The Asus FS6712X is a unique device that offers a blend of functionality and convenience. When it comes to acting as an external device, the FS6712X has been found to work correctly under certain circumstances. However, its ability to set up volume and Raid configurations is limited, requiring the use of command line utilities. The device's storage manager also fails to detect external discs, although backup options can be utilized.

For those looking to utilize the FS6712X as a media server, it requires a two-step process. This involves installing an application such as Plex or Asus Store Portal, which serves as a hub for streaming content to other devices on the network. However, these applications often come with their own set of requirements and configurations, which can be confusing for users.

One notable feature of the FS6712X is its ability to function as a media server, making it an ideal device for elderly or technologically-challenged individuals who require access to streaming services such as Netflix. This device's compact size and ease of use make it an attractive option for those seeking a simple way to stream content.

Furthermore, the FS6712X can be utilized with home automation systems, allowing users to control various aspects of their homes remotely. The device's ability to integrate with platforms such as Home Assistant, Lutron Caseta, or Zigbee, expands its potential applications and makes it an attractive option for those seeking a comprehensive smart home solution.

The FS6712X's hardware specifications reveal that it is based on a quad-core Celeron 2 GHz processor, which provides sufficient performance for most tasks. However, users should note that the CPU is non-upgradable, limiting its potential for future upgrades or modifications.

In terms of storage, the device can be equipped with up to 16 GB of memory, although this can vary depending on user configuration. The use of flash-based storage, such as m.2 drives, provides a compact and energy-efficient solution that eliminates the need for traditional hard disk drives.

One final consideration is the FS6712X's capacity limitations. Although it offers sufficient storage space for most users' needs, it may not be suitable for those requiring larger storage capacities. Nevertheless, this limitation can be mitigated by using external USB hard drives or network-based backup solutions.

In conclusion, the Asus FS6712X is a unique device that offers a range of features and applications, making it an attractive option for various users. Its compact size, ease of use, and compatibility with home automation systems make it an ideal choice for those seeking a simple media server or smart home solution. While its capacity limitations may be a concern for some users, the FS6712X remains a compelling option in the market, particularly for those seeking a niche device that offers a unique blend of functionality and convenience.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enit's a weird world we find ourselves in Asus store the fs 6712 X this is a network storage Appliance it doesn't take hard drives doesn't take SATA ssds it actually has 12 m.2 nvme Bays that's really strange I mean just one of these will saturate a 10 gbit ethernet link this is uh performance rated up to 2.1 gigabytes per second made for creators team group tcreate these ssds are actually not terrible on their own they're pretty good for this use case they're they're pretty good for just bulk storage in general they're pretty good to add to Multi-Device adapters where you can rock four or eight m.2 on a single pcie device and yet this is a very very strange product I mean it's a quad core Celeron it has 4 gab of ddr4 for the other stuff that we look at on this channel it doesn't seem like it would have enough horsepower to do anything really super interesting with this much raw storage I've got a total of six team group m.2 that're all one terabyte so this is six terabytes of storage four five terabytes of usable space for the time we're done and it's running Asus stores software although you can put your own software on this you can use it as a media center it could be completely silent I don't know anything about Asus store setup process but let's take you through it and I'll give you my thoughts I really am not sure what I'm getting myself into but let me walk you through it and I'll give you my thoughts along the way so the Box advertises Asus store data Master backup and Security application lifestyle applications business applications surveillance applications oo although flash for surveillance generally not a good idea because Flash wears out unlike mechanical hard drives which don't wear out exactly the same way supports Direct on NAS editing that really that right there doing video editing directly on a network storage Appliance is really what's opened up this entire market for unusual devices one thing that I like is Asus store taking a chance on an unconventional product because we need more of that kind of thing this thing does come with a three-year warranty it has two USB 3.2 Gen 2 that's 10 gbit ports it has an spdif port and it has a 10 GB ethernet port 10 gbit ethernet 1 Gigabyte per second on your network right here front USB power button on the side rear IO two USB 2.0 ports another USB 10 GB Port Optical SPD for like a stereo Hardware reset button DC jack in the accessory bundle you've got only a cable retention clip and a network cable and a very very modest quick installation guide no other manual or or other accessories here our installation guide says 2280 no 2230 no 2210 no 2262 no 2242 I'm also assuming no 22110 basically just means the only m.2 you can use in this is 110 mm which is maybe not amazing because you could 3D print an adapter that will take you from the super small m.2 