Photos of TS Mini’s Guts
19 Dec
(Click the pics for full-size, hi-res photos)
I posted the first review of this device on Newegg.com. Reading more recent reviews, a Mr. N/A (aka Internet Tuff Guy) impolitely informed me that I was wrong about the RAM being soldered on. Hey, I made a mistake. I wanted to be sure, though, as I could have sworn I saw a mem chip on the topside of the mainboard. So, I powered down the server and opened her up.
To access the mainboard, you must remove the cage that holds the hard drives.
First, remove the three screws:
The blue strap is how you lift the cage up away from the mainboard. Et voilŕ! In the next pic you will see that the HDD cage connects to a PCI card that slots into the mainboard. Please to be noticing the plastic-covered levers sticking out of the left—you lift these to eject the hard drives from the SATA/power connectors.
Next, the internals:
My confusion about the memory being soldered in came from, upon further examination, a Samsung Flash NAND SLC chip (part number K9F2G08U0B). It turns out to be a 2GB (8 × 256 MB)! Very interesting…
But the RAM is only accessible by disconnecting the power, removing six tiny, tiny screws, and lifting (carefully!) out the mainboard and flipping it. Upon which you will see this (minus my fingers):
The white plastic is imprinted with “1.8V” and the memory is Kingston.
Join the forum discussion on this post 
My happy discovery was seeing that lovely blue VGA port.
Slicing away the plastic gives easy access to it.
Has made converting this into a linux server so much easier.
Good catch. Do you have yours up and running on Linux? How’s the performance?
Well, it doesn’t boot off a USB thumb drive, even after fiddling w/ the BIOS a bit.
Going to go pick up a USB cdrom drive at work today, see if that helps. If it doesn’t, back to moving the drive (the quick-release is handy) back to my other machine and working in chroot.
I’m pretty optimistic Linux will work alright. the network card is supported. Just taking a bit longer since I’m doing a migration of an existing machine that I’ve had up for 10 years.
Moved the existing windows partition to the end of the disc in case I need it later and copied over the partions. Just need to set grub up again for the new disc structure.
Actually, before I relegate it to headless server, I think I’ll try plugging it into the living room TV and see if it can also playing movies. I’m skeptical the card will be able to handle it, but can’t hurt to try.
The USB CDROM drive does boot. Unfortunately the one I have sucks and I can get it to read a boot CD well enough to boot about one time in ten which is slowing things down a bit.
BTW, when I looked in BIOS, the intel graphics card had 8 megabytes allocated, there was also an option to only allocate it 1 megabyte.
Not sure why that wasn’t enabled on a headless server
Please excuse me for butting in, but what is the capacity of the Kingston 1.8v notebokk RAM card?
Great info here.. I plan on getting this server in the next week or so. Pls keep experimenting to get this thing smoking fast!
I’m looking into getting one, but I really dislike WHS and thinking of putting Gentoo on it (utilizing btrfs).
Any progress on this?
When you were looking around the BIOS did you find a setting to automatically power on if the power is lost and restored. This is typically listed as power state, and has settings like leave off, or use last state. I would like mine to automatically restart if there is a power failure and the UPS runs down.
Thnx
Mike
Not sure. Queries to ASUS go unanswered. I would guess 4GB would work. Maybe Nemo knows.
Can you host website site with Asus TS mini under the Windows Home Server? and how do you install Linux Server without being able to look at a screen? your help would be much appreciated.
Thanks
I recently got a TS Mini and immediately took it apart.
The memory can be reached by removing the plastic cover for the other side. It’s attached with 3 screws. After that, there’s a plate fixed with three more screws. You can remove it and access the memory.
Take a few more screws out (Torx-T9) and you can remove the rear panel guard to get access to the RGB port without cutting. You may need to remove the motherboard to do so however. This will also make cutting the RGB port’s hole easier.
The memory installed (in my 500GB/1GB model) is a 1GB DDR2 SO-DIMM. You can install up to a 2GB SO-DIMM. There are solder pads near the RAM mount that will allow you to attach a second memory slot, if you’re good with a soldering iron. The 945 chipset only supports up to 2x 2GB SO-DIMM.
The card slot on the top of the motherboard is not a PCIe slot. It’s a SATA and power passthrough. The board on the drive cage has power circuitry to get the voltage right for the drives. These drives are connected to the ICH7-Mobile. The chipset should support AHCI, but the option is not present in the BIOS.
The eSATA ports are connected to a Marvell 88SE6121 PCIe controller. You can set it to RAID, IDE or DISABLED in BIOS. In IDE mode, it works with standard IDE drivers. In RAID mode it should support AHCI, and therefore hot-plugging and port multipliers. I don’t have an eSATA drive to check this with.
