Look, I'm not a businessman, but I'm going to be straight with you. The next minute or so of this video is by far the most expensive minute of footage in the history of this entire channel. Let me explain. Berlin, Germany, September 2024. A member of the Minis Forum team mentioned in passing that they have a NAS in development when I was over there for IFA. I'll be honest, I was intrigued. Fast forward Nevada, America, January 2025. First reveal of the Minis Forum N5 Pro at the CES trade show. Color me double intrigued. Fast forward again. Shenzhen, China, March 2024. I head to the Minis Forum HQ to see production of the N5 Pro and get a chance to get hands-on and take it to pieces. Fast forward again. Taipei, Taiwan, May 2025. Minis Forum finally reveal the N5 Pro final prototype and predicted production model at Copyex 2025. We're getting so close. Which brings us to now Brighton end of the UK and we finally have hands-on of the Minis Forum N5 Pro. I have spent more than £25,000 on flights. I have traveled 35,658 miles for this device. I've spent over 82 hours in the sky for this Naz for a little under three and a half days. My average speed was 434 miles hour. This brand isn't sponsoring this video. This is it. This is this is what's got to show for all of that work. So, believe me when I say that I'm going to review the N5 Pro. I'm going to review the out of this. But that tremendously indulgent introduction aside, let's crack straight on. This is the N5 Pro. There is a standard N5 version. Pricing right now, uh the N5 standard is $583 currently on their website. And if you want to go for the Pro model, well, you're looking at just over a,000. $1,039. A big old jump there. Now, that includes a launch day discount, but on top of that, they're throwing some code around. NAS NAS30. Again, they're not sponsoring this video, but for those that are interested, if you want to get a discount and you're going to buy direct from them, there is a code that they banged on about on their website a little bit. Um, a quick too long didn't watch about this video. We are going to try and cover as much as we can. But, as you can already tell from the time bar, even without going through everything, which would make this video about 3 hours long, I've tried to cover as much as I can. things that aren't going to be covered in this video, but are going to be covered in the follow-up video. We are showing in this video some Plex testing, some VM stuff, but the extensive Plex and extensive uh virtual machine stuff is going to have to go into its own video cuz that is slowly working out to be longer than the review. Also, I think even Min Forum could stand a bit clearer about this. That price difference between these two of nearly $500. What does that amount to? Real simple. Uh the more expensive one has a more powerful CPU with more cores and threads. The more expensive device supports ECC memory when the other one doesn't. And that's it. That really is the difference. Same port, same number of storage options there. It is really just the CPU and its extended capabilities across the system. There is almost no other difference there. So unless you are looking to go for the powerhouse device for AI, for ex, you know, exceeding multimedia, exceeding virtual machine deployment, I would say the N5 is definitely worthy of most people's attention. Lastly, although both of those prices I mentioned do not include memory, do not include more than the base level SSD, this system does arrive in its cheapest configuration on both devices with this 64 gig little module here which has got an operating system on board. You don't have to use it, but it is included regardless. So, first up, let's talk about design. This metal chassis all the way on the outside is effectively the same as any of their mini PCs, but the storage cage on top, most would say. But the reality is that it's actually quite a lot more crafted than that. For example, this is the MS A2. This is a standard workstation system here with that slot out design. We've got the fan there on the base. We've got the fan there at the top. It's pretty much the same thing as we find inside this system. And although the board inside this and one of their other workstations is designed very similarly, it has to be said that the five drive cage array in here of five star bays, they feed onto a 20 GB or 2 GB connected port which feeds into the board. There isn't any kind of loss there in terms of bandwidth and those 5 bays are never going to exceed 2,000 megabytes pers. This also differs from those because alongside the cooling system of the fan there and the CPU fan there on the base that feeds into a copper pipe array underneath that vented fan panel there, there's also two additional cooling fans here on the rear. So during operation, I was actually quite impressed front and back. The system actually maintained a pretty good temperature around the 40 to 42° and that was both on the front and on the nicks there on the rears. It's using standard copper. there was less of a heat concern as I've seen with SFP systems with an additional transceiver. The other area where heat was a concern was with that PSU. This is a 280 W external PSU. During our first impression, a number of you raised that you weren't particularly in love with an external PSU on this system. And I will say, although it does make for easy replacement, definitely definitely definitely this thing raised the temperatures. In fact, in some of the