Compatibility / Asustor

Asustor Compatible Hard Drives - The Largest List, Read Properly

Asustor's list read 19 August 2026. Prices last refreshed 2026-08-20

The size of the thing

Asustor's compatibility table returns 6,703 rows covering 869 distinct devices, of which 703 are hard drives. Fold away the firmware-revision duplicates and that is 666 distinct part numbers a buyer could actually go and look for. For scale: TerraMaster publishes 173 rows and Synology lists between four and forty-seven drives per machine, every one of them its own.

A list that large changes what “not on the list” means. When a vendor names forty drives, absence tells you almost nothing. When a vendor names 666, absence starts to carry a little signal - not that the drive fails, but that it is probably newer than the last testing round, or sits in a class Asustor does not test.

Enterprise outnumbers NAS-class in Asustor's corpus, which is unusual and follows from their rack range. The SAS rows belong to those machines and are irrelevant to a desktop unit - a SAS drive in a SATA-only chassis is simply not seen.

Asustor's hard-drive compatibility list, read from www.asustor.com, read 19 August 2026. We record what the list said on that date; we do not re-read it when you load this page.

Published by series, and the binding nobody publishes

The table's last column is NAS Series, and it carries 27 values - AS 10, AS 33 v2, AS 68, AS 72R and the rest. Every drive row names the series it is approved for. There is no per-machine column at all.

Asustor does not publish which series maps to which machine on the product page, so we present the list at the level Asustor publishes it. We read 32 product cards during the sourcing session and not one of them names a series; the two we followed in detail - LOCKERSTOR 6 Gen3 and FLASHSTOR 6 Gen2 - link only to the generic compatibility page.

The series names look like model-number prefixes, and if you own an AS6806T you can probably guess where to look. We are not going to publish that guess as a table. Several of the 27 names do not resolve cleanly under the pattern: AS 31/32 spans two prefixes, AS 65 and AS 65R split on a suffix that means rack rather than desktop, and no series in the list begins with FS at all - which is consistent with the 4 FLASHSTOR machines being all-M.2 units with no hard-drive bays to qualify drives for. A machine-to-series table would be inference dressed as a vendor claim, and inference is precisely what this section of the site exists to avoid. Asustor's support desk will confirm your machine's series in one email.

What the series column does give you, honestly, is a picture of where the testing effort went.

Read that column from the bottom and the pattern is the opposite of what people expect: the shortest lists belong to the newest hardware. AS 12 carries 77 approved models against 283 for AS 63/64. Qualification accumulates - a machine on sale for five years has been through several rounds of drive testing and collected everything launched in between, while a machine released last year has been through one. A short list on a new Asustor is a statement about the calendar, not about the machine being fussy.

Breadth of approval, the signal only this list carries

Because a drive row names every series it passed on, Asustor's list answers a question no per-machine list can: how widely has this drive been tested? The distribution is strongly split rather than clustered.

• 156 of the 666 part numbers are approved for exactly one series. Usually these launched alongside that machine and were tested once.
• 104 are approved for fifteen or more of the 27, and the widest reaches 24. These have survived Asustor's testing across several generations of controller and firmware.

Both groups are equally “on the list”, and a badge that collapsed them would throw the difference away - so where a drive below is listed, the note beside its badge says how many series it covers. If you are choosing between two listed drives at a similar price per terabyte, the broader approval is the safer one, and that is a genuinely useful tie-breaker you cannot get from QNAP or TerraMaster.

In stock now, and on Asustor's list

Internal SATA hard drives available today whose part number appears in Asustor's corpus, cheapest per terabyte first. 69 of the 131 in stock match; the 30 cheapest are shown.

The second line under each drive is our recording-technology reading and Asustor's own class for that part number. The badge note carries how many of the 27 NAS series the drive is approved for. Buy links are affiliate links; prices update every few hours.

In stock, not in the corpus, fit-verified by us

Even a list this large has gaps, and they are concentrated exactly where you would expect: the drives launched most recently. Every row here is absent from Asustor's corpus and passes our own check instead.

43 in-stock drives are absent from the corpus and pass every fit clause. The remaining 19 are counted here rather than dropped, each against the clause it failed:

• 12 - Recording technology unconfirmed - we do not assume CMR
• 7 - SMR recording - not for a rebuilding array

How this list was actually read

Two things about Asustor's table make it easy to get wrong, and both produced a confidently incorrect number before they were caught.

It renders nothing to a plain fetch

A straight HTTP request for that page returns fifteen table rows and zero data rows - the markup is a JavaScript template, and the manufacturer names visible in it are template vocabulary rather than drives. Reading it requires a real browser session, which is why every claim on this page carries the date somebody sat and loaded it.

The default view is chunk one of forty-four

With every filter unset the table shows eighty rows across three manufacturers - Apacer, Crucial and Gigastone - which reads like a complete and surprisingly small list. It is not: the table is lazily paginated behind a “Load more” control, the rows are ordered alphabetically by manufacturer, and those three are simply the alphabetically first three. Exhausting the control took forty-four clicks and turned eighty rows into 6,703. Anyone reporting the default view would have published a list 98% short of the real one and would have had no reason to doubt it.

Matching that corpus against our catalogue has one more trap in it. 96 of the model strings carry a trailing factory code after a dash - ST32000NM004K - 3UB133-002 - and no retailer prints that tail. Matching whole strings finds 69 of our in-stock drives on the list; matching the base part number finds 69, and the drives that difference adds are Exos and Ultrastar models that are genuinely, checkably there. We match on the base part number and require exact equality, never a substring: a looser rule is how a page ends up printing vendor-listed for something the vendor never named.

What to do with all this if you own an Asustor

Start from the fact that the list does not gate anything. ADM will initialise and pool a drive Asustor has never seen, so the list is an input to a buying decision rather than a boundary on it. Then, in order: confirm the interface your machine takes, because the SAS half of the corpus is irrelevant to a desktop unit and buying from it wastes real money; check recording technology, since a shingled drive in a rebuilding array is the failure that costs weekends; and only then weigh the list.

If the drive you want is on it, the breadth figure in the badge is a free tie-breaker. If it is not, that is the ordinary case for anything released recently, and the fit-verified table above is the answer to it. Either way the decision that moves the most money is price per terabyte, which is what the NAS drive rankings and today's best NAS drive exist to settle.

And if you are still choosing the machine: Asustor's posture is one of the more permissive of the five we track. QNAP is similar in spirit with a per-machine list, TerraMaster publishes one shared list with a three-state verdict column, and Ubiquiti publishes a specification and no list at all. The outlier is Synology, whose 2025-and- later Value and J-series machines refuse to create a storage pool on an unlisted hard drive - and which lists no third-party hard drive at all.

Related

NAS compatibility hub · Asustor NAS units, priced · CMR or SMR by model · NAS drives by $/TB · What it costs to fill a NAS · SAS vs SATA

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