A Closer Look Interior
Taking off the front panel gives you quick and easy access to the four drive sleds within the chassis.
The sleds can be removed by pushing down on the little clip at the top and gently pulling.
They are capable of supporting both 3.5″ and 2.5″ drives and feature a tool-less mounting mechanism for ease of use.
The clip on the side slots into the mounting holes on the HDD making an easier removal and installation experience over using screws, of course, you are still able to use the included screws if you do prefer.
Taking off the case to get a better look inside the NAS, we can see the SATA board with its four SATA connections.
On the right-hand side is where the motherboard sits and we can see the two M.2 slots labelled 1 and 2 and ignoring the fact that we have dismantled the case, they are easily accessible once the drive cages have been removed with no further dismantling required.
The second M.2 slot is tucked away in the upper right corner so installation can be a bit tricky for those with bigger hands.
Like the Hard Drives, installing the M.2 drives is also tool-free thanks to the installation latches.
These latches make installation easy, just requiring a push on the smaller notch to lock the M.2 in place, and then a push on the larger opposing notch to unlock the latch and remove the M.2. This is definitely a better system than fiddling with those tiny screws which many newer motherboards are growing accustomed to.
The small heatsink for the Celeron N4505 can be seen which also features a thermal pad between it and the metal frame to provide some additional thermal headroom.
Between the CPU and the second M.2 slot is the 4GB of RAM which is unfortunately soldered to the board with no easy way of increasing the memory, unless you’re skilled enough to fill up the last two pads.
Further down the board is the slot for the SATA riser board meaning it can be replaced if it ever fails without having to replace the entire unit.
On top of the unit is where the PCIe Gen 3 X2 slot is located for one of the various PCIe cards allowing you to expand storage or connectivity further. The IO for this card is located on the rear of the NAS.
