Exterior
The first thing I noticed when unpacking it and having the first look, was how simple the device looks and I’m sure it will blend in well in most places.
The Front Side
At the top of the device, we have the power button and two LEDs, one for network and one for HDD activity. Just below them, we have the 5¼ inch bay that can be used for anything you like. It is intended for an optical drive, but very few need that in a NAS and ends up in problems with auto-mount and share more often than not. On the right side of the drive bay, we have four USB 2.0 ports.
The HP logo on the middle acts as power and error LED and shines a bright blue when the device is running. Below the logo, we find the door to the magic. It comes with a simple lock to prevent sticky fingers inside.
The Rear Side
Turning the server around, we see the obligatory Kensington Lock at the top right corner. At the top left we have another security ring that can be used to prevent the top cover from being opened. The thumb-screw in the middle is for removing the top cover.
A bit further down to the middle we have the 120 mm fan that cools the entire unit and the small PSU next to it. A little note to modders who wish to replace the fan, it does not use default pin assignment and you will have to redo the wiring if you wish to replace it. Guides for this can be found on the web if needed.
At the bottom, we have a D-sub VGA port, a Gigabit RJ45 port, two USB 2.0 ports and an eSATA port. We also see the 2 low profile extension slots that can be used with PCI-Express cards. People who wish to use those should keep in mind that the PSU only delivers a total of 150 watts.
This is really something I never heard about and way more better than external HDD, which you need to take with you everywhere.
But… I instantly have a question for this. You mentioned NAS works as a pc, so it should have Mobo, right? And furthermore, is there any possibility to RAID all hard drives? 🙂
While I can’t speak to a hardware raid on this device (I’m not that familiar with it).. I built my own NAS around OMV, and OMV supports various software raid levels on the storage drives no problem.
u can build pc and run omv on it. but i hate this idea, fans are noisy. if you dont mind about case, use arm board (i used banana pi) and get sata multiplier and u have board with 4 sata ports, hdmi/rca video, gbit lan, 2 usb, IR – you can also add GUI, mouse and keyboard and use it as backup comp 🙂
That’s what water cooling is for. Kits these days even come pre-shipped with coolant in them with no assembly required. There’s really not any excuse anymore.
water cooling kits have also fan included, but not this fans are noisest, i mean psu fan, in cheap units you have noisy fan, and if you can afford for better psu, you can afford for really good 4disk qnap/synology/bufallo
Believe me, fans are cheaper than a soho NAS. A good PS will set you back about $70 and a good fan maybe $15. A watercooler cost me less than $50. You are still not in the kind of money you would be in for a QNAP NAS when empty they run around $250 and then you need to populate it with NAS class drives.
Truth is it does have a mobo and there are numerous implementations of a NAS device, either in a DIY solution with the FreeNAS operating system or ready-made boxes from well-known manufacturers..
Also did a piece on the subject: http://low.tech-iq.org/11-problems-you-can-fix-with-a-nas/
I attached, after instalation, two SATA HDD, but i cannot setup Mirroring with these two. The main OS is on a IDE HDD and I want to setup those two HDD as RAID. Why I cannot do this?
Very good lessons.
Enjoyed studying this, very good stuff, thanks.
I’ve been trying to find any information on how to access the shared folder from outside your home network. That to me is the whole point of a NAS, yet I’ve not even found a mention of it besides using a VPN. I see no explanation of how to find the NAS remotely. Anyone know a tutorial that covers this?
You can actually do that quite easy, for any system, not just NAS. It requires 2/3 steps:
– Get a dynamic DNS account (no-ip.org, dyndns, etc) or check if your router already has one of its own
– Set up the DDNS in your router, making it sync.
– Forward the ports for the function you want to share in the router. That could be 80 for HTTP or 21 for FTP. (With UPnP enabled, this will be done automatically for the services you tell to use it on your NAS)
If you want access to it from the file explorer, you can add an FTP connection there too in Windows – that way it’s like a local shared folder, even though it’s remotely.