streaming with plex from my macbook to my tv - awesome.

Just set up plex based on last post. Holy crap it's awesome. Have it feeding into my 2 tvs via Apple TV (iPad airplay) and WD TV Live using DLNA.

lol not sure why a 2 year old thread has 4 viewers before I'm about to bump this...

Anywhos just got my hands on the AS1002T budget NAS a week ago...ASUS' $200 offering
I pretty much pulled the trigger blind. Pre-ordered it last month when it was announced with absolutely no customer reviews or reviews from the usual suspects.

quick specs:
Marvell ARM M7 Dual-core 1GHz
512MB DDR3
gigE, 2 USB3
Tool-less design
only sips a few watts when disks are hiberating

more deets here:
ASUSTOR - Innovation Makes a Difference

I'm running 2X8TB RAID1 which operates quite loudly, but NAS is self is very quiet unless it's booting up.

This is my first NAS so I have no other point of reference but the UI was simple yet very responsive. The settings are really robust and in depth ( you can even choose which LEDs you want on and its brightness. I like the backup option of allowing even your external HDD to spindown, so you can just set a schedule and forget about it). Schedulable SMART and bad sector tests are handy to have for a peace of mind.

Didn't test the network speed but USB 3 speeds was around 80MB/sfor ~150GB worth of gopro videos
when I was moving roughly 3.5TB of blu-ray remuxes it dropped down to 28MB/s so needless to say it took about 2 days to have that done.

using its uPnP Media Server, Blu-ray remux 25Mbps mkv playbacks on my smart TV was smooth. Plex server did not work, I don't believe that plays nice with ARM processors simply because they're too weak for transcoding-on-the-fly

Looks like Guru3d released their review today and it was very favourable. The rest you can read there as it's way more methodical.

Asustor AS1002T NAS review - Asustor Introduction

Now some noob questions about drive longevity:

I understand SMR ArchiveHDDs aren't meant for NAS/RAID, but I'm wondering if it's best to keep the drives' orientation parallel to the floor or to have the nas stand up right as the nas was designed but the drives will be vertical?

RAID1 reads doesn't always happen simultaneously to both drive. Does that mean in theory 1 drive will wear out faster than the other drive? Is there a way to force equal read on both drives?

Cheers.