Asustor Lockerstor 4 AS6604T NAS Review

If you are looking to upgrade your digital storage and find external hard disks lacking, you have got better options now. To meet your ever-increasing storage needs, and to have all your data connected and easily accessible from multiple devices and users, you can go with either cloud services or a NAS. The latter would suit you better if you want to have better control over your content and you don’t want to pay periodically to third-party online storage providers. So, that’s where a NAS (or Network-Attached Storage) comes into play. You can custom build it but the easier thing to do would be to buy something ready-made just like the Asustor NAS we are about to check out.

I had the Asustor Lockerstor 4 AS6604T (which is its full name) deployed at my home as the central storage hub for quite some time now. And here we will be taking a look at how convenient the thing is and if it could be the major storage solution you are looking for.

But first, let’s just get stuff like price, specs, and package contents out of the way.

Asustor Lockerstor 4 AS6604T NAS Unboxing

Asustor Lockerstor 4 AS6604T comes in a big box within which you would get the following:

• AS6604T Unit x1
• Quick Installation Guide
• AC Power Cord x1 with AC Power Adapter x1
• RJ-45 LAN Cable(Cat 5e) x2
• Flat Head Screw (for 3.5″ HDD) x16
• Flat Head Screw (for 2.5″ HDD) x16

The company had also bundled 4x Toshiba 2TB MG04ACA200E SATA 6Gb s 3.5″ Enterprise Hard Drives in the box.

Also Read:

• Synology DiskStation DS920+ Review: A Feature-rich NAS For Every Need!
• Synology DiskStation DS220+ NAS Review: Perfect Alternative to Cloud storage
• Best NAS devices of 2021 in India: Top Network Attached Storage for Homes

Contents

• Asustor Lockerstor 4 AS6604T NAS Design
• Asustor Lockerstor 4 AS6604T NAS Setup and Software
• Asustor Lockerstor 4 AS6604T NAS Performance
• Asustor Lockerstor 4 AS6604T NAS Review Verdict

---

Asustor Lockerstor 4 AS6604T NAS Indian price and specs

Dimensions and Weight: 185.5(H) x 170(W) x 230(D) mm; 2.96 kg
Screen: LCD Panel
CPU: Quad-Core Intel Celeron J4125
GPU: Mali-G52, 2.0GHz (burst up 2.70 GHz)
RAM: Up to 8GB SO-DIMM DDR4 (ships with 1x 4GB; Supports Mixed capacity, 1 empty slot)
Flash Storage: 8GB eMMC
HDD Storage: 4 x SATA3 6Gb/s; 3.5″/2.5″ HDD/SSD
M.2 Drive Slots: 2x M.2 2280 PCIe Gen 2 (NVMe)
Max. Storage: 72TB in 4 bays, although you can expand the bays up to 16 and storage up to 288 TB using an external unit.
Connectivity: USB 3.2 Gen 1 x3, 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet x 2, HDMI 2.0a x1, Infrared Receiver
System Fan: 120mm x 1
Power Supply: 90W x1; 100V to 240V AC Input Power Voltage
OS: ASUSTOR Data Master (ADM)
Asustor Lockerstor 4 AS6604T India Price: ₹80,963.97

---

And here we begin the Smartprix review of the Asustor Lockerstor 4 AS6604T.

The Asustor AS6604T enclosure looks like a stealthy cuboid thanks to its dark grey color. It can fit in well because of this and its size. The whole box with the drives installed doesn’t weigh a lot, although it’s built strong. So you can easily carry it around if and when you want. There are four rubber legs buttressing the chassis from the base.

The HDD drives have to be purchased separately. But inserting them is easy as just placing them in the caddies, push them in and they will lock. Unlocking is also a cinch as press and eject. That’s all.

Upfront, above the bay area, there’s the shining Asustor logo flanked by a small screen and four buttons. Beneath the logo lies the power button and LED indicator. Towards the bottom of it resides a USB-A port. There’s also the Lockerstor insignia by the bottom right corner.

By the rear, there’s an HDMI port, two USB-A sockets, a reset hole, two ethernet ports, and a DC-IN power port. A healthy selection, I remark. There is a big exhaust grille too at the back through which you can see the internal fan.

Plugging in the adapter, LAN ports and connecting their other sides to their respective source sockets, and hitting the power key turns on the NAS.

So, hardware-wise it’s a robust setup.

Time to set up the Asustor AS6604T on the software side.

The first thing you have to do is to download and install the Asustor Control Center (ACC). Open it and if everything’s setup right up till this point, then you should see the AS6604T pre-populated in the list with Ready status.

Double tapping it opens the Asustor Data Master (ADM) portal in your default browser on the computer. Log in with the preset credentials which were in my case admin and admin. Yours is likely the same. You can change this later and set a 2-factor authentication to better secure the whole thing.

ADM walks you through the key features and benefits of the Asustor Lockerstor 4 AS6604T.

