Overall, the Asustor LockerStor 2 is a superb device—just not for beginners. If you're after sheer performance, look no further.
For sheer networking performance, the LockerStor 2 AS6602T is a top choice that won't break the budget. You will need to pair it with a 2.5GbE capable switch (like this QNAP 5-port switch), but those are more affordable than ever, and your existing cabling should work. If you find yourself struggling with large file transfers for video editing tasks and such, look no further.
Looking for some blazingly fast network-attached storage? The LockerStor 2 from Asustor offers incredible performance and unique features at a great price. Retailing at $400 without drives, is this the high-performance NAS you've been waiting for? Maybe, but only if you know what you're doing.
The LockerStor 2 comes in two and four-bay models; we've reviewed the two-bay device. Internally the specs are the same, though there are a few external differences.
The LockerStor 2 looks unremarkable externally, featuring an office-like matt black plastic front and dark grey metal enclosure. Included in the box are two Cat5E network cables, mounting screws, and the power brick.
On the front, you'll find status lights for each drive bay, power, and network activity. The curious little black nub in the top right is an infra-red receiver for the optional remote control. Why does it have a remote control? We'll get to that later.
There's also a USB3.0 port in the bottom left, the frame of which is actually a one-touch backup button. Once configured, you can simply insert a USB drive, tap the button, and have the contents slurped up to your choice of archive folder. It's an incredibly useful feature that means you'll likely want to keep the LockerStor 2 on your desktop rather than hidden away.
Around the rear, you'll find the headline feature of dual 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet ports, two more USB 3.0 ports, and most curiously... a full-size HDMI port. That's right, you can hook up a monitor or TV to the LockerStor 2. That's also where the optional remote control comes in. We'll discuss the HDMI later in the section titled "Asustor Portal".
A single 70mm fan provides cooling, and in my experience, it ran silently—you're more likely to notice the noise of the hard drives clicking away.
Internally, the AS6602T is powered by an Intel Celeron J4125 Quad Core CPU running 2Ghz with a burst mode 2.7Ghz, backed up by 4GB DDR4-2400 RAM which is user-upgradeable to 8GB total.
There are also dual M.2 2280 NVMe SSD slots, though installation of these drives requires removing the whole case and unscrewing the NVMe tray.
The two drive trays are easy to remove, though not toolless. Everything you need to install drives is supplied in the box, and it's not something you'll need to do often. So what drives should you buy?
Network Attached Storage devices are not the same as small desktop computers: they're designed to run all the time. While they're much more efficient with their power requirements, the constant disk operations do take a toll on the hard drives, which spin every hour of every day.
Believe it or not, hard drives are not all the same, and I'm not talking about 5400 vs 7200 RPM speeds. You'll find different "classes" of hard drives depending on their intended purpose, according to how much workload they can handle, and the expected lifetime of the drive.
For my first NAS, I admit that I filled all four bays with an assorted collection of mismatched disks I had recovered from junk. Predictably, they all died within a few years, but I was able to replace them in a timely fashion without losing data in the process. You might not be so lucky, so if you can afford to, it's important to choose drives that are NAS-rated.
Seagate IronWolf drives are my go-to choice. IronWolf drives are rated to 180TB/year; the Pro line increases that to 300TB/year. Since I started using IronWolf drives, I haven't had one fail on me yet. That's probably because the average time between failures is 1,000,000 hours—or about 16 years!
Whichever type of drive you choose, a good tip is to either stagger your purchase or buy from a different retailer, to avoid getting all your drives from the same manufacturing batch. While extremely rare, if there happens to be a bad batch, you want to avoid all your drives failing at once.
The AS6602T is a two-bay device, though a four-bay model is also available. For data security, you'll need to use a RAID1 configuration, whereby one drive is essentially a duplicate of the other. In a four-bay device, you can opt to use RAID5, in which only a single drive out of four is dedicated as a spare, therefore, you use the drives more efficiently. You should also purchase drives of the same size for the LockerStor 2, regardless of which model you buy. You'll be unable to make use of the additional space from a larger disk until drives have been upgraded.
You also have the option of using RAID0 (striping the data across multiple drives for speed, with the total capacity being the combined capacity of two identical drives); or JBOD ("just a bunch of disks", combined into one volume). Your file system can be either EXT4 or BTRFS. BTRFS is newer, and supports snapshots, as well as allowing for intra-volume instantaneous file operations. In a RAID1 system, BTRFS can also protect against "bitrot", where data can become corrupted over time.
Managing your LockerStor 2 is all done using Asustor's custom operating system, called Asustor Disk Manager (ADM).
Installation was not as smooth as I would have liked. The helper utility (a generically named app "Control Center") successfully found the LockerStor2 on the network, but defaulted to loading the admin interface over a secure connection, which results in a security error for invalid certificates.
I had to bypass the error in Chrome by typing "thisisunsafe", and later enabled insecure connections.
Once I was into the setup interface, things began to run much more smoothly. It was easy enough to walk through the wizards to create a user account, configure the storage volume, etc.
Then you're thrown into the full Lockerstor ADM full interface and things are a lot less intuitive.
