Minisforum N5 Pro, An Impressive Zen 5 Based NAS

Five Bays Of Attractive Storage Connectivity

The majority of NAS devices use a low cost and lower performing CPU but not the Minisforum N5 Pro. Inside is a AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX Pro 370, Zen5 based with a Radeon 890M GPU onboard and the ability to handle up to 96GB (2x 48GB) of DDR5 ECC SODIMMs.  The choice to use an HXPro 370 does mean you have to use ECC RAM, which does add a bit to the cost of the N5 Pro.  The connectivity is handled by a 25GbE SFP28 NIC, which can get a bit toasty, so keep that in mind, USB-4 and a 3.2 Type-A port are also available.

Internally are space for three M.2 drives, an OS drive and two M.2 2280 or 22110 drives, and the N5 Pro also ships with an adapter that can change the latter two M.2 slots into 7mm U.2 slots.  Unfortunately those three drives share four PCIe lanes, so they run at x1, x1, and x2.  The rest of the lanes are for your five storage bays.  ServeTheHome tested out the hardware as well as the MinisCloud software the N5 Pro uses and shared their thoughts here.