Interior Impressions: NVR-101

Because one must install a hard drive for this system to work properly, opening the NVR 101 up is simplicity itself. One simply slides apart the top half of the plastic case and lifts it out. To remove the steel hard drive chassis you have to unscrew a couple of screws and lift the metal frame out. Of course to do this one should also unplug the 3 pin fan wire so as to give ones self a bit of extra wiggle room.


When this is accomplished you will have to remove yet more screws and then you can lift the PCB right out of the plastic case.


The very first thing that sticks out is that there are a few chips and/or connectors missing from this printed circuit board. The long rectangle / C shaped one appears to be the perfect size for a PATA port connector and this does makes sense as that would give the manufacturer more flexibility in spec’ing out the hardware requirements. It would not surprise us if an earlier engineering sample came with a PATA connector instead of the SATA and was later changed. The other missing chip could simply be a now redundant controller chip whose job has been taken over by a one of the other multifunction chips.


The network controller chip used by the NVR 101 is the Realtek RTL8110SCL, Gigabit Ethernet controller chip. With this chip Realtek has managed to integrate a triple-speed IEEE 802.3 compliant Media Access Controller (MAC) with a triple-speed Ethernet transceiver, 32-bit PCI bus controller, and even embedded memory all into one amazingly powerful yet efficient chip!

This network controller chip fully supports the PCI v2.3 bus interface for host communications with power management and is compliant with the IEEE 802.3 specification for 10/100Mbps Ethernet and the IEEE 802.3ab specification for 1000Mbps Ethernet. The Realtek RTL8110SCL supports the Advanced Configuration Power management Interface (ACPI) and also supports remote wake-up (AKA wake on LAN) in both ACPI and APM (Advanced Power Management) environments.


The Silicon Image 3512 “SteelVine” SATALink Processor is the PCI to 2-port Serial ATA host controller used in the NVR 101. As the name suggests this controller chip handles all the Integrated Serial ATA Transport, Link Logic and PHY layers into one single chip. While it is only compliant with the Serial ATA 1.0 specification (aka SATA 150) this does provide more than enough bandwidth to fulfill the NVR101’s needs. The phrase “SteelVine” may be recognizable to some of you as we recently reviewed the Sans Digital MobilSTOR external enclosure which used a newer generation of the SteelVine to help power it to a DAM GOOD award.


The Integrated Host Processor for this unit is certainly an interesting choice. QNAP elected to use an MPC8241LVR266D chip manufactured by Freescale semiconductors. For all those eagle eyed readers out there that spotted the passive heatsink, this is the chip that it was cooling. It is an interesting choice in that its core is based on the older Power PC architecture. In this iteration this 32bit RISC processor runs at 266mhz, uses a 133mhz memory bus and can support up to 2Gb of Dram memory. All in all it’s a very powerful chip and while it is very energy efficient it does generate enough heat to warrant the relatively large passive heatsink. It will be interesting to see how much this heat this bad boy produces while in use.


The four RAM chips that located on the main PCB are made by Powerchip Semiconductor Corporation. In this instance they are 32mb memory chips model number A3V56S40ETP. Even these chips are ancient they are still more than fast enough for the NVR 101 needs.


The USB controller is none other than the NEC µPD720101 USB 2.0 controller chip. This chip is an update to the 720100 and uses less electricity and generates less heat than its older brethren, making it a great high quality choice for the NVR101. Not only is this chip energy efficient it is also very powerful since it is in reality One EHCI (Enhanced Host Controller Interface ) and two OHCI ( = Open Host Controller Interface) integrated onto single chip. It can handle up to 5 downstream USB ports and is even fully compliant with Rev2.2 of the PCI specifications.


The fan that provides all the active cooling for this device is the FD1250-A1033C 50x50x15mm ARX CeraDyna ceramic bearing fan. This fan rotates at a nominal 5000rpm at which speed it moves 9.76CFM with a static pressure of 2.87 mmH20. The interesting thing about this fan is that unlike most ball bearing fans that used metal ball bearings this one uses ceramic bearings. While it does give the fan an interesting note to the noise it generates it does have the upside of extending the life expectancy of the fan.