like you can use on the steam deck or kyia BG5 ssds for example and you could use those in here if you can get a really good deal on them but I've got some news for you the tcreate line from Team group and these are incredibly affordable very inexpensive we're talking you know less than 50 bucks for a 5year warranty team group m.2 that's 1 tbte now in case you're thinking that you've done this kind of thing before maybe installing an m.2 on your PS5 or something like that generally the PS5 is going to benefit from uh more space and and better quality m.2 um in this case it's really not going to matter very much the bottleneck here is your 10 gbit Network Port 10 gabit might sound fast but that's actually only on the order of about 1 gbyte per second so a single m.2 is going to easily saturate the network connection and the rest of this unit is sized around that limitation so you get those two screws out then the top comes off like so revealing our ddr4 sodm slots it is dual slots you do get a benefit from adding a second 4 GB dim which team group would be happy to help you with and you can see we got another six slots on the top the magic here that makes all this work are these as media interface chips unfortunately our Celeron processor in this thing just doesn't have the PC C bandwidth to do all of this natively instead uh you're going to need some as media chips to to make that work and like I say this thing is sort of built knowing that the network is going to be the limitation so you're not going to be able to run these uh m.2 at full speed anyway even though this is an x86 platform and you can install non Asus store software on here generally I don't recommend it it's only a quad core Celler on you're not going to be able to run say ZFS on this uh with any appreciable speed you're going to suffer a little bit in other words now I'm going to do something a little unusual I think they intend for you to just put 1 2 3 4 56 in the bottom because the the more easily accessible slots are numbered 1 2 3 4 5 6 but I'm preferring to put the m.2 in the top here um so that in the future if I add more m.2 to this all I have to do is pop the bottom off another reason these are the ideal choice m.2 for this is because heat and power higher performance higher higher wattage higher power there's no heat sink here there's no you know this is it for your cooling this single fan and this is going to provide adequate cooling for normal performance m.2 but is not something that I would recommend for the same kind of m.2 that you would be installing in say A PS5 we've got our six one tbte team group T create ssds triple level cells the best thing about them is they're TLC storage and our six Bays on the back are easily accessible I'm going to have to take this part again later in order to add more uh memory cuz I really do want more than 4 GB of memory but I'm going to wait to do that if you wanted a media server that is storing you know four five terabytes of media store I mean you can use four or 8 tab ssds with this as well but generally you want to buy what is The Sweet Spot of capacity versus price the lowest number of terabytes per dollar which right now is the one to two terab variety that's a post beep which means this is just a computer in a box with a whole bunch of m.2 slots on the Asus store website when you do the initial setup it'll walk you through downloading the Asus store control center software which will scan your network and find the device fortunately you can just set it up over the network if you know the IP address if you're a sophisticated user you're on Linux you can just go to the IP address colon 8000 and walk through the web set up that way in fact if you run the Center Software and you hit the button where it says uninitialized it'll just take you to a web browser and you can finish the setup which is awesome that's how it should be it should be in the browser for the installation I opted for raid five with six discs which means that I'm going to have about 5 terabyt of raw capacity or 4.64 terabyt as reported by the guey also opted for btrfs over ext4 btrfs is a file system that can also do raid one and raid zero it can do raid file but you shouldn't use btrfs for raate 5 overall I have to say that Asus store has done a really amazing job putting the software together for uh let's call it the most common use case the problem with these is that you get a little behind of the software updates it's exposed to the internet without meaning to uh it doesn't have a firewall you don't set a password the installer walks you through samean defaults at every step of the way uh it wants you to create an Asus store account which is to help you punch through your own firewall they offer a service apparently for free that will help you connect to this from outside your network but they want you to register if you don't want to register it seems to operate fine everything except the outside network connection but it also gives you the option to connect an email provider so that you can receive email notices from that and it ALS also walks you through that again it's very uh they put a lot of work into explaining it with a as as few a words as possible which is great in this age where nobody has the attention span to figure that out so you know again this is based on Linux and I know what's going on under the hood but they've done a really nice job giving you a walkr wizard it's like click here do this let's do this to create a network share okay this is what you put in Windows to browse and connect to your network share it's really nice to see that level of Polish here but also walking you through saying hey uh let's not expose this to the internet let's set a secure password do you need help on creating accounts and passwords so that this will be