A Closer Look - Inside

Since the drive does not ship with a hard drive you have to do a bit of assembling to get everything up and running. First, you need to slide out the tray holding the entire system. The first notable item is the fan which seems to cool the encased PCB below the hard drive. It is manufactured by alpine and draws a mere 0.08A, so it should be adequately quiet.


You will not need to take it further apart, but for this review, we also want to know what makes it tick. Getting everything apart means removing quite a few screws. Interestingly enough, none of them have any warranty seals on them, so you should not worry about loosing any support from the manufacturer.


There are four ICs on the board with the biggest one hidden under a basic heatsink. It is the Realtek RTD1073DD, which is a HD MPEG1/2/4, H.264, VC1, RM/RMVB Decoder with Ethernet and HDMI according to the manufacturer website. Next to that is a NAND memory IC by Hynix with a capacity of 2GB and a 1GB DDR2 memory chip from Nanya. Last but not least there is a tiny IC which is a 102 dB, 24-Bit, 192 kHz Stereo D/A Converter with Line Driver or DAC.

Assembly

After all that technical jargon, let us continue with the assembly process, which is actually quite simple. Just plug in the drive and screw it down, slide the tray back into place and replace the screws - that is it. Thanks to the seperate NAND storage, none of the OS is stored on the hard drive, so that you do not need to format it in a specific manner to gain access to the files.