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Our unit came supplied with a single 1TB drive however you can insert a second drive if you wish and to do so you need to take the NAS apart.
Firstly we remove the top of the outer fascia by unscrewing two thumbscrews and then pulling forward. This exposes the naked chassis underneath.
Using a coin or a screwdriver we then need to remove three screws which hold the steel cage in place. Then we pull on the blue handle which forces the upper cage system out of the main carriage.
This is the main cage removed and ‘flipped' over. The hard drive is mounted into a SATA based daughterboard on the rear.
Above the primary drive is another slot for an additional hard drive to be mounted. This is a straightforward process and we like the option of being able to upgrade the storage in this manner.
Hitachi are the choosen manufacturer for this particular ASUS build and the drive is reasonably quiet.
The ATOM CPU as we can see resides under a heatsink with two 40mm fans to the left ensuring adequate airflow across the components. This motherboard is a FlexATX Asus manufactured product fitted with 2GB of laptop memory and the embedded N280 processor which is a 2.5W, single core Hyper Threaded CPU.
As can be seen in the image above, with the drive caddy rack system is flipped back to be reattached, the SATA card daughterboard slides into the motherboard slot bottom left in the images above. This is a PCI Express 1x slot.
Fitting this back in is a rather fiddly process and while not a massively complex procedure is not the best method we have seen in our labs. We would much rather have a system that just slides in on rails such as seen on the Synology unit we reviewed last month. Lining up the daughterboard with the slot without being able to actually see it makes life more difficult than it need be.
With two drives you would hope that the system would offer RAID modes, but unfortunately not. It does offer a mirrored folder duplication routine which means you can select which folders you want to duplicate onto the other drive.
