The outside of the box is remarkably simple. The front of the unit has four hot-swappable drive bays, each of which are unlocked by a simple key. Also on the front is a small power and reset button and USB port (more on that later).
The sides of the unit have holes for included rack-mount hinges. Also on the sides are holes for standard server rails, but no rails are included.
The rear of the unit features an AC in and three exhaust fans (one for the power supply, and two to expel heat from the chasis). Also on the back is a recessed reset button (which allows you to reset the NAS to factory defaults), a single LAN port, and two USB ports. The major external differences between the TS-409U and the TS-409 Pro (other than the 1U form factor) is the inclusion of an internal power supply (the Pro uses an external power brick), and the drive access.
Let’s Open Her Up
Opening the case is very easy. Just unscrew some tiny screws on the top and slide the lid open. It appears that the TS-409U uses nearly the exact same motherboard as the TS-409 Pro, but there have been a few changes to accomodate the new slim form factor. Instead of a single quiet exhaust fan, the 409U has two smaller exhaust fans. The SATA cables used are “L” type plugs, so they can fit inside the case. Each SATA cable is clearly labeled 1 through 4 to easily determine which SATA port maps to which drive bay. The power plugs in the Pro version were perpendicular to the board, but the U version has the power plugs parallel to the board, so they look like they plug into the sides. The front USB port is plugged into a lead on the motherboard. Front LEDs are also tethered to the board via a ribbon cable.
Nearly every thing else is identical, including the Marvel C500 (500MHz) processor. This chip has a high-performance Ferocean CPU core with integrated 32/32 KB L1 cache. You can read all the technical specs on the processor here. The same Marvel ethernet chip is present, as well as four 128MB Hynix DDR2 memory chips (for a total of 512MB) soldered directly onto the board, so it cannot be upgraded.
A Marvel 88SX7042-BDU1 chip is included and functions as a RAID controller. This same chip can be found on Adaptec RAID controllers. A Marvel 88E1118-NNC1 chip provides the gigabit ethernet.
There is an awful lot of wasted space in this 1U case. QNAP used the same board as their Pro version, which orients the LAN and USB ports where they are, thus determining the current orientation of the board.
It’s good to see that the board has many solid-state capacitors, which is a good sign of future reliability. There are several lower-quality Sanyo WG capacitors where the drive power is (on the top right of the board), however.
The board also comes with a JS28F640-J3D75 TSOP Flash Eprom, which contains the Linux operating system and embedded software. It is in TSOP 56 style with an access time of 75 nanoseconds. It is also the lead-free successor of the previous E28F640J3A.
The included power supply is from Channel Well Technology, which is a relatively unknown company in the US market. It is rated for a maximum of 200 Watts, which is nearly four times what the 409U typically requires. Here is the rating of the PSU:
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Channel Well 200W PSU Specifications
* although the technical specs of the 3.3V and 5V add up to 121W, the PSU notes that the total power on these rails is 80W max |
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