A Look Inside

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


Cracking the DS213+ open is definitely not an easy task because it takes precise actions that have to be backed by a considerable amount of force. You can easily damage the casing if you do something wrong. To remove the larger plastic side, you have to unscrew a screw on the rear side before pulling the panel up and back strongly.


The mainboard is quite small. As you can see, there is only a single PCIe slot on which the SATA expansion card sits. The latter is installed on the drive cage.


The CPU of the DS213+ is a Freescale P1022 (PowerPC based), featuring two cores running at 1.067 GHz. It is cooled by a large extra low-profile heatsink that really stuck to the CPU. It wouldn't budge, and we didn't remove it because we might have removed it along with the CPU. The CPU features two cores and precision vector floating point units, which will speed things up with some processes.


Four Samsung 1Gb DDR3 RAM ICs are soldered right next to the CPU heatsink. Their model number is K4B1G1646G-BCH9.


A GL850G IC is the USB hub controller.


The USB 2.0 Dual SD-card reader controller is a GL836 IC.


On the mainboard, we found a Silicon Labs SL28504BZX-2 clock generator, which provides the timing signal (or clock signal) used in synchronizing the circuit's operation.


A Silicon Image SiI3132 one-lane PCI Express to 2-port Serial ATA (SATA) II host-controller handles the single PCIe slot of the mainboard.


The gigabit Ethernet controller is a Realtek RTL8211E IC.


The USB 3.0 controller is a NEC D720200AF1 IC.


We also found a PIC16F883 8-bit micro-controller installed on the mainboard.


The 92mm diameter fan is provided by Y.S. Tech, and its model number is FD129225LL-N (12V, 0.12A, 1900RPM, 36.3CFM). Its speed is kept at low RPMs during normal operation, which minimizes noise output. According to Y.S Tech, it is equipped with Sintetico bearings which look to be of high quality and should last longer than sleeve or double-ball bearings.