secure this also has a built-in firewall function oh and by default you should enable account lockout so that if somebody's trying to log in over and over and over again it will lock you out those are nice hard one uh quality of life improvements from a company that's got experience building these kinds of devices they've also put a fair amount of attention to the detail that's not readily apparent things like the brightness of the LEDs is pretty subdued because that can be distracting in a living room but they also give you control you can disable the LEDs through the gooey software in case while you're watching a movie you know you don't want to watch the hard drive LED blinking green watching a movie with this connected to your home theater machine again they've been there they've done that that is a little thing to look for but that tells me that this company has a lot of experience putting polish into their products which is appreciated I can confirm that the file system is configured as I expected uh Linux MD and then RFS is running on top of Linux MD so your initial setup it's going to do your initial raid resync it'll show you the status that I just did cat slpr slmd stat SSH is disabled by default you have to enable that under the uh connections under services and then terminal uh and then it's like oh yeah you can enable SS you can put it on non-standard Port you can even do the universal plug andplay forwarding don't recommend that because then it's open to the internet and you do not want that even if it's secure today it might not be secure tomorrow updates you don't need it this is a level of polish on this software that is unusually good for this kind of an appliance I've ordered a lot of these kinds of appliances this is my first one from Asus store and I have to say that I'm pleasantly surprised by the uh sophistication and let's call it Noob friendliness of the software again it's a quadcore Celeron I'm a power user I want something that is just to the wall insane this is not that this does what it says on the box it does what it says on the box well it's reasonably secure I could see somebody getting comfortable with the Asus store software and then not wanting to use another brand of Nas because there is that level of Polish in the software one place where I think Asus store could improve is in their App Center when you first launch the app center it says hey which applications would you like to install the Temptation is going to be to just click to install everything but it doesn't really tell you what everything is like nextcloud installing nextcloud for document management makes a lot of sense could be really awesome what's nextcloud can I read more about it is there something that'll let me browse it I think they could put a little bit more polish into the app browser and make it a little more interesting uh for now I generally recommend that you can just not install something unless you explicitly know what it is that it does and what you want and not pay attention to that aspect of it another really impressive feature is that because this is Linux kernel 5.13 they've put the work into making sure that Intel Quicks sync works because again it's a seller on platform you've got the igpu which is a non-trivial percentage of your compute horsepower when we're talking about a quadcore ceron it's it's piped up and connected through the whole operating system if you install Plex Media Server you can totally access Quicks sync transcoding what that means for you is that if you're on mobile and you're using uh you know very low bandwidth situation but you've got your 1080P or your 4K Masters media stored on this it'll use quicksync to transcode that to h264 on the Fly at a much lower bandwidth and that means that you're squeezing out more CPU horsepower out of this than you would otherwise get and it also exposes Quicks sync to things other than Plex I didn't see an easy way to install Jelly fin for example and it probably would require extra configuration if you wanted to use the Plex alternative jelly fin for your media hosting but the plumbing on the Linux side is at least there I was also very surprised to see painer painer is a web gooey interface to Docker and Docker is a containerization system this is your toe in the water of doing some really Advanced things with your storage devices and because this is all flash based storage and because it is relatively uh high performance everything except the quad core Celeron 2 GH CPU uh you have a first class goey experience with painer so if you wanted to run pie hole for example which is not as far as I can tell supported natively you can Google the portainer pie hole setup and then have whole home ad DNS filtering so that you're basically doing ad filtering across all of your computers without actually installing any software at the network level because there exists a painer setup recipe for that portainer is just a very generic uh containerization system you can also install next cloud and everything else that way if you want to use some of that stuff that I'm describing you're definitely going to need more than 4 GB of memory though so you want to probably go 8 16 G of memory and it really stretches what this platform is capable of another application that I would recommend even for novices is tail scale tail scale is super easy and What it lets you do is connect all of your devices together on a private Network that is not the internet if you want to be able to access your media over the Internet securely without forwarding ports or anything else that uh is a security nightmare tail scale is how you do it and tail scale is basically free until you get addicted and start adding a ton of devices and then it's going to cost you a few bucks a year but for what it does I think it's