ASUSTOR AS1002T 2-Bay Entry-Level NAS Review

A closer look inside

Once the cover is taken off the ASUSTOR AS1002T, the inner workings get revealed. We see a simple layout with the motherboard mounted on one side and a PCIe bridge for the SATA3 ports and power connections. Behind it all, we can spot the 70mm fan.

The hard disks aren’t just held up by the screws when you mount them, they are also supported by the frame itself. This should make sure that there isn’t any unnecessary strain on the SATA connectors and thereby also the drives.

The motherboard in itself is very simple and there aren’t many parts on it. The ARM CPU is located right in the middle and it has a small heatsink for passive cooling. There is a lot of free space on the motherboard as there isn’t any need for a lot more in a device like this.

The rear of the motherboard is almost empty, with little worth mentioning here. We do see the front USB port mounted here and above it the LEDs.

The PCIe bridge for the SATA connections is held equally simple as the motherboard is.

Taking a closer look at some of the parts, starting with the rear IO area, we see that there actually is room for more ports than were used. The power button is located to the right in this photo, followed by the reset button, the rear USB 3.0 port, the LAN port, and the DC power connection all the way to the left.

ASUSTOR went for a Marvell Alaska 88E1512 Gigabit Ethernet transceiver for the AS1002T and used a Samsung DDR3 chip for the system’s memory.

The final parts to show up closer are the LEDs and the FAN used, both can be seen below.