2. Construction Details

What the enclosures lack in beauty, they make up in ease of disassembly and drive removal. The front panel is held on by four thumb screws so that it easily pops off to reveal the drives, which are individually removable from a small card cage, which is itself also removable.

Figure 2: Front panel exposed
(click image to enlarge)

Figure 2 shows the screws removed from the drive cage and the cage pulled out slightly and Figure 3 shows the removed cage with a drive slid out so that you can get the idea. But lest you think you really could just replace an individual drive by removing the two screws that secure it, unfortunately, that's not the case. The drives use individual power and SATA cables to connect to the motherboard and unfortunately, cable dressing does not allow them to be individually pulled all the way out.

Figure 3: Drive cage removed
(click image to enlarge)

This isn't really a problem, however, because the main three-sided cover is held with only three thumbscrews and lifts off easily so that you can get at the cables to disconnect them.

Figure 4 shows as good a shot of the ReadyNAS IT71004 main board as I could get without completely disassembling the ReadyNAS. The key component is Infrant's IT-1004 32-bit NSP that sits under that heatsink at the top center of the photo. The IT-1004 is a 32-bit RISC CPU running at 240MHz that supports four serial ATA channels.

Figure 4: Main board
(click image to enlarge)

Both ReadyNAS come with 256 MB of DDR-SDRAM and a CF card (to the left of the photo, tucked under the power supply) that carries the RAIDiator operating system. Rounding out the design are two USB 2.0 ports supported with a VIA VT6212 4-port USB 2.0 Host Controller and a single 10/100/1000 Ethernet port with its MAC on the IT-1004 chip and using a Seagate Barracuda ST3250823AS 250 GB 7200RPM SATA hard drives with 8 MB of cache, which get formatted using EXT3. Note that since Infrant sells a zero drive version of both products, you won't end up with a dead product no matter which drive dies!