actually worth it and I'm actually kind of miserly so don't listen to me tail scale has nothing to do with Asus store or anything like that it's just a really amazing service that lets you get to your stuff remotely you can install it and connect this device to your tail scale account and then this is a really easy way to access media load media it'll work on your laptop whether you're on the Internet or anywhere else and then all of a sudden things like your port interface and nextcloud and web docs and all of this other stuff that you might Deploy on this photos and and whatever else it's immediately accessible anywhere you are securely over the internet from all of your devices with no port forwarding and no extra risk it's built right in other applications that let you do that is you know Asus store's online account thing will let you do something kind of similar but it's not as slick as tail scale let me tell you and there's also a zero tier I saw as an option there's a whole bunch of applications that they have that are under the the beta section but uh yeah tail scale is is where it's at oh if you are the type to sort of modify like to muck around under the hood you want to install opkg because it's a Linux drro but it's not a Linux drro and in the App Center the easiest way to get there is probably to install inware which gives you CLI package management capabilities from there you can install Zell or bash or fio which is what we used for bench marks in this case to see how fast we could get it to run locally even before taking into account the network and all the other sort of off Lael things that we did here uh there is actually an installer for py hole under all apps it turns out you just have to give it a few minutes to load the initial app list and then it goes through this app list is also exactly what I had in mind the initial wizard where it's like hey let me set up some accounts for you it doesn't describe what the apps are but this interface does so when you install this when you get the initial popup and it's you if you have the feeling of oh if I don't click this I'm going to have another opportunity to do this and I don't know what these things are just ignore it cancel it don't check anything close it this app browser makes a lot more sense because it describes the application and is a lot more along the lines of what I was expecting so we're we're learning together chat now I decided to try some fun and off Lael creative uses with the Asus store which included an external USB disc enclosure this particular disc enclosure is 10 gbit and it's got four 3 and 1/2 in Bays I threw in 4 18 tbte dual actuator hard drives if you haven't seen our other videos on Dual actuator check those out and to my surprise under external devices it was detected correctly however it wouldn't let me set up a volume or Raid or anything like that I can do that from the command line but I'm going to have to use that o package command and install more command line utilities you can create a raay array from the command line but there is no way to do it from the guey it also doesn't show external discs in the storage manager but you can set up backups to backup to an external USB disc making use of this is a media server it's kind of a two-step process understand that the HDMI out is different than the applications that are installed just because you install Plex doesn't mean that it's automatically going to know or be able to use the HDMI output most of the time you have What's called the universal plug-in play or a DLNA media server like when you get a chomecast or an Apple TV you plug it into your network and you plug your TV into that and then it just shows up on the network and advertises this doesn't do that out of the box the application that AC store provides to do that is called Asus store portal and it's decent but there are other applications you can install to get a little different functionality and sometimes the wording on the applications you install is different because if you just search for media player or cast you'll find applications to let you cast from a web browser to something else on the network when really you want to run the application on the actual Asus store device Itself by default this is the UI that you get when you install the Asus store portal Firefox Netflix YouTube and then ADM it's a little more work to use it as a chomecast destination so you can just go to cast dot dot dot in Chrome which they'd make the installation of that a little easier but it is doable so there you go that's a quick look at the fs 6712 X now you can install another operating system on this it is after all basically a PC it's got a little bit of built-in storage for its own operating system and then this operating system sort of Tak over a little chunk of your ssds but I don't really recommend that if you're going to go that off label you should roll your own device this is good for what it is it really is this is also a really surprisingly competent uh if you just wanted to say get an elderly relative or grandparents or something their own private Netflix machine that is basically bulletproof and they can knock over and it's not going to have any physical problems the only real downside is capacity because it's flash based but you can load it with all kinds of media from the internet archive old episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show and I love lucely and Green Acres and whatever else and it will all sort of run in a self-contained manner you can plug it in with HDMI you can control it from a mobile phone uh you can even set them up with home assistant and fun things like that home assistant is for home automation you can tie that in with homekit on the Apple side or Lutron cassetta or zigg and zwave things although you'll