ASUSTOR Lockerstor 4 Gen3 (AS6804T)

The Lockerstor 4 Gen3 is ASUSTOR going after the enthusiast and small-studio end of the market rather than the set-and-forget home user. The headline change is the move from Intel's low-power N5105 to a quad-core AMD Ryzen Embedded V3C14, and the rest of the spec sheet follows that ambition: 16GB of ECC DDR5-4800 out of the box, four PCIe 4.0 M.2 slots alongside the four drive bays, dual 10GbE plus dual 5GbE, and a pair of 40Gbps USB4 Type-C ports. On paper this is one of the better-connected four-bay boxes you can buy.

It's a straightforward black tower with front-facing bays and a small status LCD that shows the IP address - useful, unglamorous, exactly right for something that lives in a cupboard or under a desk. It ships diskless, and given the flash-heavy design options here, budgeting for drives is a real part of the decision rather than an afterthought. Reviewers consistently frame it as a machine for video editors, photographers, small creative teams and homelab builders who will actually use four network ports and an NVMe cache tier; casual users looking for a photo backup appliance are being asked to pay for capability they won't touch.

The value proposition rests on throughput. Two 10GbE ports and two 5GbE ports on a four-bay chassis is unusually generous, and pairing that with four PCIe 4.0 NVMe slots means you can run a cache layer over spinning disks or go fully all-flash without an expansion card. ECC memory as standard is the detail that most signals intent - this is aimed at people storing work they can't afford to silently corrupt - and 64GB headroom leaves room for containers and VMs, with non-ECC modules available if you'd rather trade integrity for cost.

The compromises are real, though, and worth understanding before you buy. Dropping to the Ryzen Embedded part means losing the HDMI output and integrated graphics of the Gen 2 model, so if you were using the NAS as a local media player or relying on hardware-accelerated transcoding, this is a step sideways rather than forward. The USB4 ports are also narrower in scope than the 40Gbps figure suggests: because AMD's USB4 drivers are in play, they handle external storage and direct links to other Lockerstor Gen3 or Flashstor Gen2 units, but not eGPUs or general Thunderbolt peripherals. That's fine if you planned on fast external volumes; it's a disappointment if you imagined a docking-station-style setup.

On the software side, ADM's automatic post-quantum hybrid TLS in 5.1 and later is a forward-looking touch, even if it's not something most buyers will feel day to day. I'd also note that shipping 16GB as a single SO-DIMM means single-channel operation until you populate the second slot - an easy fix, but not free.

One caveat on this assessment: with no confirmed pricing available to us, I can't judge whether the hardware represents good value against competing four-bay units, and I've rated the machine on capability alone. Verdict: a well-specified, clearly targeted NAS that earns its keep if 10GbE networking and NVMe tiering are on your requirements list, and is overkill - with a transcoding asterisk - if they aren't.