The main desktop view looks simple enough, but it wasn't immediately clear to me that new shared folders should be set up under the icon labeled "Access Control", rather than say a file manager app or control panel. After all "Access Control" implies some sort of user management.
The system-wide search feature isn't great either: searching for "Sync" doesn't find the "DataSync Center" app, while "DLNA" doesn't find the "miniDLNA" server app.
Part of the problem is that I'm so used to other systems, so it's a bit like throwing a Mac user into Windows for the first time. But even so, these simple tasks should be intuitive enough that it doesn't matter what system you're used to.
I'm accustomed to using link-local addressing (otherwise known as zeroconf) for other NAS devices. This means you can give a friendly name to your device, to access the management interface without typing in the IP address (such as mynas.local). While this works out of the box for Samba shares (just use smb://devicename/ ), it doesn't create a DNS entry on your router for admin access. This means you need to type the full IP address of your system each time to adjust any settings. If you want to use a more easy-to-remember name for the web admin, you'll need to route requests through the Asustor site (CloudID.myasustor.com or CloudID.ezconnect.to). This works, but be aware that this will expose your Asustor to the world.
On the four-bay AS6604T model this is less of an issue, since the IP address can be displayed on a front LCD screen. But on the two-bay model, this is awkward for typical home users, and really shouldn't be needed.
App Central is where you'll find hundreds of server components, including things like Plex. There's plenty for everyone here, and if you don't find what you want, you can always use Docker. Much of the software available in the Asustor App Central is, in fact, a Docker install script, which you'll find listed among your other images if you open up Portainer. The benefit of doing things this way is that server components tend to get updated more quickly.
One problem I ran into frequently while installing apps was the apparent inability to queue an install. If one app has the same pre-requisite packages as another, you need to wait for the first install to finish before doing the second.
Another example: installing the DLNA media servers defaulted to using the LAN2 interface, because that's what was plugged in at the time of install. When I moved the NAS and ended up using the other Ethernet port, the DLNA server just stopped working. I had to delve into the server options and switch that over to "auto", which really ought to be the default. Restricting your media server to a single interface only is just not the standard use case.
Lastly, those of you hoping to use the LockerStor 2 as a DIY CCTV system will be pleased to know that the Surveillance Center app includes a generous four camera licenses, which should be enough for most home users. Unfortunately, if you're running Mac OS Big Sur, as I am, you're out of luck. The management interface requires the installation of a driver, which doesn't work on Chrome, and isn't currently compatible with Big Sur at all.
In the grand scheme of things, these are all individually very minor issues. But combined, they point to a lack of real-world user testing and, consequently, difficulties for those new to the system.
That said, the LockerStor 2 is an absolute beast when it comes to performance.
Asustor claims up to 588MB/s Read and 583MB/s write speeds are possible on the AS6602T, but those figures should be taken with a bucket of salt. While those sorts of speeds may be possible in ideal lab conditions, utilizing both 2.5GbE ports in a link aggregated manner to a suitably equipped network switch and client, you're unlikely to ever achieve near those sorts of speeds at home.
For a more realistic performance test, I transferred a single large file in a variety of configurations, against a baseline of a similarly specced NAS that's equipped with only a Gigabit Ethernet connection. All volumes were created as BTRFS, and I measured the time it took to copy a 5.84GB file.
For testing purposes, we're using an Asustor 2.5GbE to USB-C adaptor on a MacBook Pro running Big Sur, and going via a QNAP 5-port 2.5GbE switch with the Cat5E cabling supplied with the NAS. This switch doesn't support link aggregation (and even if it did, we'd still only have the single 2.5GbE adaptor on the Mac side).
Shorter write times are better, with effective copy speed indicated in brackets.
These numbers were also reflected broadly by BlackMagic Disk Speed Test, the only difference being that the read speed from an encrypted folder was much faster than the write speed.
So what does this tell us?
Firstly, we can see that the 2.5GbE connection makes a huge difference–as expected–more than doubling the read/write speed in both RAID 0 and 1 configurations compared to a similar specced NAS equipped only with Gigabit Ethernet. However, the additional performance gained from running a striped RAID0 configuration compared to the one-disk redundancy of RAID1, appears to be insignificant.
Secondly, encrypting the folder massively reduces the write performance by about 25 percent (but not read). But, it's still significantly faster writing to an encrypted folder over 2.5GbE, compared to a non-encrypted folder on a Gigabit-only connection.
Lastly, using a volume on the NVMe drives was faster, but not fast enough to justify using the cost difference to regular HDDs. At that point, you're almost fully saturating the 2.5Gb Ethernet connection and would need to aggregate both ports to truly see any benefits of a faster disk volume. I'm unable to test this though. The only use case for an NVMe volume, as far as I can see, is if you wanted the fastest possible volume (such as for editing raw video files over the network), then to easily transfer those files to an encrypted and data secure folder on the HDD array for long term storage.
Regardless, if it's sheer transfer speed performance that you're after, this LockerStor 2 AS6602T is a fantastic choice.
