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QNAP TS-231P 2-Bay NAS Review


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The Qnap TS-213P is a compact front loading tower design with a metal chassis and cover and a plastic front bezel. The left-hand side of the bezel holds a vertical set of indicator lights, the power button and One Touch Copy button to use with the front USB 3.0 port. The indicator lights are for (from the top); Status, LAN connection, USB, and two for Disk Activity/Status.

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The rear panel of the unit is dominated by the grill for the Y.S.Tech FD127025MB, 4,000rpm 70mm cooling fan. To the side of this are all the ports, comprising a pair of RJ45 Gigabit Ethernet ports (which support link aggregation), a pair of USB 3.0 ports, a Kensington security slot and the 12v power input.

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The front of the compact motherboard holds all the major controllers; the rear of the board is pretty empty of chips. The largest component on the board is the passive cooler for the AnnapurnaLabs Alpine AL-212 CPU. Sitting next to the CPU are the four Micron MT41K256M8DA-125:K, 256MB DDR3-1600 chips that make up the system memory and as these are soldered to the board; if you fancy upgrading the memory you're out of luck.

Just above the CPU is the 512MB Micron MT29F4G08ABBDAH4:D NAND chip that holds the system OS. The three USB 3.0 ports; two on the back panel and one in the front bezel are looked after by an EtronTech EJ188H IC while each of the two LAN ports has its own Atheros AR8035-A  controller.

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The vertical drive doors have a simple latch mechanism to lock and unlock the drive trays but there isn't any form of physical security for these doors.

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The two drive trays are made from plastic and support both 3.5in and 2.5in drives. Both sizes of drives are fixed in place with screws through the bottom of the tray. The review sample TS-231P came with a pair of Seagate 2TB IronWolf (ST2000VN0040) 5,900rpm hard drives installed and it supports drives up to 10TB.

Physical Specifications
Processor AnnapurnaLabs Alpine AL-212 1.7GHz
Memory 1GB DDR3.
Gigabit Ethernet Ports x 2.
Front panel connectors 1 x USB 3.0
Rear panel connectors 2 x USB 3.0 , 2 x LAN
RAID support  JBOD, RAID 0, 1
Cooling 1 x 70mm fan
Maximum hard drive size supported 10TB.
Maximum Capacity 20TB.
Dimensions (D x W x H)  219 x 102 x 169mm.
Weight 2.32kg.

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