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The Package

The package is a durable corrugated cardboard of standard design for accessories and peripherals. Featuring the very common black and blue color scheme the print is matted and looks almost faded. The Front features an image of the device itself which does not do it justice and covers some of the major features of the product. The back of the box goes into a little more detail of the features as well as lots of logos including energy start compliance. Contents of the package are displayed as well as some common networking diagrams.

Opening the box up we can see the installation manual. A single piece of paper with the 5 step process for installing the HDD. The notes mention the enclosure comes unsecured however this came with 2 screws holding it together. After installing the HDD and sealing up the enclosure with the 4 provided screws the screws can be covered with rubber feet. It would be nice to NOT have that feature so the feet can be used while retaining access to the drive.

Open cell packing foam is used to support the enclosure and divide the box up to include two small white cardboard boxes. One includes the DC power adapter the other includes the Ethernet cable a small plastic bag for the screws and rubber feet.

The DC01 Exposed

The brushed aluminum shell is very sleek and its only stand out feature is a small LED located directly in the center of the front panel. The top of the drive sits slightly above the top of the case to allow passive heat dissipation. Flipping the drive around we have the IO area. This enclosed a recessed power button, DC 5v power port, two USB 2.0 ports, an eSATA port, gigabit Ethernet port reset button and a security slot for use with a Kensington security lock.

The bottom of the case is also vented to aid in heat dissipation, and has marked corner to assist with placing the included rubber feet over the 4 screw mount points.

Removing the top we can see holes drilled into the enclosure to provide venting for heat escape. The bottom of the case houses all the important bits. The wire going across the unit seems extreme as it appears to provide power to the LED with no other function. It is possible that future models may have more devices located on the small PCB up front necessitating the need for 10 pin sockets.

The end user now simply needs to slide their HDD into the caddy and secure it with 2 screws that are provided in the plastic bag of parts. Reattach the top of the enclosure (secure it with the screws provided) and optionally attach the 4 rubber feet. Removing the HDD caddy reveals the guts of the DC01.

The PLX chip is the heart and soul of the network device. Featuring a Dual Core ARM11 processor at 750 MHz This powerful little chip is used in many smartphones today and includes support for Open GL 2.0 to provide a smooth UI. Couple with processor duties the PLX IC also provides Gigabit Ethernet, dual USB 2.0 ports, 2 SATA ports a single PCIE port, RAID and AES 256bit encryption capabilities. Despite Silverstone’s claims no mention of a Realtek NIC is made on the PLX specification page.

While the PLX can support up to 512MB of DDR2, Silverstone instead pairs it up with 2x 128 MB Hynix DRAM Chips. This is seen often in lower end tablets, something that would require much more memory than a small but elegant NAS.

On the top of the board we find another Hynix chip, this time in the 256 MB density and the NAND flavor. This NAS uses Solid state storage to house the operating system. Supporting up to 100 thousand write/program cycles and capable of retaining storage for 10 years, speed information is not listed in standard form so some math is required to decrypt it. Speed is listed for read speeds of 1 byte every 25ns or approximately 40 MBps. Write speeds drop to down to a 2112 byte page in 200 microseconds or about 10 MBps.

No information was available on the two unused 4-pin headers located on the top of the board. It is expected they are RS232 connectors used for programming and debugging.

Speed tests were not performed empirically as the main focus of the device is Cloud based storage and streaming. Testing was done with Audio and Video files over the Internet and performed surprisingly well. Network storage testing is going to be larger limited to drive performance, due to a smaller platter diameter as well as usually lower rotational speeds a 2.5” laptop drive will never reach 100MB/s transfer speeds. Solid State drives would easily max out the connection, but are still far too expensive to consider using them as external storage except for enterprise situations.

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