Here you can primarily setup the user groups, shared folders, local groups, and app privileges within Access Control, Raid configuration within Storage Manager, enable various kinds of servers, activate various forms of backup and restore, etc.

Sure there is a learning curve to it and at first, things might seem overwhelming and confusing. But in time, you’ll get a hang of it.

One of the good things about Asustor is its tutorials at Asustor College. It is very exhaustive and if you spare time in learning things, you’ll. There’s also an Online Help shortcut within the ADM panel.

One minor quibble I have with the GUI is how the search function isn’t very adept at pulling up all the results related to that keyword/phrase. That’s something I feel the company should work upon.

So the default apps are useful and all. But there is a vast library of apps to download within the App Central.

Some of the use cases I’d suggest are:

• Since Google Photos free backup option has ended, someone like me with an iPhone 11 64GB variant needs to backup my photos to a safe drive somewhere. We have a nifty tutorial on how to retrieve the existing Google Photos content using Google Takeout and then you can move those to the NAS. You can setup AiFoto app for real-time photo backups from your phone to the NAS.
• You might also want to backup your videos, documents, music MP3s, and other files to the NAS. Not just old stuff, but even now some of us cinephiles and enthusiasts of good music and films would want to own the content. If so, what better way than storing all those collection at one place.
• If you happen to have older CDs and DVDs, you can rip them on to the NAS.
• You can manage these media files better with a Plex account. The free tier of Plex allows you to remotely access your content from anywhere, control this content, casting, organizing the content with metadata, tags, etc. I would also suggest you Map Network Drive to the Plex folder on your computer. Asustor has its own alternatives like AiData and such, which you can try.
• You can also install RetroArch on your Asustor NAS and play arcade titles. Take a shot of that Nostalgia!
• Run Virtual Machines on NAS for other operating systems. For example my brother who is a programmer employs Linux VM since the backend codes run better on Linux distros than Windows 11.
• Speaking of my brother, he also had Docker installed, which is a online container for running/testing programs and servers.
• If you happen to have unused phones or USB webcams, you can repurpose them as security and monitoring cameras with Asustor’s Surveillance Center.
• You can organize all your downloads, even the ones from torrent clients like Bittorrent at Download Center.

Activity Monitor app within ADM shows the performance stats of CPU, Memory, Network, and Drive.

Asustor AS6604T is powered by a 64-bit quad-core Intel Celeron J4125 clocked at 2GHz but it can turbo up to 2.7GHz. It supports up to 8GB of DDR4 SO-DIMM RAM. That’s plenty sufficient and the whole thing feels snappy.

The 4 HDD bays (with up to 18TB each) should satiate your storage demands but if you want you can also increase the capacity externally up to a mind-blowing 288TB (ie 16 drives x 18TB).

As aforementioned, I had slotted in four Toshiba 2TB 7200RPM HDDs. The 3.5mm inch drive has got a 7-pin connector. It works over SATA controller with 6Gb/s speeds. The internal data rate is 175Mbps, buffer size is 128MB cache, and seek time is 8.5ms. All those numbers aside, it served the purpose, that’s all that matters.

You can implement different RAID configurations. I went with RAID 5 for my setup since it facilitates more space, backup, as well as checksum security.

To improve the storage performance, you can add up to 2x M.2 SSDs. This can be utilized for caching if you want. The only niggle is that you need to open the screws to access these slots.

The boot and transfer speeds were fine. During the course of my usage, I did get a firmware update that would restart the system on its own.

You get to do the aforementioned storage expansion using the 3x USB 3.2 Gen 1 sockets. There is an HDMI 2.0a port for connecting a bigger TV display to this thing along with 4K transcoding support. If it were HDMI 2.1, the bandwidth would have been more along with other benefits.

A highlight feature of this Asustor NAS is its dual 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet ports. If you happen to have compatible cabling and switch, the internet speeds would be very fast as is required in a NAS setup.

Now while the Lockerstor 4 runs, I didn’t hear any bothering levels of noise or heat, which was great. The 120mm fan rotates at 635 RPM. If you are wondering, it is rated to sound at 17.6 decibels whilst the HDD stays idle. The operating temperature is stated to go up to 40 degrees celsius.

Asustor AS6604T is equipped with a fairly capable processor, ample storage options with the choice of expansion too, 2.5GbE internet speeds, and other connectivity ports, all in a well-built and quiet portable enclosure. It is easy to set up too and there is an abundance of apps to try within the built-in store. Even the system apps are helpful in taking care of various aspects of a NAS user experience. Although there isn’t much to complain about here, the fact that M.2 slots aren’t easily accessible, the search feature requires better indexing, and that the UI needs some learning curve can be considered my quibbles. They can’t be tagged major pain points as you see. So, if you are ready to invest in your next network-attached storage, this quad-bay Lockerstor 4 could be worth your consideration.