A Look Inside

It's time now to strip this NAS down to take a look at the components it hides inside its casing.


Taking this NAS apart is easy since you only have to remove a bunch of screws.


The small mainboard is provided by Quanta Storage, a Taiwanese company with two factories in China.


The CPU (Intel Celeron N3160) uses passive cooling due to its low TDP of only 6 W.


Five power phases feed the CPU area with the juice it requires. Near those phases is a Texas Instruments TXS0104E voltage level shifter.


The single RAM slot is occupied by a 4 GB DDR3 SO-DIMM. Unfortunately, you do have to completely take apart this NAS in order to get to it, which makes it quite difficult to upgrade this server's RAM total. A single power phase seems to feed the RAM slot.


Here's the battery that keeps the BIOS settings alive.


A couple Intel WGI210AT controllers are used by the Ethernet ports.


The monitoring IC is an IT8616e, and close to it, we find a Macronix MX25U6435F flash memory IC. In the far-right corner is a Micron JY976 eMMC flash memory module.


A Realtek ALC262 is the audio codec. It is a basic audio IC with support for 2+2 channels.


Polymer filtering caps are used on the mainboard, which is definitely a good thing since polymer caps last longer than electrolytic caps, have a lower ESR, and are able to withstand higher operating temperatures without serious reliability problems (side note: a 10°C increase in operating temperature will cut the lifetime of an electronic cap in half).


The solder side of the mainboard doesn't host many components. It actually looks quite empty compared to the primary side.


The photograph above shows a PI3C3245QE bus switch that is used to switch high frequency signals, and there are a couple Winbond 25Q16DVS1G flash memory chips.


Another Texas Instruments TXS0104E voltage level shifter can be found on the solder side of the mainboard.


Here's the SATA expansion card.


The cooling fan's model number is AFB0712HC (12 V, 0.33 A, 3800 RPM), and it is made by Delta, one of the best PSU and fan manufacturers. This fan has a diameter of 70 mm and uses double ball bearings.