CONCLUSION

   Marvell is known to design and manufacture cost-effective ARM CPUs which in some cases are just not powerful enough to compare with what we see by Intel and AMD. Because of that pairing the Marvell 7020 dual-core ARMv8 Cortex-A72 CPU with just 2GB of non-expandable DDR4 RAM would had been wrong for many reasons if the AS4004T was also aimed as a HDMI media player. However, it’s not and so we did get very good data transfer performance during both our 1GbE and our 10GbE tests. We did encounter what looked like performance related issues with the Netstat app (of course it could also be a bug with the app) but other than that the AS4004T performed very well. The all-plastic housing may not exactly scream “quality” but it does look nice and the same applies for the magnetic front cover. Noise levels are also very low so you should even be able to use this NAS in your living room without any issues. As for power consumption although at start-up the AS4004T jumps all the way to 29W we didn’t record over 21W during all our tests.

   With a price tag currently set at USD359 inside the USA (Amazon.com) and at 349Euros inside the EU (Amazon.de) the AS4004T is indeed a very affordable 10GbE NAS. Of course, if you don’t already own all the necessary 10GbE devices (switch or router and of course a card) that cost will triple in no time (although that does depend on the type of the equipment) so that’s something to think about. Overall, we were pleased with the performance and features of the AS4004T and although that’s enough for us to give it our Golden Award unless you plan on moving to 10GbE sometime in the near future (or you already own the needed equipment) one of the more “affordable” ASUSTOR models could be a better match for you.

PROS

- Very Good Performance
- 10GbE Ready
- ADM v3 Operating System (User Friendly)
- Low Power Consumption & Noise Levels
- Android / iOS Apps
- Dual Gigabit RJ45 Ports (Link Aggregation Supported)
- Two USB 3.0 Ports
- Single / JBOD / RAID 0 / RAID 1 / RAID 5 / RAID 6 / RAID 10 Modes

CONS

- Non Expandable RAM
- No HDMI Output
- 10GbE Equipment Costs