Buy Asustor for spec-dense boxes the big two don't make — especially all-flash.
Asustor competes by out-speccing: the Lockerstor line stacks M.2 slots, fast networking and (on Gen3) ECC DDR5 into traditional NAS chassis, while the Flashstor line is the most accessible all-NVMe NAS on the market. ADM is a competent, sometimes underrated OS. Asustor lacks Synology's ecosystem and UGREEN's price aggression, but for the niches it targets — quiet all-flash and connectivity-rich mid-range — it often has the category to itself.
| Brand | Model | Bays | CPU | RAM | Network | Wty | Price | Buy |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Asustor | Lockerstor 4 Gen2+ AS6704T 4-Bay ADM | 4 | Intel quad-core | 4GB DDR4 | 2x 5GbE | 3yr | $681.99 | Buy → |
| Asustor | Flashstor 6 Gen2 FS6806X All-Flash ADM | 6 | — | — | 10GbE | 3yr | $1,040.99 | Buy → |
| Asustor | Lockerstor 6 Gen3 AS6806T 6-Bay ADM | 6 | AMD Ryzen quad-core 3.8GHz | 16GB DDR5 ECC | 10GbE | 3yr | $1,770.99 | Buy → |
Cheapest in stock: Lockerstor 4 Gen2+ AS6704T 4-Bay at $681.99. Out-of-stock models show no price and drop out of rankings until stock returns.
Asustor Data Master (ADM) sits squarely between DSM's polish and TOS's austerity. The interface is clean and desktop-like, Btrfs snapshots are supported, Docker runs via Portainer or Asustor's own container app, and the App Central store carries the staples — Plex, Jellyfin, backup tools, and a working set of third-party packages. MyArchive, Asustor's cold-storage bay feature, lets you treat swappable drives as archive cartridges — genuinely useful and rarely copied.
ADM's limitations are ecosystem breadth and mindshare: fewer first-party services than Synology, a smaller community than QNAP, and mobile apps that are functional rather than delightful. Security-wise, Asustor took its lumps in the 2022 Deadbolt campaign and responded with meaningfully hardened defaults and faster patching. The standard rules — no exposed admin UI, VPN for remote access, snapshots on — apply here as everywhere.
Hardware is where Asustor earns its place. The Lockerstor 4 Gen2+ (AS6704T) gives you four bays, four M.2 NVMe slots — more than anything comparable — and 5GbE networking at a mid-range price. The Lockerstor 6 Gen3 steps up to a Ryzen quad-core with 16GB of ECC DDR5 and 10GbE, specs that read like a small server. And the Flashstor 6 Gen2 is the purest expression of the niche: six NVMe slots, 10GbE, near-silent operation and desk-friendly size — all-flash storage without building a PC. Nobody else ships this combination at these live prices; check the table above and the comparison is straightforward because there often is no direct competitor.
The Lockerstor 4 Gen2+ (AS6704T) is the sensible first Asustor: four bays, four M.2 slots, and 5GbE networking at a live price that sits between the budget brands and the incumbents. Those four M.2 slots deserve emphasis — no similarly priced Synology or QNAP offers them — because they let you run a spinning-capacity pool and a genuinely fast NVMe working pool in one chassis, a layout that usually requires two devices or a custom build elsewhere.
The Lockerstor 6 Gen3 (AS6806T) is the small-server option: a Ryzen quad-core, 16GB of ECC DDR5 — error-correcting memory in a desktop NAS is rare at any price — 10GbE, and six bays for RAID 6. It targets the buyer who was about to build a TrueNAS machine for data-integrity reasons and would rather buy an appliance. At its live price above it is not cheap, but the parts list to replicate it is not cheap either, and it arrives assembled, warrantied and quiet.
The Flashstor 6 Gen2 (FS6806X) is the specialist. Six NVMe slots, 10GbE, no spinning drives at all — near-silent, palm-of-bookshelf sized, and fast enough to edit multi-stream 4K video straight over the network. Its economics are inverted from every other box on this site: the chassis is a minority of the total cost and the flash is the majority, so check our SSD tracker's live per-terabyte prices before committing to a capacity plan. For video editors, photographers, and homelab users who value silence, there is effectively no competing product category — which is precisely why Asustor built it.
ADM's initial setup sits comfortably between DSM's hand-holding and TOS's austerity: the web wizard handles pool creation with clear RAID explanations, and Btrfs volumes enable snapshot support you should turn on immediately for every share. On a Lockerstor, decide the role of the M.2 slots up front — cache for a spinning pool, or an independent fast volume — because converting between those roles later means rebuilding. On a Flashstor, the equivalent early decision is RAID level across your NVMe sticks, where RAID 5's capacity efficiency usually wins for six drives.