need a little View USB dongle in order to be able to send and receive zwave and uh zigby Wireless signals but you can do all sorts of fun things like that with this platform without taxing it too much just remember at the end of the day quad core Celeron 2 GHz non upgradable CPU but it is whisper quiet the memory is upgradable 8 or 16 GB of memory costs less than than a pizza and having more memory to work with means that you've got a little bit more performance and a little bit bigger working set if you do go the docker painer next Cloud uh self-hosted documents tail scale route with this platform pretty much the only thing that I don't really recommend is using it for a surveillance platform unless you use USB hard diss in terms of backing up and restoring this you can do that with a USB hard disk that works really well you can also back it up over the network you can back it up with SMB ex store gives you some online options but those are software exploration tasks and I run out of time for this video I'm W this is level one overall the fs 671 12x it's an unusual product it's an unusual product m.2 flash storage often doesn't make a lot of sense for this use case but m.2 storage is not significantly more expensive than any other kind of storage and one or two terabyte drives with 12 slots is certainly unique in the market it's a niche product but for that Niche it's actually pretty good I'm W this is level one I'm signing out and you can find me in the level one forumsit's a weird world we find ourselves in Asus store the fs 6712 X this is a network storage Appliance it doesn't take hard drives doesn't take SATA ssds it actually has 12 m.2 nvme Bays that's really strange I mean just one of these will saturate a 10 gbit ethernet link this is uh performance rated up to 2.1 gigabytes per second made for creators team group tcreate these ssds are actually not terrible on their own they're pretty good for this use case they're they're pretty good for just bulk storage in general they're pretty good to add to Multi-Device adapters where you can rock four or eight m.2 on a single pcie device and yet this is a very very strange product I mean it's a quad core Celeron it has 4 gab of ddr4 for the other stuff that we look at on this channel it doesn't seem like it would have enough horsepower to do anything really super interesting with this much raw storage I've got a total of six team group m.2 that're all one terabyte so this is six terabytes of storage four five terabytes of usable space for the time we're done and it's running Asus stores software although you can put your own software on this you can use it as a media center it could be completely silent I don't know anything about Asus store setup process but let's take you through it and I'll give you my thoughts I really am not sure what I'm getting myself into but let me walk you through it and I'll give you my thoughts along the way so the Box advertises Asus store data Master backup and Security application lifestyle applications business applications surveillance applications oo although flash for surveillance generally not a good idea because Flash wears out unlike mechanical hard drives which don't wear out exactly the same way supports Direct on NAS editing that really that right there doing video editing directly on a network storage Appliance is really what's opened up this entire market for unusual devices one thing that I like is Asus store taking a chance on an unconventional product because we need more of that kind of thing this thing does come with a three-year warranty it has two USB 3.2 Gen 2 that's 10 gbit ports it has an spdif port and it has a 10 GB ethernet port 10 gbit ethernet 1 Gigabyte per second on your network right here front USB power button on the side rear IO two USB 2.0 ports another USB 10 GB Port Optical SPD for like a stereo Hardware reset button DC jack in the accessory bundle you've got only a cable retention clip and a network cable and a very very modest quick installation guide no other manual or or other accessories here our installation guide says 2280 no 2230 no 2210 no 2262 no 2242 I'm also assuming no 22110 basically just means the only m.2 you can use in this is 110 mm which is maybe not amazing because you could 3D print an adapter that will take you from the super small m.2 like you can use on the steam deck or kyia BG5 ssds for example and you could use those in here if you can get a really good deal on them but I've got some news for you the tcreate line from Team group and these are incredibly affordable very inexpensive we're talking you know less than 50 bucks for a 5year warranty team group m.2 that's 1 tbte now in case you're thinking that you've done this kind of thing before maybe installing an m.2 on your PS5 or something like that generally the PS5 is going to benefit from uh more space and and better quality m.2 um in this case it's really not going to matter very much the bottleneck here is your 10 gbit Network Port 10 gabit might sound fast but that's actually only on the order of about 1 gbyte per second so a single m.2 is going to easily saturate the network connection and the rest of this unit is sized around that limitation so you get those two screws out then the top comes off like so revealing our ddr4 sodm slots it is dual slots you do get a benefit from adding a second 4 GB dim which team group would be happy to help you with and you can see we got another six slots on the top the magic here that makes all this work are these as media interface chips unfortunately our Celeron processor in this thing just doesn't have the PC C bandwidth to do all of this natively instead uh you're going to need some as media chips to to make that work and like I say this thing is sort of built knowing that the network is going to be the