Review
- Introduction
- Packaging and Specification
- Closer Look
- Installation and User Experience
- Test Bench and Methodology
- Transfer Test
- Conclusion
The exterior is a glossy (fingerprint magnet) plastic shell.
The front panel has a Status/Lan/Disk Activity LED Indicator with a Power Button and LED light. Towards the rear, there’s a 60mm fan followed by a Kensington lock hole, Hard Reset button, 2x USB 2.0 hub, an Ethernet port followed by the usual A/C adapter plug. Do note that the NAS storage has a MAC ID/Serial Number label on the rear.
Both side panels are plain white with the company’s name written on it with vents on the side.
On the underbelly, there are 4 rubber case feet and vents.
To open the NAS, all you need to is slide out a part of the shell.
As stated before, this is a single bay drive and looking at the mount support for the drive, its more for 3.5" SATA drives. Now I know that Synology have mentioned that you can dock 2.5" drives as well but it doesn’t seem to have a 2.5 dock converter or anything like that.
Moving on…
DS112J comes with a Y.S. Tech FD126015LL 60mm 3 pin header fan for the rear exhaust. Initially I thought its a ball bearing fan, but after googling out the model number, it uses Sintetico bearing which (according to YS Tech) gives better reliability and low noise compared to sleeve bearing that I wouldn’t be surprised if many NAS manufacturers use it in their single bay drives by default. The advertised max airflow is 15.9 CFM with advertised lifespan of 50,000 hours under operating temperatures of 40 degrees celcius.
Now taking the look of the PCB
The second part of the casing is screws against the metal plate which holds together the main board, the power/LED PCB viz. connected via the Ribbon cable and the 3 pin fan.
The processor that this NAS uses is Marvell 88F6-LG02 88F6702-A1 1 GHz processor which basically uses an ARM core (can’t find the actual Specification) with Hynix H5PS1G63EFR 128MB DDR2 ram module. For 2x USB 2.0, its powered by Genesys Logic GL850G controller, PIC16F627A 8-bit Flash based CMOS and Marvell 88E1318S Gigabyte LAN controller on the other side of the PCB.
The second PCB has those 4 LED lights and the power Button.
There’s no issue when it comes to mounting a 3.5" drive like the Western Digital 3TB RED NAS Storage Hard drive but a 2.5" is a different story.
The 2.5" drive does fit in the SATA slot, but there’s no way to slide it in properly. It could be different with a thicker 2.5" drive, even maybe a 12.5mm thick 2.5" drive, but isn’t the case with something as thick as an SSD. There’s no mounting hole either. I wonder if the “assembly kit” that Synology mentioned in the specification is a 2.5" bracket. Another downer is that it uses SATA II rather than the current standard SATA III. I would have preferred to see a SATA III and/or USB 3.0 controller, with SATA III having the higher priority in this case.
Since its not here and since I’ll be testing this with WD30EZRX Red NAS drive, the same drive that’s tested by Synology as mentioned in specs, I am testing it in its full glory. I understand that this drive can support 1x 4TB drive, but I don’t have it- nor I am sure if you get one.
