpenGL 3.0 and features Intel's Quick Sync Video, Clear Video HD and Wireless Display technologies. The AS6208T also packs a total of 4GB of SO-DIMM DDR3L RAM at 1600MHz (expandable to 8GB), eight SATA III bays (support single, JBOD and RAID 0/1/5/6/10 modes), three USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, two eSATA ports, four RJ45 Ethernet ports (support link aggregation), HDMI v1.4b port, IR receiver and an S/PDIF optical audio output. So let's move forward with our review and see what the AS6208T NAS by ASUSTOR has to offer both in terms of features and performance.