The Basics:
The two images below show off the front of the unit, which is done up in Synology's typical all black color scheme. The five drive bays are all vertically oriented, and the hex key looking shape on each bay door is a lock. At the top of the device's front face we have a status LED, alert LED, power button with LED, and an LED for each of the four network connections. Additionally, the small triangle seen at the top of each drive bay is also an LED which indicates drive activity / status.
Each side of the device features the Synology logo cut in to the metal, with a mesh panel insert. This gives it a nice aesthetic, but also allows for some air to circulate through the device.
On the back we find a power connector, two cooling fans, two eSATA ports, two USB 3.0 ports, four Gigabit RJ45 connections, and a reset button. The two fans are 80mm units rated for low noise operation, and what is particularly cool is that they can be removed rather easily without disassembling the housing. If a fan should happen to eventually die, replacing it will be rather easy.
The next set of images show the process for unlocking the drive bays and opening them in order to access the hard drives inside.
As it turns out, what looks like a set of doors that are integrated in to the NAS server's housing are actually part of each drive tray. As you see in the images below, a drive is secured in to each tray, and the hinged door is at the front end of each. The tray is made of plastic, and each drive is held securely in place by thin plastic rails that use the bolt holes in the side of the drives to lock everything together. For this review, the five trays were filled with 4TB Seagate NAS HDDs. This gives us 20TB of total space to work with, but in either RAID 5 or SHR, will have the formatted capacity of 4x 4TB drives.
Taking a look inside shows that a fairly minimal daughter board was used for the SATA data and power connections, which leaves plenty of open space for the two 80mm fans to exhaust the heat created by the drives.
