A Look Inside

Taking apart this NAS wasn't that difficult, but there is the ribbon cable of the OLED screen I had to be careful with.


Thankfully, upgrading the RAM is super easy - you don't have to remove any of the plastic casing's parts. You only need to take out the disk trays to access both RAM slots.


The chassis is made out of metal, which makes it pretty sturdy. As has already been mentioned, the casing is out of plastic.


Here's the mainboard's primary side. The filtering caps are provided by Chemi-Con polymer and Sanyo and are all polymer. Both of these brands are known for their high quality products, and we were pleased to see QNAP use reliable capacitors with such an expensive NAS.


The solder side of the board looks empty.


Let's start with the small OLED screen. A PIC microcontroller is used to control its functions.


There are two RAM slots at the front. With the TS-453B-4G, both RAM slots are occupied by DDR3L ADATA 1866 MHz SODIMMs.


The CPU is an Intel Celeron J3455 with four cores that run at 1.5 GHz and can burst to frequencies of 2.3 GHz. This CPU's TDP is only 10 W, so there is no need for active cooling. The small heatsink will do just fine without a fan. Intel's CPU supports up to 8 GB of memory and Intel's Quick Sync Video technology, which will allow this SOC to handle video conversions well.


Here is the BIOS IC.


An ASM1182e PCI express packet switch is there for the PCIe port, and an Asmedia ASM1442K controls the HDMI ports.


This is the board's flash memory. Its model number isTHGBMDG5D1LBAIL. It has a capacity of 4 GB and is provided by Toshiba.


In total, three Intel WGI210AT Ethernet controllers are used. Two of these are on the mainboard's solder side; the other two are on its primary side.


A SATA expansion card occupies this PCIe port. There is another free PCIe port for the expansion cards QNAP provides for this NAS.


Here is the PCIe expansion card that hosts all four SATA ports. On the SATA expansion card are two ASMedia ASM1062 Serial ATA repeaters, which are capable of a bandwidth of up to 6 Gbps.


An ITE IT8528 is used on the mainboard.


This is a Realtek RTL8153 Integrated 10/100/1000M Ethernet controller for USB applications.


The fan is 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.