First Looks
The PX-NAS4 is a black, mini-tower unit. Its four hard drive bays face forward and are oriented vertically. There are indicator LEDs above each bay, and the bays are accessed through a door which swings open from the left to the right. There is not a lock for that door, nor are there locks for the drives.
The side column of the front has many more indicators showing network connectivity, power state, USB connectivity state, and more. There are two USB 2.0 ports on the front, as well as a power switch. There’s also a button which provides a USB copy feature, wherein a connected mass storage device will be copied in its entirety to the unit’s storage.
At the base of the unit is the Plextor logo.
On its rear, there are dual 120 mm ball bearing exhaust fans to cool the drives. There are dual gigabit Ethernet ports, and dual eSATA ports for additional expansion. There’s a power port, too.
Note well that there are no USB ports on the rear.
The sides are blank, and aren’t really meant to be removed by the end user.
That said, we’re not the end user, so we’ll show you the inside!
The device is powered by an 800 MHz Freescale 8543 processor with 256MB DDR2 RAM and a 256 MB Flash ROM on a mATX motherboard. There’s nothing terribly special about it, aside from the dual gigabit Ethernet ports and four SATA ports connected to a breakout board on the drive rail system.
Four 500 GB Western Digital WD5000AAKS SATA 3 Gb/s 7200 RPM hard drives were provided in our demo unit. This is a recent model, manufactured in September 2010.
