A Look Inside

It's time now to strip this NAS down to unearth what components it hides inside its casing. Dismantling the N4310 was a straightforward affair; however, lots of screws had to be removed before we were able to take the mainboard out to check on its components. What made things easier as compared to the N2310 was the absence of hidden screws.


The top and side cover is out of metal, which makes it quite heavy. As such, it also protects all internal components well. It being out of metal, the cover also plays a significant role in cooling the unit down since it can dissipate heat much more readily than a plastic chassis would.


The mainboard is small, but packs all the necessary components. This is a major advantage of SoCs; they integrate all major controllers, which nullifies the need for many additional chips on the mainboard itself. Yet many manufacturers also insist on doing things their way by using additional controllers to probably take some weight off the SoC's shoulders.


The N4310 is equipped with an Applied Micro APM86491-RKB1000T SoC. It is very similar to the SoC in the two-bay N2310; however, it runs at 1 GHz, which is 200 MHz higher than the one in the N2310. This SoC supports two USB 3.0 ports, two PCI Express Gen 2 ports, two SATA II ports, and two 10/100/1000 Ethernet ports (the N4310, however, only has one). The Catalina APM86491 PowerPC 465 core features a floating point unit, 32KB L1 I-cache, 32KB D-cache, and 256 KB L2 cache, and its TDP is so low that it doesn't need a passive heatsink to keep cool. The NAND flash memory with 1 GB capacity is provided by Spansion, and its model number is S34ML08G101TF100.


A couple Hynix H5TQ4G63AFR DDR3 RAM ICs are soldered to the board. Their combined capacity is 1 GB.


The BIOS battery has been installed onto the mainboard's solder side.


An FP6137E is the DDR3 RAM bus termination IC.


There is a single PCIe slot on the mainboard, and it is occupied by the SATA expansion card. Right next to it are two JMicron JMB320 SATA II port multiplier chips.


A Texas Instruments TPS65270 synchronous step-down converter reduces the DC voltage to feed the mainboard's components with lower voltage requirements.


A couple polymer capacitors are installed near the system's buzzer.


This is the system's real-time clock, an IDT 1337G IC.


A Pm25LD512 serial flash memory module with 512 Kbit capacity.


An STMicroelectronics 8S003F3P6TR 8-bit microcontroller has also been included.


There are several interesting components on the SATA expansion card. These consist of an SMBus I/O PD9555 expander and six Fairchild FDS4435BZ P-channel mosfets.


The cooling fan is by ADDA, and its model number is AD0912DB-A79GL (12 V, 92 mm diameter, 0.09 A). It uses double ball-bearings and is a low-speed fan. It isn't noisy while operating normally, but picks up in noise at close to full speed.