A Look Inside

Taking apart this NAS is tough. I had to deal with dozens of screws, so it is best to shoot lots of photos or a video of the whole procedure to keep track of which screws go where once you put it back together.


The mainboard is quite large for a NAS. It has three PCIe slots and all the necessary I/O ports.


A look at the AMD CPU.


The heatsink is large, but doesn't use any active cooling.


There are four power phases for the CPU's energy needs. The PWM controller is an RT3663BM IC.


Only one of the two RAM slots is occupied, housing a 4 GB DDR4 2666 MHz ECC SO-DIMM.


The mainboard's BIOS chip is a Macronix MX30LF1G18AC with a capacity of 1 Gbit. It stores the core of the DSM OS. There is also a Macronix MX25U6435F 64 MB flash memory chip on board.


An 8-bit microcontroller by PIC—its model number is PIC16F18345. It handles the server's LED indicators. The driver for the latter is a Texas Instruments LP3943 IC.


A pair of JMicron JMB585 PCIe to SATA bridge ICs.


There are no electrolytic caps on the mainboard. The polymer caps are by United Chemi-Con, which means they are of high quality.


The eSATA and USB ports on the mainboard's rear side. There is another USB 3.0 port at the front.


All four Ethernet ports. The controllers are four Realtek RTL8111H ICs.


All three PCIe slots of the mainboard. Two of these are occupied by the SATA expansion card and NVMe board. The PCIe3.0 x8 slot on the left is for the optional 10G Ethernet card. Its actual bandwidth is restricted to x4. You can select between two PCIe cards: the E10G18-T2 or E10G18-T if you only need one 10 Gbit port.


The SATA card uses a PCA9555A GPIO expander IC.


The card for the optional NVMe drives.


An Altera 5M240ZM100C5N Complex Programmable Logic Device, or CPLD for short, stores the server configuration. As you can see in the first photo above, the IC was hiding behind a sticker we had to remove to identify it.


An Asmedia ASM1806 PCIe Gen2 packet switch chip.


The PSU is the widely used Delta DPS-250A. This unit can deliver up to 250 W and has two +12 V rails with a maximum current of 17 A on each.


Two Yuanshan Technology fans with model number FD129225EB-N are used. They measure 92 mm across and use double ball-bearing. As such, they won't have a problem operating under high temperatures.


The fans are controlled by an ADT7490 IC.