A Look Inside

It's now time to strip the NAS down to figure out which components it hides inside its casing.


Breaking apart the DS414slim was a little tricky, although noticeably easier than with other Synology units we have reviewed in the past. Its plastic enclosure surrounds the metal frame with the mainboard and the SATA PCIe expansion board.


This small PCB extents the fan header, which allows the fan to be easily removed.


The mainboard is really small and comes with a lot of components on both sides.


The single core Marvell Armada 370 SoC runs at 1.2 GHz and is passively cooled because its TDP is very low. Right next to it is the single 4Gb DDR3 RAM chip by Hynix (H5TC4G63AFR-PBA).


Two Marvel Alaska 88E1512 Gigabit controllers handle both network interfaces. You can combine them by utilizing the Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP), which would increase throughput or provide redundancy should one link fail.


The CMOS battery powers the BIOS chip.


We spotted a few FPCAP Electronics polymer caps on the mainboard.


The USB 3.0 controller is an EtronTech EJ168A IC.


A Marvell 88SX7042 controller takes care of the four SATA ports on the PCIe expansion card. It supports the SATA II protocol, not SATA III, but the 88SX7042 surely won't bottleneck the system since non-mechanical drives cannot exceed SATA II limits unless you install SSDs.


The small SATA PCIe card has two Chemi-Con polymer caps.


The small fan is provided by Evercool (60mm, 12V, 0.14A, 3600 RPM, 15.03 CFM, 26 dBA max according to the manufacturer), and its model number is EC6010L12ER.