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Comment by bayindirh | Hacker News Reader

ASUSTOR's latest gen hardware is ridiculous. Ryzen processors, upgradeable ECC RAM, 4xHDD + 4xNVMe, 10GbE plus a PCIe slot...

You need to add an external GPU for TrueNAS installation, but they have an official video for that. On top of that, they connected the flash which stores the original firmware to its own USB port, and you can disable it. Preventing both interference and protecting the firmware from accidental erasure.

All over great design.

Yes, it's not cheap, but it's almost enterprise class hardware for home, and that's a good thing.

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ASUSTOR looks interesting but none of their desktop units appear have PCIe expansion slots so you can't put a SFP28 card in there. It might be possible via expensive USB4 adapter.

I misremembered that Gen3 hardware had a spare PCIe slot, my bad.

You can either forego NVMe slots (which looks like an add-on card on [0]) and get the slot, or use one of the USB4 interfaces. OTOH, it has 2x10GbE on board, you can just media-convert it.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWgc8W-hIWM

That seems like a lot of effort - is there no ability to boot a custom thumb drive that loads something like an SSH terminal, or dummy display for VNC?

The problem is not getting TrueNAS on a disk. You can do it externally, but you need to disable the on board flash storage and change the boot order from the BIOS.

That box is "just" an I/O optimized PC which can boot without a GPU.

Older hardware with Intel processors have an iGPU on board. You can use the HDMI output on these directly.

Same, but I went with minisforum (another well known mini-pc brand): https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-n5-us

Installed unraid on it and it's been working great. So long, Synology.

Do all the models support ECC ram? If not, does the website say clearly which do?

I've been looking on and off for a smallish NAS for some use, but I'd really like it to have ECC. As it stands, I'm considering more and more compromising on the size aspect and getting some ASRock + AMD combo.

If I understood it correctly, all G3 hardware running AMD processors support ECC RAM. It's clearly labeled though.

The one I'm planning to get is at [0]. It clearly states ECC RAM.

[0]: https://www.asustor.com/en/product?p_id=86

I bought a small ASUSTOR NAS at work to check it out and I like it, it's definitely faster than comparable Synology units, however the camera system is quite underdeveloped compared to Synology. Synology's surveillance station rocks and ASUSTOR has a long way to go in that niche.

Thanks, good to know. I just want my files, and a couple of containers doing my backups, that's all.

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