limitation so you're not going to be able to run these uh m.2 at full speed anyway even though this is an x86 platform and you can install non Asus store software on here generally I don't recommend it it's only a quad core Celler on you're not going to be able to run say ZFS on this uh with any appreciable speed you're going to suffer a little bit in other words now I'm going to do something a little unusual I think they intend for you to just put 1 2 3 4 56 in the bottom because the the more easily accessible slots are numbered 1 2 3 4 5 6 but I'm preferring to put the m.2 in the top here um so that in the future if I add more m.2 to this all I have to do is pop the bottom off another reason these are the ideal choice m.2 for this is because heat and power higher performance higher higher wattage higher power there's no heat sink here there's no you know this is it for your cooling this single fan and this is going to provide adequate cooling for normal performance m.2 but is not something that I would recommend for the same kind of m.2 that you would be installing in say A PS5 we've got our six one tbte team group T create ssds triple level cells the best thing about them is they're TLC storage and our six Bays on the back are easily accessible I'm going to have to take this part again later in order to add more uh memory cuz I really do want more than 4 GB of memory but I'm going to wait to do that if you wanted a media server that is storing you know four five terabytes of media store I mean you can use four or 8 tab ssds with this as well but generally you want to buy what is The Sweet Spot of capacity versus price the lowest number of terabytes per dollar which right now is the one to two terab variety that's a post beep which means this is just a computer in a box with a whole bunch of m.2 slots on the Asus store website when you do the initial setup it'll walk you through downloading the Asus store control center software which will scan your network and find the device fortunately you can just set it up over the network if you know the IP address if you're a sophisticated user you're on Linux you can just go to the IP address colon 8000 and walk through the web set up that way in fact if you run the Center Software and you hit the button where it says uninitialized it'll just take you to a web browser and you can finish the setup which is awesome that's how it should be it should be in the browser for the installation I opted for raid five with six discs which means that I'm going to have about 5 terabyt of raw capacity or 4.64 terabyt as reported by the guey also opted for btrfs over ext4 btrfs is a file system that can also do raid one and raid zero it can do raid file but you shouldn't use btrfs for raate 5 overall I have to say that Asus store has done a really amazing job putting the software together for uh let's call it the most common use case the problem with these is that you get a little behind of the software updates it's exposed to the internet without meaning to uh it doesn't have a firewall you don't set a password the installer walks you through samean defaults at every step of the way uh it wants you to create an Asus store account which is to help you punch through your own firewall they offer a service apparently for free that will help you connect to this from outside your network but they want you to register if you don't want to register it seems to operate fine everything except the outside network connection but it also gives you the option to connect an email provider so that you can receive email notices from that and it ALS also walks you through that again it's very uh they put a lot of work into explaining it with a as as few a words as possible which is great in this age where nobody has the attention span to figure that out so you know again this is based on Linux and I know what's going on under the hood but they've done a really nice job giving you a walkr wizard it's like click here do this let's do this to create a network share okay this is what you put in Windows to browse and connect to your network share it's really nice to see that level of Polish here but also walking you through saying hey uh let's not expose this to the internet let's set a secure password do you need help on creating accounts and passwords so that this will be secure this also has a built-in firewall function oh and by default you should enable account lockout so that if somebody's trying to log in over and over and over again it will lock you out those are nice hard one uh quality of life improvements from a company that's got experience building these kinds of devices they've also put a fair amount of attention to the detail that's not readily apparent things like the brightness of the LEDs is pretty subdued because that can be distracting in a living room but they also give you control you can disable the LEDs through the gooey software in case while you're watching a movie you know you don't want to watch the hard drive LED blinking green watching a movie with this connected to your home theater machine again they've been there they've done that that is a little thing to look for but that tells me that this company has a lot of experience putting polish into their products which is appreciated I can confirm that the file system is configured as I expected uh Linux MD and then RFS is running on top of Linux MD so your initial setup it's going to do your initial raid resync it'll show you the status that I just did cat slpr slmd stat SSH is disabled by default you have to enable that under the uh connections under services and then terminal uh and then it's like oh yeah you can enable SS you can put it on non-standard Port you can even do the universal plug andplay forwarding don't recommend that because then it's open to the