FLASHSTOR 12 Pro Gen2 FS6812X, 12 Bay All-Flash Enterprise NAS

I bought the Asustor FLASHSTOR 12 Pro Gen2 FS6812X to consolidate all my scattered USB drives and multiple storage setups into one fast, centralised system—and it’s been a fantastic upgrade. Here’s what stands out: I installed six 4TB NVMe drives and set them up in RAID 5, giving me around 20TB of usable space with redundancy. 12 x M.2 SSD slots offer massive potential for future expansion, and make this NAS totally silent—no spinning disks here. Dual 10GbE ports provide blazing-fast transfer speeds—file moves and backups are quick and effortless. The Ryzen Quad Core 2.3GHz CPU and 16GB ECC DDR5 RAM handle everything smoothly, even under load. The Asustor OS is clean and powerful with great tools for backup, media, Docker, and more. USB4 Type-C is a nice touch for external device access. Yes, it’s on the expensive side, but with these specs and performance, I think it’s worth every penny. If you’re looking for a high-performance NAS with tons of SSD storage potential, excellent speed, and a future-ready setup—this is it.

As someone working in the visual effects industry, I was genuinely excited to try the ASUSTOR Flashstor NAS. The hardware specs is impressive, 10GbE connectivity, and an SSD-only architecture make it an appealing choice for content creators and professionals dealing with large media files. The promise of performance, particularly for workflows involving sequential files like EXRs or image sequences, is what drew me in. ASUSTOR's marketing highlights this as being suitable for 4K editing and content creation, and I do believe the potential is there. However, after months of real-world testing across various system configurations, operating systems, and network environments, I encountered persistent performance inconsistencies. What I Tried: Multiple fresh installs of Windows (Home, Pro, Pro N, LTSC, and debloated variants) Swapping between ECC and non-ECC RAM Comparing different 10GbE NICs, including the one recommended by ASUSTOR Using tools like iperf3 and AJA System Test to monitor throughput Testing with SMB, NFS, and even attempts at running alternative NAS OSes Despite my efforts, performance would sometimes drop inexplicably. Transfers of 20GB+ EXR sequences could take hours under certain conditions, and at times, AJA tests would stop responding altogether. While large single-file transfers worked well and could saturate the 10GbE link, the NAS seemed to struggle under workloads that involved thousands of sequential frame reads/writes—something very common in VFX and post-production. To be fair, ASUSTOR's support team was responsive and polite throughout, and I truly believe they care about improving the product. I also want to highlight that in many editing scenarios (e.g., ProRes or large single video files), this NAS might perform excellently. But for artists working with dense image sequences and multi-user render farms, your mileage may vary. Why two Stars? The hardware is solid and well thought out. The vision behind the product is admirable—making high-speed SSD NAS accessible to professionals and enthusiasts. The performance just didn’t match expectations in my use case, despite extensive troubleshooting. I'm giving ASUSTOR the benefit of the doubt that with firmware/driver updates, this unit could evolve into something exceptional. If you're a content creator working with large video files, this might still be a great solution. But if you're in VFX, 3D, or any workflow that relies on reading thousands of files rapidly (e.g., EXR, DPX, or image sequences), you may want to do additional research—or wait for software/driver improvements. I’m still rooting for ASUSTOR. The enthusiasm and ambition behind their products, and I hope future revisions will take feedback like this onboard.

The NAS has great performance, easily saturating the 10 GbE interface. The OS is okay, pretty intuitive and a rich App Store. I've dropped a * because for me it really needs dual 10 GbE, or even an SFP+ or SFP28 interface. Also, it does feel a little cheap and it's frustrating that access to the drives is via 4 screws and then inside they have quick release. The case should have a quick access mechanism rather than having screws.

Whilst the specifications of this Flashstor Gen 2 unit are good. After only 1 year and few months it has had 2 corruptions of the NVMe RAID array, and now hardware failure of both network ports. Can't recommend as the most important thing in a NAS is reliability. The first time problem was simply extending the storage with additional NVMe drive (all top quality Samsung 990 Pro's). It detected the new drive and offered to extend and rebuild the array, as you would expect. Then after about 5% of the extend job it started beeping and the web management showed multiple drive failures (which was not the case). In the end I had to reformat all the drives on a PC. Then set it up from scratch and it was fine for nearly a year. Then became unresponsive. Hardware reboot and it came back on. Showed one drive needed rebuilding, kept getting to around 20% rebuild and then would report the drive missing. Tried a few times and reseated all NVMe drives. To top it off, both network ports broke. Factory reset etc. Network ports dead still. Returning unit.

the USB4/TB4 port DOES NOT WORK with a mac, really disappointed as it was not mentioned ANYWHERE.

PERFEKT - für meine Zwecke. Ich wollte eine leise, schnelle Möglichkeit meine Musiksammlung im haus Streamen zu können (roon) und eine Ablage für Daten zur Verfügung zu stellen. Das Lüfterlose Gehäuse ist für Musik-Fans ideal, das Ding ist schnell und zuverlässig, die Verwaltung easy, Applikationen laufen darauf problemlos und der Medienserver im Haus ist supper. An die Grenzen der Perfomance bin ich im Hausnetz noch nicht gekommen. Ich habe nur gesehen, was da drin steckt, als ich den Roon-Index aufbaute, der dauerte von USB-Disk gute 3 Tage und mit dem Flashstor jetzt gerade mal 25 Minuten. Verglichen mit allen HighEnd Musik-Servern ist der Flashstor echt günstig.

If you are looking for a best performance in a reasonable price, Asustor FLASHSTOR 6 Gen2 FS6806X is the device to go. I just tried a few things so far, I will update this review later. + Easy installation of SSDs and initialization of the NAS + Fast PCIE Gen 4 NVME interface + Fast 10gbps network interface + Fast CPU, never seen it above 10% (most of the time, it is around 1%) + You can install several apps, all run smoothly - It could have a better user manual and tutorial videos (it comes with Gen1 User Manual) - I dont like the red LED on the side, it looks like a gaming device not a professional device.

geen Wake on LAN... Gebruik HP laptop (655 g11) en krijg via thunderbolt maar een snelheid van 400 MB/s. Ik weet niet of het aan laptop of Flashstor ligt. Verschillende kabels geprobeert. Software is vrij goed (komende van Synology (die is qua software uiteraard wel beter maar dat stoorde me niet - de basis is ok).

So far everything works good. It's expensive NAS but depends on your priorities. I needed something really quiet and I think this device achieves that. That being said you still can hear electronics but I keep it where I keep other devices (e.g. router) and it is not disturbing me at all (although it's other room where I watch movies. Functionality wise is not the same as mature SW from other vendors. However, it has everything what I need so can't complain. The only downside I do believe that NVMe heatsink should really be included and not sold separately. If something changes in next months of usage to be negative I will update my comment