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Let's have a look inside. At the back side we remove three screws and then remove the cover (pull it towards you and then upwards). You'll immediately stumble into the PCB and driver trays. Let me zoom in at the front side of the trays though:
Inserting and removing the HDD/SSD is a very simple and smooth process, this unit is hot swappable meaning you can change/remove/insert storage units even when the unit is powered on. If you opt for a big HDD, everything we know is supported including 8TB HDDs. There are four trays you can install your HDDs in if you prefer many RAID options and a hot-spare. At the PCB you can see the SATA connectors. These are SATA 600 aka SATA3 aka SATA 6 Gbps compatible.
At the top side there is, interestingly enough, a connected/wired SSD mount. It should serve a purpose for this model, we learned this can be used as a cache SSD.
We are slowly uncovering the bays/trays and whatnot. BTW we'll be testing with an SSD not an HDD, we do not want the storage unit to be any kind of limiting factor slash bottleneck for the benchmarks. We'll do some extra testing on power consumption based on HDDs though. Zooming in at the PCB you really are looking at a SFF motherboard with embedded Celeron, memory and storage subsystems. Most of it is SMT soldered however you may upgrade the memory. Here's a view of the PCB, we see that the Intel Celeron N3160 Quad Core processor can be passively cooled.
At the backside, or left side if you will, you can spot a 4GB DDR3L SO-DIMM. You may double that up. Now 4GB we feel is perfect for this unit, so 8GB might be a bit overkill. But perhaps if you'd like to run some more advanced MySQL database stuff on the NAS, moving towards 8GB would be a cheap upgrade alright. You can insert two DIMMs and thus add a 4GB DRAM, or just replace it with a single 8GB DIMM.
Thecus is now using Innodisk memory for this batch production, but there is a big compatibility list available for you to download and upgrade to. We do recommend pairing similar specced SODRAM if you plan to go for two DIMMs of course.
