(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 voilà! 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.
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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.:-(