Part Analysis
Taking apart the NAS was easy. I only had to remove several screws.
The six 2280 M.2 slots are installed in a small space, but thankfully there is a cooling fan above them to keep the NVMe drives at low operating temperatures. All are PCIe Gen 3 x1, so don’t expect to get the full performance out of any NVMe drive you install since most of them are PCIe Gen 3 x4. Still, 1 GB/s from one NVMe slot means 8 Gbps, a speed that you won’t be able to utilize even with both ethernet ports of this NAS, teamed. So you should install affordable but durable NVMe SSDs and not go for over-spec ones, which the NAS won’t be able to utilize fully.
Moreover, Asustor doesn’t provide any extra heatsinks for the NVMe drives. I know there is a fan above them, and some SSDs come with their own heatsinks, but it would be nice to have some heatsinks included in the bundle. The capped speeds, because of the PCIe Gen 3 x1 interface, won’t stress the controllers of the drives, keeping temperatures low.
