MINISFORUM N5 MAX AI NAS

Nice platform to play with xcp-ng. I am running TrueNAS as a VM, passing thru the SATA adapter, and the 10gb NIC. xcp-ng only recognizes the 5gb nic, which is fine. Running zfs raidz2 with some old 8TB IronWolf Pro NAS drives on TrueNAS, providing storage for xcp-ng. Runs cool, quiet, and so-far, reliable.

Using it as a PC with many drive bays and running ZFS is great. I prefer a DIY solution as far as NAS software is concerned. I tried using Minis MS-01 with 2 Yottamaster 5bay thunderbolt connection, but the disk was keep dropping. With the N5 Pro I have yet to encounter any dropped disks. I even have the Yottamaster attached.

This seems to be a great, well layed out piece of hardware. The OS NVME drive was a brand I wasn't familiar with, but I left it in place to try out. The only thing I knocked a star off for is the OS. Requiring a 3rd party app and not having a simple web UI configuration system is a big negative, so I blew it away and installed TrueNAS. I'm not downloading shady mobile apps to manage a storage appliance.

One of the best solution in term of nas machine.
Not vendor lock , can install which os you want .
Premium rayzen cpu and ecc memory supporting.

Featured pack NAS for 2025! Value for money if you get in early during the pre-sales and also the excellent construction quality is usual Minisforum standard and option to go Pro and Non-Pro stands down to how much power you need from your home NAS. If only to store and retrieval of files and media, the Non-Pro is more than sufficient. The Pro model is really meant for home labs and running local LLM. The ability to pre-load any opensource NAS software if you don't like MinisCloud OS is perhaps a compelling choice as an alternative DIY NAS for 2025. Easy to setup, excellent quality, powerful hardware and storage expandability.

This is a powerhouse of a NAS. I just got it in today. I had gotten 5 renewed HP HGST 10 tb drives. I was concerned as they have power disable pins. (some pc's cant use them drive will not power on unless you tape the pin over with capton tape. ) I asked support they said it did not support power disable. I can confirm and updated my support ticket to state Power disable drives work fine now :))

Minisforum are on to winner here. Delivery was earlier than indicated in my confirmation email, the product is really (and I mean really) well designed. It took me maybe half a day to set up, but include replacing the miniscloud os with TRUENAS, installing all the NVMe, SSDs and HDDs, configuring them, setting up permissions and configuring nfs shares for my AI workloads and project repositories. By all accounts it’s a really solid platform. I’ve been in technology for 20+ years and this is a winner in my view

This incredible NAS has storage, compute and connectivity. Its everything I could have ever wanted and more. I've only had it for a few days, but even stress testing it I've yet to get the CPU use above 2%. It's amazing. My only complaint would have to be that it doesn't come with the screwdriver nessisary to get inside the device. I had to purchase one seperately.

The Minisforum N5 Pro has exceeded my expectations in every way. Its design is sleek and thoughtfully engineered, with a build quality that feels premium and durable. The specs are impressive, delivering exceptional speeds. This machine is exactly what I was hoping for and it's been a huge upgrade compared with my previous NAS.

Took out the included OS drive and popped in a 500GB NVMe for TrueNAS SCALE. Works great!

The MINISFORUM N5 Pro AI NAS has been a fantastic experience so far. It was very straightforward to open up and add/modify NVMe drives as well as upgrade the RAM—everything inside is laid out in a clean, accessible way. My only small complaint is that the two screws on the bottom could’ve been replaced with simple press-buttons for an even smoother experience, but that’s a very minor gripe.

For those planning to use this with Unraid, be sure to enable UEFI on your flash drive. Once that’s set, it boots without issue. Overall, setup and upgrades were a breeze, and the unit has been rock solid in daily use.

Highly recommend!

Excellent performance and design at an excellent price!

I received my N5 PRO NAS order and got everything set up in under a day. I went with the 96GB ECC ram option, installed 2 NVMes, two SSDs and 3 HDDs. I also opted for installing TRUENAS. The system is great, super fast, quiet and compact.

14 days and hardware going strong
installed unRAID so not sure about your software but I thought the bios very sparse e.g. how do I get it to restart on a power failure

Amazing NAS, tons of power, and the ability to load TrueNAS on it has been great. I have to say I am pretty happy with it.

Hardware=what I wanted, does it job, quite, didn't know it powered up until lights.
If you expect stellar customer service, tough cookies, I messaged in the discord, some regular user replied. he did help.
The minicloud OS is trash, it is better to run another OS, I'm running trunas, and love it.
Shipping was nightmare,they lied and said June then kept pushing back, as a business you should have your crap together.
Would a buy another miniforums appliance. Yes,

Device arrived earlier than I thought, even with an order modification. Love the look and feel