today I'll be doing a quick guide this is the ASUS TS mini which I unboxed a
little while back it's a home server unit from ASUS it accepts two hard
drives but the one that I have comes by default with one 500 gig drive so this
is going to be a drive or well drive drive installation or 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 well it slides off just
like this okay so you just get a good grip on it there slide it
off all right from here you need to remove only three screws and it would
really help if I had the right bit in my screwdriver here so I'm just going to
dump the bits out put in my slot head 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 remve 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 uh 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 um 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 oh okay these are uh
slot as well I had just kind of assumed that they would be Philips head since
I've seen very very few hard drives in my time that are mounted with uh slot
head screws so there you go you see something new every day so sload screws
are not really my favorite they're a little
harder to maneuver into place than Philips head so bear with me here while
I try to do this with a camera strap to my chest you 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 always slips out of the way I
don't know how people do it like there's entire industries that seem to use
nothing but slote head screwdriver or screw 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 a Robertson or a Phillips
I mean I guess if you need a whole ton of torque then slot head's probably the
only way to go but I can't think of all that many applications where you need
that much torque okay I'm just going to have to
like turn this off for a bit and 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 back
plane 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 locks right into place when you screw the when you
uh Slide the drive in so now I have two hard drives plugged into this uh this
back plane 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 a hardware
installed in it so that's really good so here's a custom motherboard this is the
ASUS TS mini MD WS so I guess that's
their workstation series and uh 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 two e sat ports oh 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 I hold on
a minute we are discovering things
today so let me see there's uh I see
there's got to be a way to remove this uh this back plastic piece so here okay
we're we're getting sidetracked today I'm apologizing in advance for that but
it's something that has to be done we're going to go ahead and remove these These
are Philips head yay so that'll go much faster see look I can do Philips head
with a C strap to myself all day all right 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 does 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 uh 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 let's see what happens if
we push on this push this thing no no
that doesn't help interesting so I I 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 oh that's so
interesting okay well I guess if you were desperate if you absolutely needed
to get access to the Home Server from uh 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 uh 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 onto 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 uh automatically backs up your data I don't
believe Home Server is 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 uh it's hardly even a factor
when you consider the data security that's at uh that's at stake so there
you have it that is how to upgrade your hard drive in the assus TS 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 assus TS mini Home Server
to include a second hard drive