A Look Inside

It's time now to strip down the NAS and discover what components it hides inside the casing. Once we removed the one-piece top and side cover a small mainboard is revealed along with a chassis that has enough space to accommodate an SFF PSU. The rear side of the mainboard is covered by a thick plastic shield in order to avoid shorts with the metal casing.


The rear side of the mainboard is almost void of components with the two RAM chips being the most important here. There are two on this side and two on the opposite. In total 512MB of DDR3 RAM (Hynix H5TQ1G83TFR) are directly soldered on the mainboard and you cannot upgrade them since there are no DIMM slots.


Under the small heatsink a Marvell 88F6282 SoC controller is hiding. Among others it integrates a Marvell developed single core CPU running at 2GHz which is fully ARMv5TE-compliant and is equipped with 256KB L2 cache. As you can see from the above block diagram this SoC controller packs quite many features.


The Ethernet ports are controlled by two Marvell Alaska 88E1318 ICs. Each of these ICs contains a single Gigabit Ethernet transceiver which implements the Ethernet physical layer portion of the 1000BASE-T, 100BASE-TX, and 10BASE-T standards.


The GL850G IC of Genesys Logic plays the role of the USB 2.0 hub controller and provides four downstream USB ports.


The main PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) controller of the mainboard is an NCP3121 IC. This IC is a DC-DC buck regulator so it lowers (steps-down) the incoming DC voltage to the levels required by the various components of the NAS.


On the board we also spotted a PIC16F690 8-bit microcontroller. Among others it includes twelve A/D channels and two voltage comparators.


The PCIe card, to which all four removable drives attach, utilizes a Marvell 88SX7042 controller. It supports the SATA II protocol and not the newer SATA 6 Gbps, but since the speed of mechanical drives cannot reach such speeds, the 88SX7042 surely won't be the system's bottleneck.


The functions of the LCD screen are handled a Microchip PIC16F73 8-bit microcontroller.


The cooling fan is provided by Y.S. Tech and its model number is FD129225LB (90mm, 12V, 0.15A, 1900RPM, 40.2CFM, 80000 MTBF). It uses ball bearings so it will last fairly long, definitely much longer than a sleeve bearings one.