A Look Inside

It's time now to strip the NAS down to discover what components it hides inside.


Dismantling this NAS was a pretty straightforward procedure, at least compared to similar products we have reviewed in the past.


The mechanism that keeps both HDD trays in place.


Made mostly of metal to absorb and dissipate as much heat as possible, the top and bottom covers are heavy. You can see a pretty wide aluminum cylinder in the last of the above photos. It is the actual CPU heatsink.


Two thick metal plates cover the HDDs, which improves their ability to dissipate heat. Although QNAP did the best they could to lower HDD temperatures, these exceed 40°C in a room with an ambient of around 25°C-27°C after only a few hours, so we suggest avoiding a 24/7 operation; that is, unless you put the NAS into a very cold environment.


All crucial components (CPU and RAM) are soldered directly to the tiny "T"-shaped mainboard, which makes upgrading them impossible.


Here is the Bay Trail CPU (Intel Celeron J1800) with its thermal pad attached. The heatsink's screw left its footprint in the latter.


As has already been mentioned, all RAM DIMMs are directly soldered to the mainboard, so you can't upgrade them. All four DDR3 DIMMs are by Hynix, and their model number is H5TC4G63AFR-PBA. At CL11, these sticks can operate at up to 1600 MHz. Right next to two such DIMMs is the circuit that feeds the memory with power through a one phase DC-DC converter. The latter uses a couple of OS-CON (Sanyo) polymer caps.


The battery that keeps the AMI BIOS data alive.


The many polymer caps on the mainboard will prolong its lifetime since increased temperatures don't affect such caps seriously, especially compared to electrolytic ones. The ones shown above are provided by Nippon Chemi-Con.


Like with all QNAP servers we have reviewed so far, the flash memory is provided by Apacer,.


Two Asmedia ASM1442s control the two HDMI ports, and the USB 3.0 controller is an ASM1074 with support for up to four such ports; however, this NAS only has two USB 3.0 ports because the mainboard doesn't have room for more. A Pm25LD512, a piece of Flash memory with 512 Kbit capacity, has been installed right below the ASM1442 IC.


We found a PIC16F722A microcontroller on the mainboard.


Two Intel WGI210AT Ethernet controllers are used to control the Ethernet ports.


An NCP6133 phase controller for one of the mainboard's DC-DC converters.


The hardware monitor IC is a Fintek F71869AD.