You can boot from a USB thumb drive. In the BIOS, you can set the boot order. From another option on the same screen you can choose the hard drive order. The USB drive will show up as a hard drive in that list. You can also press F8 during the BIOS POST to get a boot menu.
I have my system running NexentaStor Community (based on OpenSolaris), booting from a 4GB thumb drive.
Mike — Yes, there is an option in the BIOS to have it turn back on in case of power loss.
I was able to upgrade the memory in TS Mini to 2GB from 1GB. The 1GB memory module is labeled: Kingston Memory, 1GB 1Rx8 , C2-6400S, 666-12-b2, ASU128X64D2S8000C6 9995293-026.A00LF, 4486713-0938
I purchased a Kingston 2GB 800MHz DDR2 Non-ECC CL6 SODIMM : KVR800D2S6/2G from Newegg, PN N82E16820134770 for $46.98 with shipping.
The installation was a no brainer, remove the 2 parts of the plastic shell(5 screws total), remove the metal back cover(3 screws), swap the memory module, close everything up, and reboot. You should now have 2GB TS Mini.
Note: The Intel Atom N280 CPU only supports 2GB of memory, and is a 32 Bit only processor. No WHS Vail allowed.:-(
Well, I bought one… and I’m in the process of putting Gentoo on it.
..and for the VGA port, just slice around the port and peel the sticky part off. Still haven’t figured out how to access the 256MB (not 2GB) of NAND Flash.
Good luck, Simba. I guess I viewed the specs on that NAND chip wrong. I found a datasheet: http://www.alldatasheet.com/datasheet-pdf/pdf/194598/SAMSUNG/K9F2G08U0A-I.html
It could be for CMOS and 256M (with 64M spare) in size to hold ASUS’ Express Gate, which is not installed by default.
Nope. The 256MB flash *IS* an entire onboard flash drive. I think it’s used as a recovery area, but I kinda.. wiped it. It’s currently housing my /boot partition.
..just have to enable USB 2.0 Disk in the second BIOS menu. This should come up when you boot your Linux distro up:
scsi 5:0:0:0: Direct-Access PMAP PQ: 0 ANSI: 0 CCS
sd 5:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg3 type 0
sd 5:0:0:0: [sdd] 503808 512-byte logical blocks: (257 MB/246 MiB)
It’s not much, but I’m sure (if you wanted to) you could install a small Linux distro and use the HDDs for just storage. I just want a portable server that can do almost anything.
Oh, I have 2x2TB Seagate 5900RPM drives in it now. I did a Linux RAID to combine both drives as a RAID0 (risky, I know). So, I have a /dev/md1 with almost 3.75TB of storage sitting in my corner compiling without issues.
The eSATA ports DO support hot swapping from WHS. Don’t see why they won’t on Linux. I just finished installing Ubuntu Server 10.10 on my new 2TB (2x 1TB) TSMini system. Everything is looking good so far. Cutting the plastic with a hobby knife worked great. No screw removal necessary.
Thanks to this post. I did the same modification to my TS-MINI and now it’s running a ubuntu server edition very well. The flash as a internal USB drive is the windows 2003 server recovery environment. If you boot from that one, you will see the server recovery environment output.
Using the VGA port after cutting away the plastic, I had no problem booting the TS mini on an ubuntu CD (using an external USB CDROM drive since it didn’t seem to want to boot off a flash drive).
I then copied my gentoo over aaaand… works great.
It was a little finicky when plugging and unplugging video/mouse/keyboard (as in, going unresponsive such that I could no longer ssh in) but I don’t know if that’s a general thing, or related to my 9 year old gentoo configuration.
Everything was autodetected just fine, and I suspect a default ubuntu install would have worked great too, maybe better.
FYI – the article says you have to remove the motherboard from the case to replace the memory. Not so. If you remove the plastic shell on both sides (2 tool-less thumbscrews followed by 3 small phillips screws) you can gain access to the back of the motherboard via a removable panel held in place by a few more small phillips screws. Simple 5 minute operation.
Also, the comments say you can’t boot from USB. Not true. However, the BIOS boot sequence doesn’t seem to work right. First, You can work around that by hitting F8 on boot which will let you manually choose the boot device. Choose the USB device and it will boot from it. I think you do need to enable USB booting first, however. Either way, after fidgeting a bit I booted into Fedora from USB with no problems.
Also, exposing the VGA port only requires an XActo knife and a little careful cutting.
Hey guys.
Love the site. Been messing with my TS mini for a while and I though I would try a server 2008 standard install. Booted fine with a flash drive and the install went fine. I’m all up and running. The problem is I’m missing some drivers and I did not think to look at the device manager before I did. Can anyone post the device manager description for the following?
VGA Adapter
Network Adapter
I could just reload home, but don’t want to if I don’t have to.
Hi, Lucas,
Here is a screenshot of the device manager: http://imgur.com/Bdimk
Great work!
