Asustor Lockerstor 4 Gen 3 (AS6804T) NAS Review

The Lockerstor 4 Gen 3 (AS6804T) is a throughput monster with dual 10Gig, dual 5Gig and two USB4 connections. Equipped with an AMD Ryzen Embedded processor, ECC DDR5 memory, and PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD capabilities, this four-bay NAS promises to deliver, but, who is it for? Lets find out together!

The Lockerstor 4 Gen 3 (AS6804T) may confuse you a bit; as the name implies, it is a replacement for a new generation, if you prefer- of the Gen 2 presented in 2022, but it certainly doesn’t feel like one. The new Lockerstor features are very compelling and suitable for a NAS, but it is a different product compared to the previous generation. Therefore, it doesn’t make sense to draw this comparison, but rather, it should be placed against other offerings with similar specifications.

First and foremost, Asustor decided to ditch the Intel N5105 for the significantly more powerful V3C14 AMD chip. This led to a hardware overhaul, bringing ECC DDR5 to the game and higher performance. It cost us, however, the HDMI port and the integrated graphics support. The importance of these losses is up to the individual user. However, the hardware and the I/O indicate that the end user Asustor has targeted with this product is someone in need of high data throughput, not necessarily a home user. That said, we never like to see valuable features removed from products.

A benefit of opting for this CPU is the ability to use ECC memory, which we find in the form of a single 16GB ECC DDR5-4800 SO-DIMM, expandable up to 64GB and with the option to ditch ECC functionality if you wish to install non-ECC modules.

Another highlight of the AS6804T is USB4 connectivity. USB4 has some of the features of Thunderbolt 4, and in this case, it offers speeds up to 40Gbps through a Type-C USB connector. Using an AMD CPU meant that Asustor had to utilize AMD’s USB 4 drivers and, thus, can only support external storage devices and direct connection between another Lockerstor Gen3 or Flashstor Gen2 series NAS. This means you cannot connect an eGPU or other Thunderbolt devices. Regardless, it offers yet another modern communication port for other storage devices at competitive pricing relative to the competition.

As for internal storage options, it offers four 3.5″ drive bays combined with four additional NVMe drive slots. You can have a total of eight drives in various configurations, while there are models with more drive bays and expansion units that bring the limit of drives up to 16. In addition, the SATA drives are hot-swappable, but not the NVMes.