Minisforum is taking direct aim at high-speed home servers and creative workspaces with the launch of the S5, an ultra-compact, fanless all-flash NAS (Network Attached Storage) box. Designed to eliminate mechanical drive chatter and cooling fan whine, the aluminum NAS crams five M.2 NVMe solid state drive (SSD) slots and a local AI engine into a sleek and small form factor, with an introductory price of $599. It arrives barely a month after Minisforum introduced us to its MS-S1 Max-P495 mini workstation.
Rather than relying on HDDs with spinning platters like the Beelink Me Pro we reviewed in April, the S5 is an all-flash solution. The unit can fit up to five standard M.2-2280 form factor PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs, with support for up to 8TB per slot. Busting out the trusty abacus tells us that amounts to up to 40TB of total storage (minus OS overhead, of course).
Of course, storage is anything but cheap these days, especially flash-based solutions. To ensure you don't burn through a pricey high-speed SSD just to boot up your system, Minisforum embedded a dedicated 128GB UFS 3.1 drive on the motherboard to handle OS chores. Meanwhile, thermals are managed without any fans; instead, the NAS taps copper heat pipes and thick aluminum fin arrays to dissipate heat and keep the tiny NAS totally silent.
Beyond the storage and cooling, the S5 runs on Intel’s Core 3 304 processor, which is a Wildcat Lake chip featuring five total cores (1x Performance core clocked at 1.5GHz to 4.3GHz and 4x Low Power Efficient cores clocked at 1.4GHz to 3.3GHz), five threads, onboard Intel Graphics clocked at 2.3GHz, and a dedicated NPU capable of up to 15 TOPS for AI workloads.
"To support the stable, always-on residency of the local agent and millisecond-level response, the S5's built-in dedicated NPU provides 15 TOPS (INT8) of on-device AI computing power. This enables the S5 to effortlessly support the always-on wake-up, semantic retrieval and local data scheduling of edge-side agents at ultra-low power consumption, delivering a private agent experience," Minisforum says.
Other specs and features include 12GB of soldered LPDDR5X-7467 memory, Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6.0 wireless connectivity, dual LAN ports (1x 10Gbps and 1x 2.5Gbps), an HDMI 2.1 output, two USB4 ports (40Gbps + DisplayPort 2.1 Alt Mode), and two USB 3.2 Type-A ports (plus and internal USB 3.2 Type-A port).
While the S5 comes pre-installed with Minisforum's proprietary MinisCloud OS, it also features standard UEFI support for users who would rather run another OS like Windows 11, Linux, TrueNAS, Unraid, or whatever.
The Minisforum S5 all-flash NAS is available now for a $599 introductory rate (versus $749).
Paul is a seasoned geek who cut this teeth on the Commodore 64. When he's not geeking out to tech, he's out riding his Harley and collecting stray cats.