Asustor Drivestor 2 Pro AS3302T Review

Designed for use as a personal cloud server, the Asustor Drivestor 2 Pro ($249) is a reasonably priced two-bay NAS that offers multi-gig connectivity and numerous USB ports. It also has a generous catalog of apps that let you press it into service as a media server, a backup solution for photos, music, and other important data, a surveillance center, and more. It delivered solid file-transfer performance in our tests and is easy to install and manage, making it a good choice for personal use. That said, small businesses can get better performance and a few more features with its pricier sibling, the $399 Asustor Lockerstor 2 AS6602T.

Sleek and Loaded With Features

The AS3302T uses the same glossy black 6.6-by-4.4-by-9.0 inch (HWD) enclosure as the AS5202T we reviewed a while back, but instead of a red Asustor badge, it's rose gold. Behind the magnetic front cover are two hot-swappable 3.5-inch drive bays that offer tool-free drive installation. It supports a total two-drive storage capacity of 36TB, and supports JBOD, Single, RAID 0, and RAID 1 configurations and EXT4 and Btrfs file extensions. If you hook it up to an expansion unit, you can get up to 252TB of storage. As is the case with most of the NAS devices that we review, the AS3302T doesn't come with storage drives.

The AS3302T is powered by a Realtek RTD1296 ARM quad-core 1.4 GHz CPU, 2GB of DDR4 RAM, and 8GB of flash memory. It lacks the HDMI port and M.2 NVMe solid-state drive (SSD) slots that you get with the Lockerstor 2 AS6602T, but it does support 4K video transcoding and is equipped with a 2.5Gb Ethernet port and three USB 3.2 ports, one of which is located on the front of the enclosure. The remaining two USB ports are around back, along with the Ethernet port, a power jack, and a single 70mm fan that helps keep internal components cool.

The Drivestor 2 Pro uses the latest Asustor NAS operating system, ADM (Asustor Data Master) 4.0, which provides more security than older versions but still offers an intuitive Windows-like appearance. You can also use multiple Asustor AI mobile apps to control things with your phone, but ADM gives you everything in a single user-friendly web console. When you first launch the OS, you’re presented with a desktop populated with more than a dozen tiles including Storage Manager, Access Control, App Central, File Explorer, Activity Monitor, and Settings tiles.

Tap the Activity Monitor tile to view CPU, memory, and network activity. Here you can also view drive-usage statistics in a colorful pie chart format. To add shared folders, create users groups, and assign privileges, tap the Access Control tile. The Storage Manager tile opens a screen where you can create and manage data volumes, perform RAID scrubbing, manage SSD cache, view drive health statistics, scan for bad blocks and other disk errors, and view S.M.A.R.T. (Self Monitoring Analysis and Report Technology) drive information.

The File Explorer can be used to browse and manage files stored on the NAS, assign folder permissions, and share links to files. The Backup & Restore tile takes you to a screen where you can configure the NAS for remote syncing, set up cloud-based backups, create backup schedules, and configure the One-Touch Backup feature for use with external USB drives.

Tapping the App Central tile opens a screen with more than 160 Asustor and third-party apps that let you use the NAS in a variety of ways. There are over two dozen categories, including business and home productivity, security, home automation, surveillance, media server, backup and sync, content management, and web hosting. These apps allow you to press the AS3302T into service as an OwnTone or Plex Server, an automatic backup solution for phones, tablets, and PCs, a cloud server for sharing photos, music, and other personal data, a mail server, and much more. By way of comparison, the QNAP TS-253D-4G offers up to 118 apps and the Asustor Lockerstor AS6602T offers more than 340 apps.

To edit network settings, configure fan speed and disk hibernation settings, and manage system error notifications, use the Settings tile. Here you can also manage the appearance of the portal screens, use ADM Defender to protect the NAS from malware, use the Certificate Manager to establish secure SSL connections, and configure DHCP and Proxy Server settings.

Easy Installation, Good Performance

As with other Asustor NAS devices that we’ve tested, the AS3302T is easy to install. I started by installing two Seagate 10TB Ironwolf drives and connecting the NAS to my router using the included LAN cable. I opened a browser on my desktop PC (also connected to the same router), typed acc.asustor.com in the address bar, and downloaded and installed the Asustor Control Center software.

Upon launching the program, the AS3302T was immediately recognized, so I tapped the Uninitialized button and followed the instructions to update the ADM operating system. After several minutes, the NAS restarted and I clicked 1-Click Setup and selected Balanced as my storage option, which automatically creates a volume, configures the drives for RAID 1, and provides 9.09TB of storage capacity. The initialization process only took a couple of minutes, but the ADM software needed close to 20 hours to sync the drives, which isn't unusual.

To measure NAS performance, we time read and write speeds while transferring a 4.9GB folder containing a mix of music, video, photo, and office document files back and forth between the NAS and a desktop PC connected to the same network. The AS3302T’s write speed of 89MBps beat the TerraMaster F2-210 by 19MBps and came within 1MBps of the QNAP TS-253D-4G. The Asustor AS6602T led with a score of 92MBps. On the read test, the AS3302T managed 81MBps, once again beating the TerraMaster F2-210. The QNAP TS-253D-4G scored 90MBps on this test and the Asustor AS6602T took top honors with 94MBps.

An Excellent NAS for Personal Use

The Asustor Drivestor 2 Pro is a solid choice if you're looking to store and share photos, music, movies, and important data using your own personal cloud. It’s easy to set up and install, even easier to manage using the latest version of Asustor’s ADM operating system, and it offers a wealth of Asustor and third-party apps that let you stream video, monitor surveillance cameras, back up your phones and PCs, and serve email. Although it delivers solid file-transfer speeds, it isn’t quite as fast as the more expensive Asustor Lockerstor 2 AS6602T. Granted, the Lockerstor 2 is a better fit for small business use, but it does provides superior performance and more apps, and it's equipped with an HDMI video port and a pair of M.2 NVMe solid-state drive (SSD) slots. Depending on your needs, either NAS is a strong choice.

The Asustor Drivestor 2 Pro is a two-bay NAS that offers solid performance with multi-gig Ethernet and a nice selection of apps, making it a good personal cloud server and backup solution.

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