GoKawiilOverview of AOOSTAR WTR Pro on *BSD
Finding a NAS that provides NVMe and SATA storage while being tiny enough to sit in my 10" rack, have a CPU that’s not hogging, use a small amount of watts and offers usage of a non-proprietary OS is not simple. Especially when you have the “must run any BSD” to the equation.
But here we are, the AOOSTAR WTR Pro Ryzen edition meets all my prerequisites. And here’s what I discovered.
Note that I aimed this machine at running FreeBSD. So I just had a quick look at other BSDes just to get a rough idea of what you get “by default”. It’s not a fair features and power usage comparison. I spend way more time tuning FreeBSD.
Build quality
The case is using metal, not plastic. And in a 25-27 degC room, it always feels rather cold to the hands. It also fits pretty well in my 10" rack space.
RAM and NVMe slots are located beneath the machine and accessible using screws. The slots are numbered so that you don’t have any surprise when you plug stuff and look and the IDs in the OS. If you ever care about this…
The SATA disks are accessible from the front. The front cover uses magnets to stay in place and hide the caddies and LEDs. The caddies have click and pull mechanism. 3.5" SATA disks are set and removed using a tool-less mechanism that is quite smart. 2.5" SATA disks need to be fixed to the tray using screws. Those are a bit less trouble free. It took me quite a few tries & fails to succeed in plugging the 2.5" disks in. You seem to need to lift the caddy up a bit. But once it’s done, everything goes as expected. Also, SATA disks are numbered from bottom (SATA 1) to top (SATA 4). This may be important if you have to deal with device number IDs.
The fan is quite noisy by default and produces a low-pitched sound. Also, I don’t know how to describe it but you hear the metallic case in that sound.
Here’s YouTube videos I watched before buying that machine:
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