Harden it in the same first hour: rename the default admin account, enable 2FA, set ADM and App Central to auto-update, and route remote access through a VPN rather than exposed ports — Asustor's own EZ-Connect is convenient but a tunnel is safer. Owners who lived through the industry's ransomware years will find ADM's current security-settings page reassuringly blunt about what should be off. Finish with a scrub schedule for Btrfs volumes and the box is set for unattended duty.
Asustor — an ASUS spin-off — has spent a decade as the industry's persistent third option, surviving in a market the big two dominate by finding configurations they decline to build. That strategy produced the Flashstor, the first genuinely accessible all-NVMe NAS line, and the Lockerstor's signature four-M.2-slot layout. The 2022 Deadbolt ransomware campaign was the brand's hardest chapter; its response — hardened defaults, rearchitected remote access, faster patching — was thorough, and ADM's security posture today reflects lessons actually learned.
The trajectory favors the niches: each Flashstor generation has moved all-flash storage closer to mainstream pricing, and each Lockerstor generation has pulled server-class features (ECC memory, 10GbE) further downmarket. Asustor will likely never out-ecosystem Synology or out-price TerraMaster — but for the buyer whose requirements match one of its configurations, the brand's decade of iterating on exactly those configurations is its own kind of track record.
Lockerstor bays take standard SATA drives — CMR NAS or recertified enterprise stock per our live per-terabyte rankings — while the M.2 slots and the entire Flashstor line take ordinary NVMe SSDs. For all-flash builds, watch two things: use SSDs with DRAM and sensible endurance ratings for pool duty, and remember that NVMe per-terabyte pricing remains several times HDD pricing in the current shortage market — our SSD tracker shows the live gap. The hybrid pattern many Asustor owners land on: spinning CMR drives in the bays for capacity, NVMe in the M.2 slots for cache or a fast working pool.
For Flashstor buyers specifically, plan capacity in flash economics from the start: six 4TB NVMe sticks buy 20TB usable in RAID 5, and the sticks will cost several times the chassis. Price the SSDs first on our live tracker, then decide whether the silence and speed justify the premium over a spinning build of equal capacity — for editing workloads they usually do, for bulk archives they never do.
Live per-terabyte rankings: NAS drives · CMR drive list · recertified enterprise. Upgrading an existing array? The upgrade planner computes net cost after resale.
Buy Asustor if: you want an all-NVMe NAS without DIY (Flashstor is the category), you want maximum M.2 slots and fast networking per dollar in a traditional chassis, or MyArchive-style swappable cold storage fits your workflow. Skip Asustor if: you want the deepest app ecosystem or surveillance platform (Synology), PCIe expansion (QNAP), the absolute lowest price (TerraMaster), or bleeding-edge value hardware (UGREEN) — Asustor wins on configuration, not on any single headline number.
The shortlist test: write down your requirements before looking at any brand, and if the list includes 'silent', 'all-flash', 'ECC memory' or 'four M.2 slots', Asustor is probably the only page on this site where every requirement is met by a single in-stock device at a live price. If none of those words appear on your list, one of the other five brands almost certainly serves you better per dollar — which is exactly how a niche specialist should be shopped.
Yes — a competent, sometimes underrated one. ADM handles the core duties well with Btrfs snapshots and Docker, hardware specs are aggressive for the price, and the Flashstor line effectively owns the accessible all-NVMe niche. Its ecosystem is smaller than Synology's or QNAP's, which is the honest trade.
An all-M.2-NVMe NAS line — no 3.5-inch bays at all. The Flashstor 6 Gen2 we track pairs six NVMe slots with 10GbE in a small, near-silent chassis. It is the easiest way to run an all-flash NAS without building a custom server, ideal for video editors and homelab users who value speed and silence over raw capacity.
For a traditional drive NAS, the Lockerstor 4 Gen2+ is the mainstream pick — four bays, four M.2 slots, 5GbE. Step to the Lockerstor 6 Gen3 for ECC DDR5, 10GbE and six bays. For all-flash, the Flashstor 6 Gen2. All three live prices are in the table above.
Yes — Plex is in App Central, and Intel-based Lockerstor models handle hardware transcoding. On the Ryzen-based Gen3 units (no iGPU), plan for direct play rather than heavy transcoding, as with Synology's Ryzen models.
In 2022 the Deadbolt ransomware campaign hit internet-exposed Asustor (and QNAP) devices. Asustor responded with hardened defaults, faster patch cadence and better remote-access architecture. The enduring lesson applies to every brand: never expose a NAS admin interface directly to the internet.
The models we track are diskless (Amazon listings bundling SSDs exist, but we exclude bundles from rankings). Add standard SATA drives to Lockerstor bays or NVMe SSDs to Flashstor slots — our live trackers rank today's cheapest options for both.