The Basics (continued):
Around back the features continue to make the N4100PRO look like a computer. There is a large exhaust fan, a pair of USB ports, a pair of Gigabit LAN connections, and a 200W power supply at the bottom with its own (small) cooling fan).
The USB ports found here and on the front can serve a variety of purposes... Including the addition of external drives, printers, wireless networking adapters, and even cameras. Thecus manages to incorporate far more than storage capabilities into their products, and many of these extras are much easier and more cost effective to manage with something like a NAS than a dedicated computer. The pair of Gigabit LAN connections allow for fail over protection in case one port should die, and you can even configure them to do load balancing if your network happens to be that advanced.
The next set of images takes a look at the drive cages, and how you remove them for use. Once the door covering the four bays is swung open, each drive tray is easily accessible. A cylindrical key is used to lock/unlock each drive tray individually, and when unlocked it is a simple matter of pulling the silver colored handle outward to remove the tray.
 
Installing the trays into the housing is a tool-less process, but attaching drives to the trays does require a screw driver. There are four screw holes on the bottom of each tray, and there are enough screws provided to install four hard drives quite securely. While this tray design is much nicer and more substantial than what was experienced on the N3200, the N3200 had the added bonus of being completely tool-less.
The below left image takes a look through the drive bays, which reveals a PCB with SATA data and power connections mounted to it for each drive. The PCB has eight cut outs to allow the fan behind it to draw out the heat. While the openings may not be equal to the cross sectional area of the fan, with the fan set to rotate slowly enough to be extremely quiet they should be adequate.
 
The N4100PRO's cover can be removed by loosening three thumbscrews on the back, and by sliding the U-shaped piece of steel off. Once inside it is possible to slide the frame off of the drive bays to have a closer look at the PCB where the connections are made. The above right image shows the PCB, and how it is connected to the rear of the housing with the exhaust fan sandwiched in between.
Having the cover off reveals even more similarities to a small form factor PC. If the item in the images below look like a tiny motherboard, it should. Among other things, the board features a passively cooled AMD Geode LX800 processor (rated for 500MHz), 256MB of DDR 400 memory (user upgradable), USB controller, drive controller, and network controllers. The board can be slid out rather easily as shown in the below right image.
 
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