QNAP TBS-453A 4-Bay M.2 SSD NAS Review
A Closer Look Continued
To access the internal bays of the TBS-453A, you’ll need to pull up the four rubber feet located at each of the corners. Under the rubber feet are thumb screws that hold the bottom panel on. Unscrew them and pull the panel up.
The user accessible bays inside include four M.2 SSD drive slots and two SO-DIMM slots. The M.2 slots use M.2 SATA SSDs.
The M.2 slots support M.2 drives with lengths of 80, 60, and 42mm and screws are included with the TBS-453A to secure the M.2 drives in their slots. The slots also have a film thermistor to measure the temperatures of the SSDs.
The TBS-453A also includes small heatsinks for the controllers on the SSDs. This helps dissipate heat and helps to keep the controllers from throttling.
Two slots are provided for RAM. Our review unit shipped with 4 GB of RAM but can be ordered with 8 GB. The maximum supported RAM for the TBS-453A is 8 GB. The memory that was shipped with our unit was two 2 GB Transcend DDR3L 1600 modules.
The fan for the TBS453A is a Sunon MagLev blower style fan and is easily replaced. During testing, fan noise from about 3 feet away was not noticeable when the NAS is set to automatically control the fan speeds. However, when using manual control, the fan could be heard when the fan was turned up to around 42%.
There are actually two network controllers on board the TBS-453A. The four network ports grouped together are managed by a RealTek RTL8367N 5-port network controller. The RTL8367N is a full featured managed solution that supports technology such as spanning tree, 802.1Q VLANS, Access control lists, etc. The single port is controlled by an Intel i210 network controller. The i210 is no slouch either and is compatible with the same technologies as the RTL8367N. With this configuration, physically you have 5 network ports available but logically it is set up in a 4+1 configuration. Four of the ports will be usable as one network while the other is used on another.
Storage function for the M.2 drives is handled by a pair ASMedia ASM1062 SATA controllers. Each ASM1062 supports two ports of Serial ATA up to a max of 6.0 Gbps.
A pair of everything seems to be the on going theme with the TBS-453 as there is a pair of ASMedia ASM1442Ks that drive the dual HDMI ports. Both ports are capable of 4K @ 30Hz and when the NAS is connected to monitors, keyboard and mouse, the NAS functions as a lightweight Linux desktop and the displays can be extended or duplicated.