Does it support wake on lan and wake on rtc?
Thanks!
Hi all!
Due to this site and all your comments, I decided to buy an Asus TS Mini. Euro 172.- + taxes for a complete system, with 2x 1 TB Seagate barracuda and 2 GB Ram is excellent. Normally I buy single components, but for this price, including a WHS license, this is very good.
Components are top, quality is high. Single little problem was an occasional shaking of the plastic case. Touching the case with a finger and all is fine. Nevertheless, I will open it again and try to fix the problem. Otherwise it makes very low noise. A prerequisite for me to buy a computer.
I need this server for performing groupware services, like calendar, business tasks and emails including push mail.
What I need as a base is a strong and ultra stable linux server. This will lead directly to Debian.
I tested Ubuntu a lot and I have to say, in comparison, Debian is hard as iron.
You guys helped me a lot and I want to give a little back to others. So, if somebody wants to install Debian, now this could be helpful for you. Now to the practise:
I run into some small problems. Nothing bad, but all in all it took me 8 hours, because I was not sure, whether my usb-devices did problems or not.
Not doing this all day, I tried to find a simple way to make an usb stick bootable. The Debian website tells to do this:
# cat mini.iso > /dev/sdX
# sync
Right at the moment, you can find the squeeze mini.iso here:
http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian/dists/squeeze/main/installer-i386/current/images/netboot/mini.iso
I prefer UNetbootin to copy the mini.iso, a gui tool for linux. There you can choose an iso and the usb device. With the command “df” you can find out, what location your usb device has on your linux system. Btw. usb stick should be empty.
Having done this, there need to be another file, called “rtl8168d-2.fw” on the stick to be able to activate the network device. For everything else, mini.iso is sufficient. You can get the network file at the moment here:
http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/firmware/squeeze/current/firmware.tar.gz
Having opened it, you will get a lot of deb packages. One of them is: “firmware-realtek_0.28+squeeze1_all.deb”. You do not have to install it. Just copy it somewhere, open a shell, go there and type:
ar -x firmware-realtek_0.28+squeeze1_all.deb
Et voila, you find a “data.tar.gz” including “rtl8168d-2.fw”. Just copy it on the stick and your stick is ready now, ready to rumble…
When booting your Asus TS Mini with stick attached, go to Bios.In section Boot/Hard Disk Drives, you can find your stick. Select it as first drive. In section Boot/Boot Device Priority, chose your stick at first boot device (I messed around with Removable Dev. for a while (dont do that!) and also had some tests with a not bootable stick (by mistake), which costs me a lot of time … grrrrrrr.). Save Bios settings, restart and you should see a normal tiny Debian install monitor.
I used Debian software raid, because I have not notice, there is a Marvell Raid Controller included. On the other hand, hardware RAIDs are often not too good. Debians Software RAIS is very good, so it works like that.
In BIOS, Marvell RAID Controller is still set to RAID Mode. Shall I disable it? shall I reinstall without Linux software Raid? Any ideas on that?
One last thing, Grub wanted to be installed on my stick during installation. I was very tired and was not sure, how to change device…so I just pulled the stick out without unmounting :-S … It worked… System is running now… lucky me.
Hope, some of my hints can help the one or the other.
Cheers
Something could be ambiguous… so: Copy just the “rtl8168d-2.fw” on your stick, not the whole “data.tar.gz”…
Sorry for that.
Thank you, Jones! I’m glad to know that this site was helpful. Thank you for the hints, too. I’m sure they will be helpful to others.
Simple question… I would like to put in a second hard drive. I need to get the case off. Do I just undo the two thumb screws and then force it off. It doesn’t seem to want to easily come off. Thanks for any help you can offer.
Lance, yes, undo the two thumbscrews. Shouldn’t need much force to remove it. It sounds like it might be a little stuck. Try using a plastic fork to wedge it apart. Then you will have to remove three screws to remove the HD cage.
I replaced both hard drives in my TS Mini, now I can’t use the OS restore DVD. How can I restore my System? Thanks for the help.
Hi, Helder. Why can’t you use the restore DVD? It’s designed to install WHS over a network from a client PC. Go to this post: http://www.tsmini.info/2009/12/04/heres-the-manual/ and download the user’s manual if you haven’t got it. The process to install the OS on a new hard drive starts on pg. 96.
My status indicator light is blinking, I run the restore application on a home PC, but it cannot locate my home server. I’ve tried several times with no success.
Did you just purchase the tsmini or have you been using it for some time? Make sure your client PC and server are wired to the network (not wireless). If all else fails, I would clone the original hard drive to the new hard drive.
Jeff, I purchased my TS Mini about 18 months ago. I simply tried to replace the drives. If I wanted to take you up on the offer to clone a drive, how can we proceed? Thanks for the help.
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