A Look Inside

It's time now to strip the NAS down to discover what components it hides inside its casing. The whole procedure was easy, although we had to remove a lot of screws in order to take the mainboard out of the chassis.


The drives' cage and the chassis itself are metallic, while the enclosure is made of plastic. Nothing changed here since the TS-451's enclosure is made of plastic as well; however, it has a white finish.


The mainboard is small since there is no need for extra controllers or chipsets because of Intel's J1900 quad-core SoC (System on Chip). We also noticed that the mainboard is identical to the one in the TS-451, and a closer examination revealed that most of the components on it are identical.


The CPU is an Intel Celeron J1900 featuring four cores that run at 2 GHz with a burst frequency of 2.42 GHz. This CPU's TDP is very low, 10 W, so there is no need for active cooling. The NAS can support up to 8 GB of memory, and Intel's Quick Sync Video technology is supported, which means the SOC will handle video conversions well. Next to the J1900 CPU are two power phases that cover its power need. Each phase uses an NTMFD4C20N fet.


Both RAM slots are occupied by DDR3L Transcend DIMMs clocked at 1600 MHz.


The heart of the DC-DC converters that feed the RAM slots with power are two TPS54426 synchronous buck (or step-down) converters. These convert 4.5 V input to 18 VDC and -0.1 V output to 5.7 VDC.


An Asmedia ASM1442 controls the HDMI port HD Station exploits.


On the mainboard is a PIC16F22a microcontroller.


The hardware monitor IC is a Fintek F71869AD.


We only found polymer caps by Nippon Chemi-Con and an NCP6133 phase controller on the mainboard.


Two Macronix MX25L4006E standard serial interfaces are soldered to the mainboard.


The flash memory is provided by Apacer.


The BIOS chip is a Winbond 25Q64FWS1G.


On the mainboard's solder side are two Intel WGI210AT Ethernet controllers.


Here is the PCIe expansion card that hosts all four SATA ports. On it are two Marvell 88SE9215-NAA2 controllers and a Macronix MX25L4006E standard serial interface.


The fan is provided by YS. Tech, and its model number is FD121225LB (120 mm, 12 V, 0.18 A, 1800 RPM, 73 CFM, 34 dBA, 80,000 h MTBF). It uses ball-bearings and will, as such, last fairly long.