Legit Mods and Ends Reviews

Building a BitTorrent Rig with the Zotac ZBOX Nano Plus

Manufacturer: Zotac
Product: ZBOX Nano VD01 Plus
Date: Tue, Dec 20, 2011 - 12:00 AM
Written By: Ken Brown -
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Inside the Zotac ZBOX Nano Plus

Inside the Zotac ZBOX Nano

Let's take a quick peak inside the Zotac ZBOX unit.  After unscrewing the four thumbscrews on the bottom, we have very easy access to ZBOX's internals.

Inside the Zotac ZBOX Nano

Our ZBOX came equipped with a 320GB 5400 speed SATA hard drive with 8MB of cache (Samsung model HM321HI). 

 

Inside the Zotac ZBOX Nano

As you can see, it is very easy to upgrade our Zotec with more memory or even an SSD.  For now we will stick with "stock" but we will keep in mind that we have a number of different upgrade paths.

Inside the Zotac ZBOX Nano

To get the memory out of the ZBOX, all you do is press down on the catch and the spring system will help eject it for you. The 2GB DDR3 1333MHz PC3-10600 memory was also Samsung brand (M471B5673FH0-CH9). 

Inside the Zotac ZBOX Nano

After taking all the parts out of the ZBOX, we see that Zotac designed this palm-sized PC with a very tight, but neat, layout. 

 

Inside the Zotac ZBOX Nano

It's pretty amazing how the Zotac engineers designed the layout of the ZBOX.  On one hand, the Nano Plus has everything you want for a turn-key system: Processor, Memory, and Hard-drive.  On the other hand, you have a bunch of different options in configurations with the various ZBOX models.  Of course, you can choose to purchase the ZBOX shell with processor only and add your favorite flavor of hard drive and memory depending on your needs and budget.


Inside the Zotac ZBOX Nano

Zotac makes upgrading very easy as it took less than 2-3 minutes to remove the back of the case, hard drive and memory.

Inside the Zotac ZBOX Nano

Now that we've seen the inside of the ZBOX, let's see how the new VIA Nano X2 processor performs.  On the next page, we have a number of different benchmarks that we threw at the ZBOX.

 

Next Page - Benchmarks of the Zotac ZBOX Nano


Review Index
Page 1 - Building a BitTorrent Machine with Zotac’s ZBOX Nano Plus
Page 2 - Inside the Zotac ZBOX Nano Plus
Page 3 - Benchmarks of the Zotac ZBOX Nano
Page 4 - Building a BitTorrent Machine – Installing the Software
Page 5 - Vuze BitTorrent Software
Page 6 - Port Forwarding and Router Settings
Page 7 - Configuring the BitTorrent Search