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Along the top right hand side of the NAS above the drive bays sit the power button and indicator LEDs. There are four drive activity indicators, a pair for the two 1GbE ports, a separate one for the 10GbE connection and finally a Status LED.
There are three grills on the rear panel for each of the 4cm system cooling fans. Sitting between the grills for fans 1 and 2 are four USB 3.0 ports and a pair of 1GbE RJ45 ports. To the left of fan1 are the reset button, the maintenance port and the 10GbE SFP+ port.
The plastic drive bay doors are integrated into the drive trays, and have a simple locking lever to hold them in place without any form of physical lock for extra security. The drive trays are constructed from metal and they are not tool free so you need a screwdriver to fix the drives in place.
The drives are fixed into position via holes in the bottom of the trays and QNAP provide enough screws for 3.5in and 2.5in drive options. At the time of writing this review the TS-431XeU supports 3.5in drives up to 12TB.
As the TS-431XeU is a short depth 1U NAS, the motherboard is equally compact. The passively cooled Annapurna Labs Alpine AL-314 processor sits very close to the single SO-DIMM slot that can handle up to 8GB of DDR3-1600 memory.
Bundled in with the TS-431XeU are all the screws needed to install four 3.5 or 2.5in drives, a pair of 1GbE Ethernet cables, two rack hangers, a pair of handles which make it easier to get the unit in and out of a rack and lastly a Quick Start Guide.