internet and you do not want that even if it's secure today it might not be secure tomorrow updates you don't need it this is a level of polish on this software that is unusually good for this kind of an appliance I've ordered a lot of these kinds of appliances this is my first one from Asus store and I have to say that I'm pleasantly surprised by the uh sophistication and let's call it Noob friendliness of the software again it's a quadcore Celeron I'm a power user I want something that is just to the wall insane this is not that this does what it says on the box it does what it says on the box well it's reasonably secure I could see somebody getting comfortable with the Asus store software and then not wanting to use another brand of Nas because there is that level of Polish in the software one place where I think Asus store could improve is in their App Center when you first launch the app center it says hey which applications would you like to install the Temptation is going to be to just click to install everything but it doesn't really tell you what everything is like nextcloud installing nextcloud for document management makes a lot of sense could be really awesome what's nextcloud can I read more about it is there something that'll let me browse it I think they could put a little bit more polish into the app browser and make it a little more interesting uh for now I generally recommend that you can just not install something unless you explicitly know what it is that it does and what you want and not pay attention to that aspect of it another really impressive feature is that because this is Linux kernel 5.13 they've put the work into making sure that Intel Quicks sync works because again it's a seller on platform you've got the igpu which is a non-trivial percentage of your compute horsepower when we're talking about a quadcore ceron it's it's piped up and connected through the whole operating system if you install Plex Media Server you can totally access Quicks sync transcoding what that means for you is that if you're on mobile and you're using uh you know very low bandwidth situation but you've got your 1080P or your 4K Masters media stored on this it'll use quicksync to transcode that to h264 on the Fly at a much lower bandwidth and that means that you're squeezing out more CPU horsepower out of this than you would otherwise get and it also exposes Quicks sync to things other than Plex I didn't see an easy way to install Jelly fin for example and it probably would require extra configuration if you wanted to use the Plex alternative jelly fin for your media hosting but the plumbing on the Linux side is at least there I was also very surprised to see painer painer is a web gooey interface to Docker and Docker is a containerization system this is your toe in the water of doing some really Advanced things with your storage devices and because this is all flash based storage and because it is relatively uh high performance everything except the quad core Celeron 2 GH CPU uh you have a first class goey experience with painer so if you wanted to run pie hole for example which is not as far as I can tell supported natively you can Google the portainer pie hole setup and then have whole home ad DNS filtering so that you're basically doing ad filtering across all of your computers without actually installing any software at the network level because there exists a painer setup recipe for that portainer is just a very generic uh containerization system you can also install next cloud and everything else that way if you want to use some of that stuff that I'm describing you're definitely going to need more than 4 GB of memory though so you want to probably go 8 16 G of memory and it really stretches what this platform is capable of another application that I would recommend even for novices is tail scale tail scale is super easy and What it lets you do is connect all of your devices together on a private Network that is not the internet if you want to be able to access your media over the Internet securely without forwarding ports or anything else that uh is a security nightmare tail scale is how you do it and tail scale is basically free until you get addicted and start adding a ton of devices and then it's going to cost you a few bucks a year but for what it does I think it's actually worth it and I'm actually kind of miserly so don't listen to me tail scale has nothing to do with Asus store or anything like that it's just a really amazing service that lets you get to your stuff remotely you can install it and connect this device to your tail scale account and then this is a really easy way to access media load media it'll work on your laptop whether you're on the Internet or anywhere else and then all of a sudden things like your port interface and nextcloud and web docs and all of this other stuff that you might Deploy on this photos and and whatever else it's immediately accessible anywhere you are securely over the internet from all of your devices with no port forwarding and no extra risk it's built right in other applications that let you do that is you know Asus store's online account thing will let you do something kind of similar but it's not as slick as tail scale let me tell you and there's also a zero tier I saw as an option there's a whole bunch of applications that they have that are under the the beta section but uh yeah tail scale is is where it's at oh if you are the type to sort of modify like to muck around under the hood you want to install opkg because it's a Linux drro but it's not a Linux drro and in the App Center the easiest way to get there is probably to install inware which gives you CLI package management capabilities from there you can install Zell or bash or fio which is what we used for bench marks in this case to