Exterior

The casing may be of plastic, but is of high enough quality. A plastic cover at the front hides the HDD trays, and several LED indicators keep track of LAN- and HDD activity as well as status. This side also houses an SD card reader and a USB 2.0 port, along with the power and copy function buttons.


Once we removed the front cover, a couple HDD trays were revealed. As you can see in the last of the above photos, there are several numbering dots right next to the trays, but the trays don't have any identifying marks, so you will have to improvise. Weird, isn't it?


Both sides have the Synology logo sculpted into the casing, which also has these act as exhaust grills.


The 92mm fan takes over most of the real estate at the back, and all I/O ports, including two USB 3.0 ones, an Ethernet and eSATA port, a DC input and Kensington lock, are situated below the fan. There is also a reset switch here should things take a turn for the worse.


The bottom not only has the four plastic feet, but also a small label depicting the product's model number and power requirements. The same label tells us that this product was manufactured in Taiwan.


We removed both trays and took some photos of the small PCIe expansion card holding the SATA connectors.


Two WD RED series disks (Red WD40EFRX) with a capacity of 4 TB, each, were pre-installed into the trays. These HDDs are probably the best you can get for NAS usage since they are optimized for NAS servers, are energy efficient, and have lower operating temperatures than other, normal HDDs, and their NASware 2.0 firmware is compatible with every RAID level and all NAS hardware. These HDDs are also backed by a three year warranty. Another interesting feature of these disks is that they are significantly quieter than plain HDDs, which may not be as important a factor in business environments, but is definitely crucial for use at home.