After careful consideration I have decided to transfer all hardware review activities to a new domain. I purchased Hardwareasylum.com in 2012 and have been working hard to build a new and improved Ninjalane on that domain. If you are reading this you have reached one of the archived articles, news, projects and/or reviews that were left behind during the site migration.
Please update your bookmarks and be sure to visit the new and improved Ninjalane at Hardwareasylum.com
QNAP TS-409 Pro Turbo NAS Review
Author: Dennis Garcia
Published: Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Product Design and Features Cont.
We're using 36Gig 10,000RPM WD Raptor drives in our NAS installation which may not sound like much considering this device supports up to 4TB in a RAID 0.
The SATA connection is made on the back of the unit in the typical Hot Swap manner. The cables snake around and plug into the motherboard along the side of the drive cage.
Much to our surprise power is delivered using the proper SATA power connector but is only comprised of 4 power wires instead of 6.
Much to our surprise power is delivered using the proper SATA power connector but is only comprised of 4 power wires instead of 6.
Some of you may notice the blank fan headers on the motherboard. Given the single fan nature of this device it doesn't make sense to install the other parts. In fact looking around the motherboard you'll find quite a few things in the silkscreen that never got installed such as the laptop memory module in the lower right and power port along the left.
Everything else on the system board is fairly typical, the flash memory module can be found at the top while the 4 DDR2 memory chips are along the left near the CPU. The "south bridge" is actually just a Marvell PCIe RAID controller number 88SX7042. Similar chips can be found on the HighPoint RocketRAID and other PCIe raid controllers. This isn't a hardware RAID controller but does come with some pretty nice features.
