Physical look
TS-109 Pro - Physical exam
Box!
Lovely.
The TS-109 Pro is somewhat larger than other single-drive NAS solutions we've seen. This is in part down to the way that it's passively cooled, which we'll come to shortly.
Style-wise, it's curvy but we weren't struck by the colour of the brushed aluminium. It's probably best described as somewhere between bronze and brown - borrowing from Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen's palette, perhaps.
The front has the usual array of LEDs, from power to HDD/LAN activity. There's a power button too, of course, along with a front USB port and copy button for easy backups of USB drives to the internal disk.
The TS-109's rear has two more USB ports, an eSATA port, a GigE RJ-45 socket, along with a power input. A Kensington Lock slot and a reset button complete the list of rearward features. Note the absence of a fan.
QNAP's product came with a power brick, a CAT5e cable, a software CD, a setup guide and screws. The guide was detailed enough to get the hardware setup out of the way - the software CD took care of the rest, as we'll explain.
Inside
Take out a couple of screws, then slide half of the casing off and you're inside the TS-109.
The casing has fewer fins than we expected, given that it's charged with dissipating all the heat the hard drive produces, with no fan assistance.
Take off the hard drive's mounting bracket and the underside of the motherboard is fully visible. There's not much to see on this side, save the mounted connectors, buttons and LEDs.
Flip the board over, however, and the heart of the TS-109 Pro is revealed. The CPU, made by Marvell, is a variant of the ARM926EJ-S - an ARM-9 processor with Jazelle Java-acceleration technology.
However, Jazelle won't be put to any use in this particular environment. Instead, the ARM-9 is being used for its power and efficiency. Provided you don't place silly demands on it, it can run pretty much anything you want at a reasonable pace.
128MiB of DDR2 is available to make sure memory-resident data can be handled in a speedy fashion. Get a closer look at these chips if you wish.
There's also an 8MiB flash chip but that isn't anywhere near big enough to store a copy of the Linux OS and provide the features QNAP offers.
Instead it just holds enough to bootstrap the system and load the rest of the OS from the installed hard drive. The OS takes up relatively little space on the disk, so it's a pretty sensible strategy – and one we've seen used with other NAS devices.
Build quality
The solid aluminium casing was, well... solid, so no complaints there. And, in general, the TS-109 is built very sturdily.
But when we came to install a hard drive into the box, we found our first real gripe. The thickness of the bracket between the drive and motherboard was such that the SATA connectors didn't line up perfectly. This meant we had to apply too much force to get the drive in place.
SATA connectors should slide into place with a minimum of fuss but not in this case - we were worried we'd snap something. We didn't, but hope that QNAP reworks the TS-109 to bring the connectors into proper alignment.
