Closer Look at the QNAP TS-328
Entire outer shell is made from white ABS plastic. This plastic material is very light and durable and ideal for a small type of NAS devices. There are not many buttons on the QNAP TS-328 just power and USB copy. On the front of the device, there are six LED’s that correspond to Power, Network, and Activity status of the device. TS-328 has one USB 2.0 connector, USB 3.0 connectors two Gigabit Ethernet jacks, 3.5mm line out and speaker line out.
Every QNAP NAS comes with a myQNAPcloud key. myQNAPcloud is a handy way to get access to your QNAP when you are not at home or at the office. Registering your Cloud Key with the cloud will grant you access to all of your files on TS-328.
Ventilation in QNAP TS-328 is done via 80mm PWM fan in the rear. It pulls air from the bottom front of the case to the back. To keep the device stable on the flat surface QNAP uses thick adhesive rubber feet. When installing hard drives you would need to remove the cover of the case and remove the trays.
Trays are made from ABS plastic as well. To mount your supported drives you would need to use the rubber inserts to secure the drives in the sleds.
As I have mentioned earlier, TS-328 is actively cooled by an 80 mm PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) fan. One of the unique features of TS-328 is the battery. This battery is located in the back of the unit and provides a few seconds of power in the event of unexpected power loss to the system. In that short period of time, NAS finishes the last writes so your data doesn’t end up corrupted or truncated.
The ts-328s motherboard is green and very neat. I have not seen any over fluxed areas or bad soldering. The motherboard has CMOS battery and a small onboard speaker. Majority of the chips are open-faced and are placed on the top of the motherboard.
Daughter board has three SATA connectors on it. The back of the daughter board is the ASMedia controller which is responsible for SATA I/O.
Some of the interesting chips I found.
Internal SATA controller is provided by ASMedia (ASM1062).
TS-328 has an 8 bit flash micro controller. It is being provided by Weltrend (WT61p803). The newer version of this chip is (WT61P808).
Internal caching is being done by e-MMC NAND controller. This controller is a 4GB e-MMC by Toshiba (THGBMDG5D1LBAIL).
The TS-328 has dual Gigabit Ethernet adapters. These adapters are provided by Realtek (RTL8111H).
Communications with USB 2.0 and 3.1 interfaced are done by Texas Instruments (TUSB522P).
CPU in this NAS is based on the 64 bit ARM Cortex-A53 processor. Realtek has a stock clock rate of this chip at 1.4GHz making it one of the most powerful ARM-Based Quad Core NAS CPUs on the market. (RTD1296 Quad-Core ARM Cortex-A53 Processor @1.4GHz).
There are four DDR4 RAM chips on the motherboard. They are total 2Gb and Provided by Western Digital (SEC 731 5WE BCRC).
The design looks already old to me. But a 3 bay is a nice alternative for those who need space, specially with the new 14 TO Ironwolf.