THE TS-531P INTERIOR

Opening the NAS is not hard you just need to remove the three screws found at the rear used to keep the top cover in place.

QNAP has used a 250W power supply from Delta Electronics (perhaps overkill since even with all drive bays and USB ports populated the NAS shouldn't surpass 100W at load).

Here we see the PCIe Gen2x4 slot.

Our sample arrived with a single 8GB DDR3-1600 SO-DIMM and as you can see there's another slot right beneath which can be fitted with one more 8GB module (16GB total).

The Annapurna labs Alpine AL-314 processor sits right beneath a large black aluminum heatsink.

Micron seems to be the supplier of the 512MB ROM used in the TS-531P.

We'll also be testing the TS-531P with the 10GbE SFP+ Network Adapter in this review.

This adapter is based on the Tehuti TN4010 chip and is actually quite affordable (always compared to the Intel T-base models).

Installation is very easy as you can see from the above picture (unfortunately only this adapter is compatible with the TS-531P).

With 5 of our Seagate Constellation ES.3 4TB HDDs installed we're good to start our tests.