Teardown and upgrades
Let’s take a look at what’s under the aluminum cover. First of all, the two bay slots are removed. These can be unlocked with a simple snap mechanism and removed individually.
The next step is the inside. To do this, we only have to loosen four screws at the back and pull off the aluminum body, so nothing to be afraid of.
Once you’ve done that, the naked truth lies before you. The first thing we notice is the 80 mm fan, which is used to cool the NAS. It is pleasing that a regulated PWM fan is used for this and not a noisy DC fan. We will discuss this fan in more detail later in the review.
Next, we look at the board, which initially turns its back on us and doesn’t really reveal what this tiny powerhouse can do.
TerraMaster has placed the RAM SO-DIMM slots on the right-hand side, which also allow us to upgrade. This is because only a 4 GB DDR4 2133 bar is pre-installed here. However, the maximum possible memory expansion is 2x 16 GB DDR4 2933, i.e. a total of 32 GB. Since I’m already doing this, I’m going to upgrade and install a Crucial 16 GB bar with a 3200 MHz clock rate. The other 16 GB are then installed on the opposite side. This gives me a 32 GB upgrade and I have no problems getting the RAM to work.
After the small operation, we take a look at what else we can find and come across the next option for an upgrade. TerraMaster has installed two M.2 slots here, which allow us to either install M.2 SSDs as a cache for the HDDs or as an additional storage solution to increase the total storage space. As I still have a lot of unused M.2 SSD2s lying around here, I’m happy to take up the offer and install a 512GB M2 Viper Gen4 from Patriot as a cache, which should provide a decent performance boost.
Next, let’s take a look at the front of the mainboard. A passive, black anodized aluminium cooler immediately catches our eye. Underneath is an Intel Celeron 5105 (codenamed Jasper Lake from Q1 2021). This CPU has 4 cores without hyperthreading with a clock frequency of 2.00 GHz, a turbo clock frequency (1 core) of 2.9 GHz and a turbo clock frequency (all cores) of 2.6 GHz. The Intel Celeron N5105 is manufactured with a structure width of 10 nanometers and is based on the BGA 1338 socket, which means that the processor can only be permanently soldered in. This CPU also supports the hardware transcoder H.264, H.265, MPEG-4, VC-1 and a maximum resolution of 4K (4096 x 2160 pixels) as well as a frame rate of 60 Hz as codecs and is therefore also suitable for simple media servers.
This CPU is mainly used in the mobile sector and therefore also has an iGPU. In this case, Intel UHD Graphics with 24 execution units of the “Jasper Lake” architecture is used.
Next to the CPU is the second SO-DIMM slot with the aforementioned 16 GB DDR4 3200 from Crucial as an upgrade.
To the right of the RAM slot we find the obligatory CMOS battery. And in the top left corner, there is even an old-school speaker that alerts us in the event of an error. However, this can all be controlled in the software, e.g. when and how the alarm should be triggered in the event of overheating. Well, let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. On the top of the boards we find other connections, including a USB pin connection, another PWM fan connection and, interestingly, a normal USB 2.0 connection with a USB stick.
Funnily enough, the operating system is on this stick. In my opinion, this is an additional security feature, because without this stick you are completely locked out and cannot access the data on the hard disk, not even if you want to access it with a third-party stick and the same operating system. This is because the original operating system leaves a fingerprint in connection with the installed hard disks. We also find a PCIE x4 slot on the board. This is connected to our HDDs and the IO shield in the front.
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