A Look Inside

It's now time to strip this NAS down to figure out what components are inside. Breaking apart this NAS wasn't an easy task. QNAP apparently made it harder with their more recent models since lots of screws had to be removed because the USB port in the front is directly attached to the mainboard.


It took about 15 minutes to completely disassemble the NAS to inspect its components in more detail.


The metallic chassis holds the LCD screen. The functions of the latter are handled by a Microchip PIC16F73 8-bit microcontroller.


The mainboard is small and sparsely populated as no additional controls or chipsets are necessary because of AMD's SoC (System on Chip). The mainboard's model number, also on the board itself, is TS-863, and it is the same as in QNAP's high-end TVS-x63 model.


The CPU is passively cooled by a heatsink that utilizes a single heatpipe. It is an AMD GX-424CC SoC with four cores running at 2.4 GHz. It has a 25 W TDP and a 2 MB L2 cache. The GX-424CC supports DDR3 memory with speeds of up to 1866 MHz and incorporates a Radeon R5E GPU that is clocked at 497 MHz. The latter uses 1 GB of the system's memory as video RAM.


The mainboard's obverse side holds two easily accessible SO-DIMM slots. You only have to remove the single top- and side cover to reach these. Only one of these was populated by a Micron DDR3 SO-DIMM. Clocked at 1600 MHZ, this DIMM also includes ICs with FBGA code D9QBJ.


The flash memory is provided by Apacer.


The hardware monitor IC is a Fintek F71869AD.


An Asmedia ASM1074 USB 3.0 hub controller is used on the mainboard, and another Asmedia product, an ASM1182e PCI express packet switch is there for the PCIe port.


This is a multi-phase PWM regulator by Intersil. Its model number is ISL62771, and it controls the VRMs that feed the SoC and its embedded GPU with power.


The mainboard only uses polymer caps by Chemi-Con and Sanyo (OS-CON).


Here a picture of the system's buzzer.


Two Intel WGI210AT controllers handle the two Ethernet ports.


Here is the PCIe expansion card that hosts all four SATA ports.


On the PCIe expansion card are two Marvell 88SE9215-NAA2 controllers and a single PIC16F722A microcontroller.


The PSU is by Delta Electronics, one of the best OEMs around today. Its model number is DPS-250AB, and it can provide up to 240 W of power on its main rails (+12V, 5V and 3.3V), which is a lot for this NAS. The unit also meets the 80 PLUS requirements and exploits a small 40 mm fan that is very quiet under normal conditions. This PSU only has to deliver a fraction of its maximum power with heavy data throughput, which keeps its cooling needs low.


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.