Inside

The AS-20XTEs are powered by an Intel Atom CE5310 dual core processor running at 1.2 GHz. On the AS-204TE, there's an Asmedia ASM1061 PCI Express to dual port SATA on the backplane to provide the third and fourth SATA ports for the four bay version.

Other components are collected in Table 1, along with two other dual-core Atom NASes, ASUSTOR's AS-604T and a slightly less expensive Thecus N4560.

Below is a photo of the component side of the PCB. The processor is covered by a large heatsink. To the right of the processor is the connector for the riser board that contains the connectors for the disks. Above the CPU is the strip that connects to the power supply. Interestingly, the PCB is silkscreened with AS-30XT, so you might assume that the components are the same for the "3" series with the exception of a slightly beefier processor (1.6 GHz).

ASUSTOR AS-20XTE PCB component side

For an inside shot of the chassis, you can refer to the AS-604T review - the construction, as you can tell from the rear panel connector layout, appears to be very similar.

Features

When Tim reviewed the AS-604T, the device was running on version 1.0.4.RBU2 firmware. In February, ASUSTOR has upgraded their "ADM" (ASUSTOR Data Master) to version 2.1 with the tested version being 2.1.1.R3B2. Tim posted a news release that highlighted the new features here. To summarize, new features include:

• An improved file explorer
• MyArchive which allows users to use hard disks as removable storage archives.
• VPN Server app supporting PPTP and OpenVPN
• Integrated Avast Anti-Virus
• AiMusic app for Android and iOS to enable streaming from the NAS to mobile devices.
• Download Center Helper add-on for FireFox and Chrome browsers.

To give you a feel for ASUSTOR's GUI, here's a screenshot of the landing page. As with Android devices, if you have more than one page of icons, you can scroll left or right. We will be doing an in-depth review of the ADM 2.0 in a few weeks. In the meantime, if you can't wait for the review, you can visit ASUSTOR's live demo page and navigate your way through the interface and App Central.

In App Central, you can download additional programs that run on the server platform and add functionality to your ASUSTOR NAS. App Central sems to have grown since Tim's review of the AS-604T. According to my count, using the live demo, there are now 124 apps in App Central. Tim counted 85 in January of 2013, so you can't say that the number of available apps is "exploding".

ASUSTOR ADM 2.1 landing page

The feature list for the AS20XTE for the most part, lines up pretty well with what Tim reported for the AS-604T. Here's that summary, edited to reflect the differences in the devices.