The manufacturer Asustor is introducing two new network storage products. The models are called Drivestore AS1204T and Drivestore AS1202T and come with 4 and 2 HDD bays, respectively. Both support 3.5-inch hard drives and don't sport an M.2 slot for SSD caching. Storage capacity can be expanded via expansion units that can accommodate up to 12 additional hard drives. Various RAID levels are supported, as usual.

Both NAS are positioned in the lower price segment, which is also reflected in their feature set. For example, they lack an HDMI port and all three USB Type-A ports are limited to 5 Gbps. PCIe expansion cards are not supported either, which means that users are limited to a single Ethernet port with 2.5 Gbps of bandwidth, which can be a significant upgrade compared to the 1 Gbps port that's usually found on entry-level NAS devices.

A Realtek RTD1619B SoC is onboard and features four cores with a maximum clock speed of 1.7 GHz. Unfortunately, the DDR4 RAM cannot be upgraded later on. The configuration with two bays (Drivestore AS1202T) has a power consumption of 11.6 watts under load, which drops to around 6 watts in standby mode.

As a possible alternative, check out the Asustor Drivestor 4 Pro Gen2 AS3304T v2 on Amazon.