A Closer Look - Inside

As we want to show you what makes the TS-859 Pro tick, we actually opened the unit up by removing all the screws holding the top cover in place. By pulling the top off, you will also be tearing a warranty sticker, leaving you high and dry if something were to happen to the NAS. Considering the price of the unit and the lack of any really self-serviceable parts inside of the TS-859 Pro, we strongly urge you not to do what we did in this review.


As mentioned before, the mainboard is located on the side of the unit. It is pretty much an ITX board, but specifically designed for the NAS unit. It comes wiith the standard 24 pin power connector and also controls the two PWM equipped 120 mm cooling fans. As you can see, the Atom and its chipset are only cooled by a large black heatsink.


You will not find a traditional hard drive on which the Linux OS is stored on. Instead there is a small Apacer 512 MB flash drive situated in the lower left corner. It carries a QNAP part number, which suggests, that you won't find this in normal retail channels. The single SO-DIMM module on the other hand is of the standard variety and is made by Hynix. QNAP ships the TS-859 Pro with 1GB of system memory. This is the only real part which you could theoretically upgrade, but the drawbacks of no warranty are not worth it in my humble opinion. Last but not least, there is a single PCIe x4 slot. This is used to connect the custom PCB with the 8 SATA connectors to the mainboard.


This PCB holds a single IC from Marvell. According to Google, this is a 4 port SATA II controller, which seems a bit weird, as the TS-859 Pro has a whole eight SATA ports. No matter where I looked, I did not find another IC of the type, but I was not able to pull the entire PCB out of the chassis, as that would have meant a total disassembly of the NAS. Another interesting tidbit is the fact, that there seems to be no dedicated RAID controller. This may not be the best approach with a normal system, but makes perfect sense with a NAS. A software RAID solution which offloads all the work to the Atom CPU is perfectly fine. The central processing unit has nothing else to do really besides running the minuscule OS and managing the drives.


Taking a closer look at the 1U PSU, it is made by FSP and can deliver up to 350W - way too much for a device like this. It also carries the 80Plus certification and can be used in 110 or 220 Volt environments.