see how fast we could get it to run locally even before taking into account the network and all the other sort of off Lael things that we did here uh there is actually an installer for py hole under all apps it turns out you just have to give it a few minutes to load the initial app list and then it goes through this app list is also exactly what I had in mind the initial wizard where it's like hey let me set up some accounts for you it doesn't describe what the apps are but this interface does so when you install this when you get the initial popup and it's you if you have the feeling of oh if I don't click this I'm going to have another opportunity to do this and I don't know what these things are just ignore it cancel it don't check anything close it this app browser makes a lot more sense because it describes the application and is a lot more along the lines of what I was expecting so we're we're learning together chat now I decided to try some fun and off Lael creative uses with the Asus store which included an external USB disc enclosure this particular disc enclosure is 10 gbit and it's got four 3 and 1/2 in Bays I threw in 4 18 tbte dual actuator hard drives if you haven't seen our other videos on Dual actuator check those out and to my surprise under external devices it was detected correctly however it wouldn't let me set up a volume or Raid or anything like that I can do that from the command line but I'm going to have to use that o package command and install more command line utilities you can create a raay array from the command line but there is no way to do it from the guey it also doesn't show external discs in the storage manager but you can set up backups to backup to an external USB disc making use of this is a media server it's kind of a two-step process understand that the HDMI out is different than the applications that are installed just because you install Plex doesn't mean that it's automatically going to know or be able to use the HDMI output most of the time you have What's called the universal plug-in play or a DLNA media server like when you get a chomecast or an Apple TV you plug it into your network and you plug your TV into that and then it just shows up on the network and advertises this doesn't do that out of the box the application that AC store provides to do that is called Asus store portal and it's decent but there are other applications you can install to get a little different functionality and sometimes the wording on the applications you install is different because if you just search for media player or cast you'll find applications to let you cast from a web browser to something else on the network when really you want to run the application on the actual Asus store device Itself by default this is the UI that you get when you install the Asus store portal Firefox Netflix YouTube and then ADM it's a little more work to use it as a chomecast destination so you can just go to cast dot dot dot in Chrome which they'd make the installation of that a little easier but it is doable so there you go that's a quick look at the fs 6712 X now you can install another operating system on this it is after all basically a PC it's got a little bit of built-in storage for its own operating system and then this operating system sort of Tak over a little chunk of your ssds but I don't really recommend that if you're going to go that off label you should roll your own device this is good for what it is it really is this is also a really surprisingly competent uh if you just wanted to say get an elderly relative or grandparents or something their own private Netflix machine that is basically bulletproof and they can knock over and it's not going to have any physical problems the only real downside is capacity because it's flash based but you can load it with all kinds of media from the internet archive old episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show and I love lucely and Green Acres and whatever else and it will all sort of run in a self-contained manner you can plug it in with HDMI you can control it from a mobile phone uh you can even set them up with home assistant and fun things like that home assistant is for home automation you can tie that in with homekit on the Apple side or Lutron cassetta or zigg and zwave things although you'll need a little View USB dongle in order to be able to send and receive zwave and uh zigby Wireless signals but you can do all sorts of fun things like that with this platform without taxing it too much just remember at the end of the day quad core Celeron 2 GHz non upgradable CPU but it is whisper quiet the memory is upgradable 8 or 16 GB of memory costs less than than a pizza and having more memory to work with means that you've got a little bit more performance and a little bit bigger working set if you do go the docker painer next Cloud uh self-hosted documents tail scale route with this platform pretty much the only thing that I don't really recommend is using it for a surveillance platform unless you use USB hard diss in terms of backing up and restoring this you can do that with a USB hard disk that works really well you can also back it up over the network you can back it up with SMB ex store gives you some online options but those are software exploration tasks and I run out of time for this video I'm W this is level one overall the fs 671 12x it's an unusual product it's an unusual product m.2 flash storage often doesn't make a lot of sense for this use case but m.2 storage is not significantly more expensive than any other kind of storage and one or two terabyte drives with 12 slots is certainly unique in the market it's a niche product but for that Niche it's actually pretty good I'm W this is level one I'm signing out and you can find me in the level one forums\n"