Minisforum N5 Pro Power Consumption and Noise
On the power side, the external 280W power brick is OK, but we would have preferred an internal power supply.
It also offers a lot of power for expansion, but in most cases, you will not use it. For example, with the five 28TB Seagate drives, we were pulling 45-49W and running at 39-41dba at idle. Our standard NAS loading might have pushed it to 120-125W.
If you really push the CPU/ GPU, add SSDs and a NIC, you can go over 200W, but our sense is that most folks simply will not hit these power levels making the 45-125W range most reasonable.
Key Lessons Learned
We certainly learned a lot from this. First, you have to want a 5-bay NAS. If you want an 8-bay, then this is not the right option. Still 4-5 bays is a very popular segment.
From a CPU side, the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX PRO 370 was a long name, but it offers great compute and acceleration. Frankly, that is a chip many would be more than happy with in a desktop, letalone a NAS. Here, the PRO version means we also get ECC memory support. The challenge is that there are limited PCIe lanes for how much connectivity Minisforum has so there are fewer than ideal lanes for all of the features like the SSDs.
The Minisforum MinisCloud is OK, but it is far from being the world’s best NAS solution. It needs more time to mature. We were originally apprehensive that it would not be usable. It probably is, but check out that section in our review for more.
At the same time, one can install standard software and run a NAS or NAS with virtualization server out-of-the-box. One of the strange thoughts we had was that this would actually be a neat PC if you were building a Linux or Windows desktop that you wanted hard drives in. It is a neat small form factor package for that as well.
Maybe the biggest takeaway, however, is that while not perfect, for a first generation NAS product, Minisforum did a great job on this machine. We hope that Minisforum takes this opportunity to also look at upping its game on the service and support side since that is important in the NAS segment as well, especially with pre-built NAS units like this.
Final Words
It is hard not to appreciate this machine. If you were thinking of building a MS-01, MS-A1, or MS-A2 box with an external card for 3.5″ SATA storage, then this might make more sense. Also, if you wanted to build a NAS, I think this is a great hardware platform. Minisforum really checks a lot of boxes in this effort making it a step above most other pre-built options.
Last week we looked at a higher-end U.2 SSD-based NAS in Building New STH Studio Storage NAS which is a much larger and more costly effort. We had been using this system in parallel which is not necessarily cheap, but it also comes with a lot of higher-end specs in this segment for DIYers who want a lot of good hardware in a single package. This is also the reason we bout a bunch of Seagate Expansion 28TB External Hard Drives to shuck (Amazon affiliate link here.)
At just over $1000 for the barebones with OS storage, this is not “cheap” as in low cost. On the other hand, for a pre-built NAS with a high-end CPU, iGPU, NPU, 10GbE and 5GbE networking, and a lot of connectivity, it is priced fairly well.
Where to Buy
If you want to check current pricing, we found a few configurations of these on Amazon:
- N5 Pro no memory: (Amazon Affiliate)
- N5 Pro 16GB (Amazon Affiliate)
- N5 Pro 96GB ECC (Amazon Affiliate)
Here is the link to the 28TB Seagate drives we shucked (Amazon Affiliate.)
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?