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If you don't have to cater for 3.5in disks – or 2.5in ones for that matter! – then you design a NAS that doesn't look like one. Asustor's Flashstor 6 Gen 2 looks a million miles away from the normal-looking NAS box, more like a digital media player or gaming system rather than a boring old cube. It measures just 48.3mm high (with a width of 308.26mm and 193mm deep) and weighs in at 1.4 kg. The four system LEDs are all in the top panel of the unit; Power (blue/orange), System Status (green), Network(blue/purple) and Drive Indicator (green).
The front panel is home to one of the three USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports supported by the NAS, and that's it for the front panel ports. Everything else is in the back panel; a 10GbE port, two USB 4.0 (40GB/s) Type-C and two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports.
The power button is built into the right-hand side panel and the whole panel glows red when the Flashstor 6 Gen is working.
The base of the NAS is dominated by cooling grills for the two cooling fans. The smaller of the two is for the Power logic PL807016B12H 70mm 4,500rpm blower fan that cools the CPU. The second is for the Everflow R128010BU 80mm 4,200rpm fan that helps cool the SSDs. The speed of the SSD cooling fan can be controlled via the ADM OS.
To access the six M.2 SSD slots (2280 only) you have to remove the four screws in the base around the bigger of the two fan grills. Then slide the cover off to reveal the slots. The slots are tool-free using a simple latch-like device to hold them in place. We used mainstream drives for testing and just used the cooling fan to keep the drives cool but if you want to use high-end drives or are planning on using the NAS for very high throughput work then we would advise buying the optional Asustor heatsinks.
The Flashstor 6 Gen 2 comes with a single 8GB ECC DDR5-4800 SO-DIMM installed but supports up to 64GB of memory via two DIMM slots. To access the memory you remove two screws in the back of the unit (one below the Kensington Lock Slot and one above the rest button and slide the top of the unit off.
