Asustor AS-204 TE Review

welshdragon · 15 Mar 2014 at 09:53

Good morning,

I've now finished my review of the Asustor AS-204TE. It can be found HERE

In a nutshell the price/performance ratio on these is crazy and they are fantastic nas units with great htpc capabilities.

As always any constructive feedback welcome!

niko · 21 Mar 2014 at 14:34

thanks for posting this, any thoughts on comparing this to the 304t ?. there doesn't seem a whole lot of difference in spec or price. which would you recommend

welshdragon · 21 Mar 2014 at 17:28

My pleasure. The main difference is of course the cpu with the 304t offering more grunt. It all depends really on it's intended use. For storage and local playback using the portal then this is a great unit. If you have multiple concurrent connections etc then the extra cpu grunt will help.

The 204te uses the atom CE5310 chip whilst the 304t uses the CE5335 chip. The difference being that the 5335 chip is a SoC which supports hardware encoding which means once the likes of Plex start to support it you should find that you can transcode on the fly. Useful if running a Plex server and a Plex client on say an ipad and your media is not mp4.

Again, depends on needs really. What will it be used for?

niko · 21 Mar 2014 at 18:10

thank you mate
the obvious really , to back up my files to and to enable me to have access from off site. as a media server and possibly to add in ip cams in the not to distant future. The intention is to have two hd's as storage and two as backups (one big storage drive and two independent copy's if that's possible? I like backing up my back up!)
I guess power usage plays a part in deciding, if its not to big a performance hit
cheers nik

welshdragon · 22 Mar 2014 at 06:17

Yeah there are a number of ways you could set up the drive. You could also check out their Myarchive feature which may be quite handy.

I would probably be minded that the 204te is plenty for the tasks at hand

niko · 22 Mar 2014 at 07:02

welshdragon said:
Yeah there are a number of ways you could set up the drive. You could also check out their Myarchive feature which may be quite handy.

I would probably be minded that the 204te is plenty for the tasks at hand

thanks again mate