Instead of an additional storage volume, the NVMe SSDs can be used to create a caching drive, where your system will place frequently used files. Unfortunately, this is very difficult to do quantitative benchmarking for. Not all applications that you run on your NAS are going to benefit from a caching drive. If all you're doing is copying files back and forth to the drive array, you won't see any significant speed improvements from a caching system. If you're running a Plex server and streaming or transcoding large movie files, you also won't see an improvement from a cache.
On the other hand, if you're running your own web server, you're more likely to benefit from those frequently accessed server files being stored on the SSD. Web software like Wordpress needs to read tens of thousands of small PHP files to generate even a simple webpage. Other things like virtual machines will also benefit to varying degrees from an SSD cache—similar to how your PC runs far better from an SSD compared to a regular spinning disk. But that's not something we can quantify for you by saying"an NVMe cache will make your system 20% faster".
You probably weren't expecting to find an HDMI output port on the back of a Network Attached Storage system, and that's completely understandable. However, if you need something that can do double duty as both a massive network storage system and a media center, the LockerStor 2 can do that. Sort of.
In order to use the HDMI output you'll need to install Asustor Portal from the App Center. It's included if you choose the default set of Home/Personal Applications, but can be installed individually too.
The Asustor Portal is essentially a web browser, with the home screen containing links to a variety of web services, including YouTube and Netflix. You can customize these links, or just have it default to a single one if you prefer.
The Asustor Disk Manager OS can also be used directly from the HDMI output, which makes it much easier to manage the device in-situ, without needing to jump onto another computer.
If you have VirtualBox installed, you can also operate the currently running VM from Asustor Portal. There's a bug in the current X-Org driver however preventing this from working when connected to a TV, but it works fine hooked up to a monitor.
The experience with media apps with far from satisfactory. In fact, they're not apps at all; they're web links. Upon opening YouTube, it presents a message that you're being redirected to YouTube web, and that you should consider installing the YouTube app for this device instead. There is no YouTube app though. After a recent update, I can no longer sign in either—YouTube won't allow sign-ins from an "insecure browser".
While Asustor Portal can technically output at 4K60, I found the general interface was quite sluggish, and even then, YouTube wouldn't actually permit anything higher than 1080p to be played. I don't have a Netflix account to test if that would output at 4K, but I wouldn't hold your breath.
Basically, any $50 media streaming stick is going to offer a far superior experience to Asustor Portal, so the only viable use-case here is for in-situ device management. For that, it works well.
Instead of first-party virtual machine manager tools, Asustor has VirtualBox for full virtual machines and Portainer for Docker images. These are both very competent tools that you might already be familiar with, though relying on third-party software means the experience is less integrated.
VirtualBox is easy enough to get up and running with your choice of virtual machine, and you even have the option of displaying the currently running machine (you're limited to one at a time) on the HDMI output via Asustor Portal. Unfortunately this didn't work in testing for me: both the admin interface and a Windows 10 VM refused to display at all. I'm still working through the issue with support at the time of publishing, though their solution so far was to delete and re-install Asustor Portal and the X.org package—which also resulted in a handful of other applications being deleted in the process (rather than simply pausing them until the requisite software was re-installed).
The VirtualBox admin interface can also be accessed from any web browser, and once in, you can view the currently running machine through your browser by clicking on the "Console" view. Be warned though, this requires Adobe Flash, so it didn't work for me in Chrome. This left Remote Desktop Management from another PC as the only option to access the virtual machine.
Both Portainer and VirtualBox are powerful tools if you know how to use them—but they are symptoms of Asustor's over-reliance on third-party software, resulting in an inconsistent experience.
For sheer networking performance, the LockerStor 2 AS6602T is a top choice that won't break the budget. You will need to pair it with a 2.5GbE capable switch (like this QNAP 5-port switch), but those are more affordable than ever, and your existing cabling should work. If you find yourself struggling with large file transfers for video editing tasks and such, look no further.
For pros who what they're doing and are comfortable with Portainer for managing Docker images, or VirtualBox for virtual machines, the LockerStor 2 is a beast that'll run anything you throw at it. You've also got the choice of either NVMe caching or as an extra fast storage volume for use with virtual machines. There's a lot of flexibility to configure the LockerStor 2 for your exact purposes. You'll find all the pro features you expect in a network storage system—but you may have to look a bit harder for them.
However, if you're looking for your first network storage device, it's difficult to recommend the LockerStor 2 to beginners. The interface design is inconsistent, and I encountered small issues during testing that combined lead to a difficult first-time user experience. The lack of Zeroconf naming meaning you have to type the IP address in every time, for instance, or the fact that the Surveillance Center doesn't work on Mac OS Big Sur. The Asustor Portal HDMI output is unsatisfactory as a media player, so this isn't going to do double-duty underneath your living room TV. It could prove useful for in-situ device management, but that's a rare use case.
Overall, the Assutor LockerStor 2 is a superb device—just not for beginners.
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James has a BSc in Artificial Intelligence and is CompTIA A+ and Network+ certified. When he's not busy as Hardware Reviews Editor, he enjoys LEGO, VR, and board games. Before joining MakeUseOf, he was a lighting technician, English teacher, and data center engineer.
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