Minisforum N5 Pro Topology
In terms of the topology, here is the system with five hard drives and a boot SSD.
Here we can see the 4-core Zen5 cluster with 16MB of L3 cache and the 8-core Zen5c cluster with 8MB of L3 cache. For many NAS applciations, having 4MB per core does not make a big difference. What does make a big difference, especially if you run containers or VMs on here, is having 12-cores and 24 threads of Zen5 compute.
As a quick aside, the 25TB drives are actually 28TB Seagate HAMR drives we shucked from our Seagate Expansion 28TB External Hard Drive enclosures and worked great in here.
You may also notice another PCIe device in that one. We installed a Realtek RTL8127 10Gbase-T NIC as well.
On the networking side, here is the shot of both the Marvell AQC113 10GbE and the Realtek RTL8126 5GbE NICs.
There is actually quite a bit going on here.
Minisforum Has NAS Software?
On the software side, Minsform has MinisCloud. There were certainly some ups and downs with this. I will say, it was much better than I expected it to be in terms of functionality. On the other hand, it required downloading an app that got flagged by Microsoft Defender. It also asks for quite a bit of information during setup which we do not love. You also have to use those desktop applications for setup as you cannot just go to web browser and put in an IP address and get going like you can with other systems.
Still, once in it was easy to figure out what was going on and the GUI worked for setup.
Still, some aspects were not fully translated to English.
To Minisforum’s credit, there are applications like AI face recognitiion in the photo app which can be useful. These are the types of applications that are pushing for the use case of having AI compute in a NAS like this.
Also, somewhat neat, is that we quickly got Open WebUI up and running for a little local chatbot experience which is always fun.
Of course, if you have an OS you prefer, you can just load that. We used the latest Proxmox VE 9.0 here.
Proxmox saw the drives and the NICs, except for the RTL8127. That RTL8127 we had to add drivers for, but it was via an add-in card.
Next, let us talk a bit about performance.
Minisforum N5 Pro Performance
On the performance side, we have the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX Pro 370.
This is an awesome CPU. Something else that we saw, which was just interesting, is that when we saw the Geekbench performance it was quite good. Just giving you some sense, here it is on Geekbench 5.5.1 albeit with the new Proxmox VE 9 on the N5 Pro and Windows 11 on the Acemagic F3A with the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370.
A newer Linux kernel provides an an advantage here, but the bigger takeaway is that the CPU performance is really competitive in the HX 370 space. Perhaps better said, sometimes we see CPUs perform worse for power limitations in NAS units. That was not the case here, at all. We also get modern video codecs, and an AMD Radeon 890M iGPU that we have shown is capable of running esports games quite well.
Now that AMD has the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 out (we have more reviews of those systems coming) which has a bigger CPU and GPU, the 370 class is not the top-end. The Max+ is a different beast. Still, this is an extremely capable part and the Pro version having ECC memory support puts this in another class. As the third HX 370 class system we have reviewed, the most exciting aspect might simply be that it is the Pro version, and available in this NAS.
Next, let us get to the power consumption.
I’ve only got 3 complaints
1. Please ship without your OS. TrueNAS is fine
2. SFP+ instead of Base-T even if it’s just for 1 port
3. Make me believe you’re gonna help if there’s a problem
Honestly, my only complaint with my experiences with Minisforums is their garbage BIOS support/updates/breakages for their platforms.
My last minisforums was the AMD 7945 based box. Literally had to stay on the launch BIOS because all of the fix BIOS they released after the fact made things worse. Stability, memory support, all of it.
That being said, wanted to point out there is no link back to this article on the youtube video.
Once again, can’t even label the performance charts? Come on, do better. Also, under Power Use, you state eight 28TB drives? In a 5 bay NAS? Magic.
A few slightly curious decisions; but I’m pleasantly reminded of the older HP microservers, NL54-era, from before they decided to switch away from situationally appropriate mobile-focused CPUs and toward basically the most depressing xeons intel bothers to sell(along with things like typing boot m.2 to the ILO kit).
Please, please, please, please mention in the first page of the article if the system can run TrueNAS or boot an alternative OS. It saves a lot of time.
Thanks for the very nice review! I’ve put this on my “would be nice to have but hard to justify over my old self-built TrueNAS box” list. Looking at the specs, the price is actually very competitive. Not much more expensive than mini PCs with the same CPU:
999 EUR Minisforum AI X1 Pro (including 32GB RAM and 1TB SSD)
1050 USD GMKtec EVO-X1 (including 32GB RAM and 1TB SSD)
Did anyone else also think that it’s very unusual to see support for 110 mm m.2 (22110)? In fact geizhals.eu only lists 14 models with this size, compared to 1324 models with 2280.
I just bought one of these. I fail to be impressed with the OS that comes pre-installed. When booting up into it there is a label describing it as “beta”. I’d not expect something sold for $1000 to be “beta”. I wish it were easier to add and remove NVME/M2 drives cause doing so requires opening up the machine. Adding/removing hard drives in any of the 5 bays is very easy. It’s a tad pricey but I do appreciate that it can hold all kinds of storage devices.
Did you try the QNAP 25G NIC card in the PCIe slot?
I bought one of these on Amazon, and I love it. It was just under $1600 for the model with 96GB of LPDDR5 ECC memory.
I’ve been looking for a capable mini-server to act as a secondary host for virtual machines (so I can do updates on the main VM server) and also to act as a server for regular backups. This thing is perfect.
It has a very-capable processor and space for up to 3 NVME M2 SSDs and 5 full-size hard drives. I bought the version that includes 96GB of ECC memory, and I installed 3 Adlink D60 2TB SSDs. These are high-endurance (3,800 TBW) PCIE 4 SSDs with Power Loss Protection for a great price.
I removed the built-in NAS software it comes with and instead installed Proxmox VE and Proxmox Backup Server. The former gives a powerful and flexible environment for hosting virtual machines that can operate as part of a cluster with my other Proxmox server.
I use the SATA hard drives to create a separate ZFS pool for Proxmox Backup Server. This allows rapid, incremental backups of all my VMs and incorporated deduplication to greatly reduce storage needs.
All this gives me the power of a commercial small server for a lot less money and in a much smaller and quieter space.
So far it has performed perfectly and is cool and nearly silent.
What about remote management? Are there any headers for the power of reset buttons, for piKVM-style addons, or even PICe boards?
Would the BIOS even recognize the Asrock PAUL impi card?