ASUSTOR AS-304T Multi Media Storage Server Review

Download Center is a great little app that will automate your torrent downloads.  There is no reason to have a NAS device unless you can consume and store data on it and torrents are a great way to do that.  In fact there are quite a few downloading apps in the ASUSTOR App Central that can help you download things like TV shows and anime programs or simply find movies you haven't seen before.   There is also an app to download Youtube videos which doesn't help the youtuber but does allow you local access for casual viewing.

App Central is the ASUSTOR location for programs you can install on the AS-304T.  The idea with the App Central is to provide up to date versions of programs configured to run on the NAS.  In our testing we also installed a few applications from App Central just to see how they worked.  Many of the applications installed just fine and required no configuration on our part. 

Installing some of the more complex applications like PHPBB required extensive configuration after the download just to get them running.  Having used PHPBB in the past we had expected a certain level of setup but the experience here was no different than if we had downloaded it directly from PHPBB.com and installed it ourselves. 

The same was true for another sample application, Dolphin.  The difference here was that the install script detected that some of the files didn’t have execute permissions.  If you were installing this on a regular Linux box you simply issue a “chmod 777” and away you go but, this is a NAS.  Lucky for us Asustor allows shell access via SSH and even includes a browser based command line tool such an emergency.

Of course had the App Central actually done more than simply download the source code and adding a shortcut we would have needed shell access to begin with.

App Central also includes an auto update feature that scans the installed applications and will determine if you need an upgrade based on what versions are available.  From there you can choose to update all of the applications at once or select individual apps at the touch of a button.  ADM will also notify you when a system update is ready and prompt you for action.

As part of our testing we decided to sign up for the Beta program and were able to test out version 2.1 while it was still in development.  When the final version was available we got an alert and were prompted to download the new firmware.  After a few short minutes the NAS rebooted and we were presented with the final version of the OS.

All of this is very impressive considering that we only scratched the surface on what applications they have available.  The web admin is also impressive given that it does real time monitoring and is quite powerful in setting the required configurations.