12 lanes of PCIe4 for the m.2 (1x per m.2), Dual 10gbe. USB4 (thunderbolt?)
And ECC.
Asus rep says they think it may support up to 96GB of ram.
Heh.
Cool device, unfortunately no GPU so not for me…
Looks attractive. I’d want confirmation that it’s true ECC rather than the pseudo-ECC that DDR5 uses, and I’d like to know what network controller it’s using. But that’s quite a bit of very fast storage, potentially.
So how would you install TrueNAS on this, anyway?
Normal way is to temporarily add a graphics card. So that you can continue bios to boot off a USB or something. Maybe via an m.2 to PCIe adapter?
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That would kind of suck for me since I don’t own one, but I guess it’s a moot question–I just bought one NAS (the Ugreen 6-bay) I don’t need; I doubt I’ll be buying another one soon. Good news about the ECC too.
If this unit is what this fella says it is, I’m going to wish I waited to build my NVMe NAS. I like how compact it is and the idea of using only one PCIe lane per NVMe makes complete sense from an I/O perspective.
As for running TrueNAS, well he said it can be done however I’m curious what bells and whistles can be utilized other than just being a NAS. Run any VMs?
But if it does what he says, even if it is just a NAS device, I’m impressed. And the footprint, I like that too. And who doesn’t like Low Power and Quiet?
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I was following the previous gen, and apparently it did work with TrueNAS, and like the guy says, this one seems to fix all the deficiencies.
Only thing is no GPU. But perhaps that’s the sacrifice they had to make.
Only a 4core 8 thread CPU, but seems to have a decent turbo.
Seems fairly amazing at this level.
A few smaller ones, I’d expect. It isn’t the beefiest of CPUs, but should be enough to handle some lighter-weight stuff. I don’t think I’d want to plan on running Windows Server as a VM, though…
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I miss the old days of serial consoles, (or remote text consoles via network SC / IPMI). They were cheap and reliable. Of course, x86 / x64 BIOSes were designed as a full screen color TUI, (Text User Interface), unlike Sun’s OpenBoot which was simple command line.
If this thing had a serial port, (even if just internally accessible), that might be enough for installing Linux or FreeBSD. Not sure if TrueNAS could be installed as such.
Now it does appear that M.2 M Key serial port adapters are available… not sure if it would need to remain after installation.
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I’ve had a flashstor 12 (gen 1) running TrueNAS for just over a year. Asustor even have a howto video on their youtubes with instructions for installing alternative operating systems.
The main issue is the lack of fan control under TrueNAS due to the ‘non-standard hardware’ (TrueNAS speak). Enabling fan control means compiling and installing kernel modules which means iX/TrueNAS washes their hands of you and leaves you out in the wilderness if things go wrong - related or unrelated.
I wrote a guide and a fan control script for 22.x (GitHub - bernmc/flashstor-trueNAS-fancontrol: Asustor Flashstor temperature monitoring and fan control for TrueNAS-Scale).
From 23.x, you need to enable Developer mode, and there have been some more recent changes to the kmod that mean I need to relook at the installation. I’ve been happily running 22.x, but it’s now at the point where app catalogues don’t sync, so I’ll need to sort out the upgrade shortly, if only to stop the irritating error emails.
The flashstor Gen2 uses different hardware, so I it may need a different approach to sorting out the fans, but we’ll only know once it’s available.
It’s a great little machine, currently running 48TB of m.2’s, all bought on sales like Black Friday, and all the drives are the highest TBW I could find at a reasonable price.
App-wise, I only run Tailscale and TinyMediaManager. I have a couple of Synology machines doing the usual docker stuff - the Synology OS is just so good that I can’t be bothered fiddling around with anything else to run non-storage things, so I’ve never pushed the flashstor’s CPU.
In reality, I seldom push the 10G NIC or available NVME throughput, so it’s all overkill. But we like to play, don’t we 
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