Open Turbostation:TS101

System Overview
The TS101 contains space for a single 3.5" SATA drive; as well as connectivity to external USB and e-Sata drives. Full product details and updated firmware are available from Qnap TS101. Progessive Audio provides a firmware update (and support) for enabling Slimserver in order to stream data to the Squeezebox / Transporter Audio sytems. It is recommended! Alternatively a new firmware update from QNAP allows UPnP streaming.

Circuit Boards
The images below were taken from TS101 with the V1.02 PCB board. Many others do not have the type III mini pci connector in place.



Firmware
The firmware is currently available under GPL from the QNAP website. First head to the Specifications page; select Download and then the 'Technical Docu' link. For convienence the link is here but this could break in the future.

Upgrades
The standard system works very well for the initial applications it is designed for; however many want to add / expand the system. Thoughts, ideas and results are listed below. Please feel free to add any results of upgrades!

Memory
There are clearly two empty SDRAM slots on the original PCB board. According to QNAP, the memory cannot be upgraded and is fixed at 64MB. The details of the MPC controller shows that it can support a maximum of 2 Gigabytes of RAM; attached in 1-8 banks of 16,64, 128 156, 512 MB. Quick calculations show that things dont add up; unless you consider that SRAM is addressed in row, column, bank format. Getting to the bottom of this is complicated as there are no public specifications for the existing PSC SDRAM.

Can we use the empty sockets?
In principle we should be able to - a lot depends upon how the designers connected things.

A further investigation showed that there are some unconnected capacitors associated with the empty SDRAM sockets; these are listed below. Assuming that all SDRAM with the TSOP54 footprint have the same pinouts then using information for the Micron MT48 series should enable the functionality to be deduced. Values are unknown as they are not readable on the SMD components; but they seem to be stabilisation (debounce) capacitors connected between the power supply and isolated DQ power supply. Please fill out the table if further information is found.

Can we replace the existing chips?
Based on the fact that the capacitors are purely acting for stability it would seem logical that the existing chips can be extracted and replaced with new ones. Once again getting better specifications on the PSC chips would enable an easy answer. Most of the Micron memory chips are 4 bank devices; and go upto 256MB; thus allowing a theoretical potential of 512MB ram. Practically though it is not clear whether the CPU is running in 32 bit or 64 bit access; or has the full PCB connected capacity for the higher memory options. Unfortunately the CPU is a Ball Grid Array device; and getting access to check all the pins is not easy.

Mini PCI Connector
Originally the Turbostation TS101 was announced with a optional wireless card; however this option never materialised. Some of the PCB's released had space and layout for the SMD connection of the connector; but this was left blank. Other boards (>August 2006) seem to have the connectors added. There is currently no known information about which mini-pci (type III) boards may be suitable.

An interesting observation: there is a sealed hole at the end of one of the cases which might be for an ariel for a wifi connector. This may be needed because the casing could cause interference problems.

Update: 11/10/06 QNAP have claimed at the Mini PCI feature is not yet enabled in the firmware. If the board has a Mini PCI slot then it is a new board version and more announcements will follow in the future. Whether old boards can be retrofitted with the correct slot is still unknown.

USB Swap File
Based on comments from the [forums.slimdevices.com Slimdevices forums] there could be opportunities to add a cheap USB stick to one of the ports; and use this for a swap file. This could help enable hard disks to spin down when not needed.