Gadgetory

today I'll be doing a quick guide this is the asou ste s mini which i unboxed a little while back it's a home server unit from a soos it accepts two hard drives but the one that I have comes by default with one 500 gig drive so this is gonna be a drive or well drive drive installation or a storage upgrade tip today so we're going to start by removing the casing so I just undo these two thumb screws at the back here one and two the whole process is quite simple I've already scoped it out even though I haven't actually installed a drive in it just yet the case slides off just like pilot slides off just like this okay so you just get a good grip on it there slide it off alright from here you need to remove only three screws and it would really help if I have the right bit in my screwdriver here so I'm just gonna dump the bits out put in my slot head and there we go so just do this one up here they are magnetic screws which is good news because I also have a magnetic screwdriver so that makes it easier to keep track of them once you've taken them out and then the second one and then the third one is down here and then you actually slide out almost the entire internal guts of the Ts mini now the reason that I am doing a hard drive installation video before I actually do any tips about home server or the TS mini itself is that home server is not terribly useful unless you've got multiple hard drives because a big I mean there's a bunch of stuff it does but it's from my perspective it doesn't really matter if you if you don't have the data security that it can also provide for you so here I have a hard drive this is a 500 gig drive to go with the 500 gig drive that is already installed in the TS mini and so you just grab your accessory box which I happen to conveniently have here there's my user's guide there's a bunch of other stuff and here are the screws that I will use to install this drive so just put those there okay these are slot as well I had just kind of assumed they would be phillips-head since I've seen very very few hard drives in my time that are mounted with slot head screws so there you go you see something new every day so slot head screws are not really my favorite they're a little harder to maneuver into place than Phillips head so bear with me here while I try to do this with a camera strapped to my chest you've got to put six of these on or at least four so this may take a while there we go I got one although it's not in all the way yet so hard to line up while he slips out of the way I don't know how people do it like there's entire industries that seem to use nothing but slot head screwdriver screws it's a pretty useless standard if you ask me there's nothing that you can do with a slot that you can't do with the Robertson or I Phillips I mean I guess if you need a whole ton of torque then slot heads probably the only way to go that I can't think of all that many applications read these that much torque okay I'm just gonna have to like turn this off for a bit struggle with this off-camera all right I got it that really wasn't that hard when I'm not trying to hold the camera at the same time so I made it look very difficult but it isn't so then all you do is you slide the drive in you see there is a SATA backplane there which runs off a PCI Express 1x interface right here and I'll show you how that fits into the TS mini itself but basically all you do is line up these screws with the rails that are in there and then drop it in so this lever right here lifts up if you want to take the drive out and then it just lifts itself up and then walks right into place when you screw that when you slide the drive in so now I have two hard drives plug into this this backplane here and I'm ready to put it back in but I wanted to give you guys a look at the inside of the TS mini one of the things to note about the TS mini is there are not any warranty void if removed stickers when you take the thing apart so it is designed to be opened up by an end user and have hardware installed in it so that's really so here's a custom motherboard this is the asou ste s mini mb WS so I guess that's their workstation series and we've got our Atom processor here a chipset we have a PCIe 1x interface that I mentioned before and then we have a whole lot of connectivity here on the back so we've got all six of those USB ports 2 eSATA ports well that's interesting huh well I'll be look at that the TS mini has a VGA port but it's not accessible from the back so I like hold on a minute we are discovering things today so let me see there's I see there's got to be a way to remove this this back plastic piece so here okay we're getting sidetracked today I'm apologizing in advance for that but it's something that has to be done we're gonna go ahead and remove these these are Phillips head yay so that'll go much faster I feel like I can do Phillips head with a camera strapped to myself all day alright so one two three three of those and let's see what happens if we take this off do we get access to that VGA port cuz the whole thing slide the whole thing slides off and we still don't have access to the VGA port okay well maybe there's some other trick involved here that I am that is not readily apparent to me let me just see oh I see there are more screws somewhere but I don't see how those help us just see what happens if we push on this push this thing no no that doesn't help interesting so I guess in theory you could you could cut this away and get access to it but I yeah the plastic is thin over top of where the VGA port is but you can't actually get at it that's so interesting okay well I guess if you were desperate if you absolutely needed to get access to the home server from from like a physical display then then that would work but I mean it is meant to be managed completely remotely anyway so it's not like it would be a concern for 99.99% of situations but there you have it if you were really that desperate you could just rip this open and you could plug in a VGA port yeah you can hear that so this black thing is probably almost just a sticker you can see it sticking on to the port there behind it huh interesting okay well anyway so when you slide the now full of drives enclosure thing back in you just line up the PCIe interface with the PCIe slot inside like this and then you just slide that in so it only goes in one way there you go then you put your three screws back and these are slot again so we'll see how this goes I actually found it was a little bit easier to thread them in by hand because they do have ridges on the edges of them and then tighten them with the screwdriver so that might be the strategy that we use here so yeah anyway without the redundancy feature where it automatically backs up your data I don't believe home servers all that useful so pretty much the first thing you should do if you're not buying a home server unit that already has two hard drives in it is you should probably grab another hard drive for it I mean hard drives are so cheap these days it's hardly even it's hardly even a factor when you consider the data security that set that's at stake so there you have it that is how to upgrade your hard drive in the assist es mini oh I didn't even notice this look at this this is actually see through you can see my hand through so it's not actually solid black I had no idea we are learning all kinds of things on my video blog today the unit gets quite a bit heavier once you've installed an additional hard drive in it as well so thank you for checking out my guide on upgrading the assist ts mini home server to include a second hard drive