The AS6604T is a solidly constructed, four-bay box stylishly rendered in matte black with easy-open, locking (not secure) trays. The trays don’t feature quick change rails, but they have metal frames–a trade-off I’ll take any day. There’s 4GB of DDR4 memory on board (and additional SODIMM slot is free) feeding a late-model Intel Celeron J4125. It’s quick.<\/p>\n

The front of the box is adorned by two stylish LED lights for power and status, as well as a 2-line, 12-character per line LCD readout with dual control buttons. These allow you to administer some basics and see the box’s status without logging on to the HTML configuration pages. There are also network and drive status lights, and a single 5Gbps USB Type-A port.<\/p>\n

On the back are two more 5Gbps USB Type-A ports, dual 2.5GbE ports that may be aggregated for 5Gbps of throughput, plus an HDMI 2.0 port that will drive an attached display for command line access, multimedia output, or virtual machines. A Kensington lock port is also provided.<\/p>\n

The box features a removable PCIe card with two M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 slots that’s easily accessible once you remove the box’s cover. Installing the SSDs takes perhaps 10 minutes and involves seven screws including the three for the cover. I do have one complaint which is that you can’t use the installed SSDs as a separate volume rather than cache, which would be my preferred methodology. QNAP allows this. Just putting that out there for ASUSTOR’s eyes.<\/p>\n