Minisforum S5: A $599 Fanless All-Flash NAS With Five SSD Slots and 10GbE
Minisforum has launched the S5, a silent five-slot NVMe NAS built on Intel’s new Core 3 304 (Wildcat Lake). It sells for $599 without drives on Minisforum’s own store, down from a $749 list price.
In short
The S5 holds five M.2 SSDs (up to 40TB) with no fan, a 10GbE port and two USB4 ports, for $599 at launch. The trade-offs: 12GB of memory that can’t be upgraded, one PCIe lane per SSD and no independent reviews yet. It suits a quiet file and backup server, not a virtualization box.
What Minisforum launched
A 176.5 × 154 × 60 mm aluminum NAS with a 5-core Core 3 304, 12GB of LPDDR5X, a 128GB UFS system drive and five M.2 2280 slots, on sale since October 16.
The chip has one performance core, four low-power cores and a 15 TOPS NPU; Wi-Fi 7 joins the two Ethernet ports. Minisforum calls the design “totally silent”: heat pipes and fins replace fans, and its lab measured about 15W of sustained CPU power. The S5 ships with MinisCloud OS; standard UEFI means TrueNAS or Unraid can be installed, though Minisforum does not list them as supported. A 20TB version costs $3,759 and ships in early November.
| Spec | Minisforum S5 | Beelink ME Mini |
|---|---|---|
| Processor | Intel Core 3 304 (5 cores) | Intel N150 (4 cores) |
| Memory | 12GB LPDDR5X, soldered | 12GB LPDDR5, soldered |
| SSD slots | 5 × M.2, PCIe 4.0 x1 | 6 × M.2, PCIe 3.0 x1/x2 |
| Network | 10GbE + 2.5GbE | 2 × 2.5GbE |
What it means for buyers
For silent file storage on a 10GbE network, the S5 is new territory at this price. For virtual machines or hard drives, look elsewhere.
One PCIe 4.0 lane moves about 2 GB/s, more than the roughly 1.25 GB/s a 10GbE link carries, so the single-lane slots won’t hold back network transfers. Fixed 12GB of memory suits file shares and a few containers, not ZFS with many services. Flash is also costly in 2026, so filling five slots will cost more than the NAS. Wait for independent tests of SSD temperatures under long writes. If you need hard drives or more memory, our best mini PC for NAS and home server guide compares the options, including the Minisforum N5 Max. The Core 3 304 itself is covered in the Wildcat Lake section of our N150 vs N100 vs N97 comparison. For a cheaper home server that also runs apps and containers, the N150-based Beelink EQ14 remains our budget pick.