shots, you may have noticed earlier, it was the PSU that was raising the highest temperature when I was filming on the table. I would go as far as to say that when I was looking at that internal lockable bay there, the temperatures of the individual SSDs were doing fine. It was only really with the OS drive that it was any concern. And when I did check the temperature of the SSDs, the board, and more, when I had the system powered down directly after removing it, I still got good temperature. So air flow is definitely being controlled quite well on this, but it's just the optimization within that software and the OS running off of that tiny little drive with no passive cooling system, just relying heavily on the airflow didn't seem to really match the numbers for me. But come on, let's be realistic. How nice is the design of that tray inside there? Whether it is for troubleshooting, whether it is for maintenance, whether it is for upgrades, the ease of access to the core components in this is a joke. and I love it. It is locked in with two screws and I've removed them obviously for this review, but I really enjoyed going deep into the components on this device and I can imagine just simple cleaning on this is going to be an absolute dream. Although once again this front panel something of a smudge magnet. The brand tells me that they are working on better coating for this but ultimately when you're going to go for something like that on the front it's always going to be a concern. Another thing noise. We got to talk about that. And I'll say this left me quite pleased in terms of the overall noise level. When the system was in idle and standby on the front there, it registered 32 to 34 dBA there. Not too shabby. And that is a system that was populated, I might add, with three 24TB Seagate Iron Wolf drives, two Sarta SSDs there, so I could have gone for the full set, but didn't. And three M.2 or two NVMEs inside with all the fans when it was set to automatic and idle. Again, that is a lovely little number there to be playing with. Now, when we set the fans to high with SSH and putting the command there, uh we saw at 48 to 51 dBA with the fans on their highest. That was with the mic at the rear of the system. So, that was obviously exceedingly close proximity. So, if you set the fans to high anyway, you should expect it to be high. But overall in terms of passive and automated up and down when needed, I was quite happy with the audio levels. Now, power consumption was something of a mixed bag because we've got to look at this device as the Pro series. You know, the stats I'm about to roll out to you apply only to the Pro. And later on when we talk about the CPUs, the Pro CPU is for the most part better, but not completely better in all ways. But when we look at power consumption on this, I did four different instances of power consumption. Hopefully, you can see it all rolling out on screen. Number one, uh we went with all media inside the device. All uh those three hard drives, two Serds, and three M.2 2 MVMEs with the system in idle. They achieved 32 to 34 watts power consumption there. Next, they removed all of the M.2 MVMEs running from unra on a USB and with just the hard drives inside, right? Three 24TB and two 8TB drives inside there in two separate pools. And we achieved 34 to 35, maybe close to 36 watt. So again, not too shabby. Uh after that, I went with SSDs on their own. removed all of the SATA drives inside and went ahead with just the SSDs, the three at the base, the OS drive and two SSDs in a rag one environment. And from that, with the software being the only thing access it, it actually was higher than the hard drives at 40 to 41 W. And again, that was due to the optimization of that software not quite being good enough in my opinion. And again, something they're going to have to work on. Uh lastly, we went with six Windows VMs running inside the system and it was with three SSDs with the M2 MVME uh hosting uh the uh virtual machines and the three starter hard drives in 24TB running there in their own ray just sitting idle. At that point, the CPU went up to 78 to 80 watt. And again, that is because of that CPU being something of an arm stretcher when it needs to be. Overall again in idle this is going to be higher than most of the average CPUs you've seen in the market when it comes to domestic 24/7 NAS but this is a powerhouse unit and therefore I didn't expect the power consumption to be lower than about 20 2025s it was a pinch higher than I would have liked but for that pro series CPU and particularly because we looked at this CPU previously with the Minis Forum X1 Pro it's was sort of to be expected. Next, ports and connections because this thing has got them in spades. Again, I could bore you. There's 10 gig USB and there's USB 2's on there, but the things you want to care about the most, number one, there is a 10 gig copper connection there using an AQC113 uh controller. They're on board. There's also a 5 gig um network port as well, copper once again. And that is using the RTL 8126. Both of them full saturation, easily achieved. I did with independent connections and I was really happy with what I saw there. Again, where things got interesting and I talked about this over at Computex, this thing supports USB4 direct connectivity in that software. Now, of course, that means you're going to have to use their software until the likes of Trunaz and Unrade stably support USB 4 and Thunderbolt for connectivity over the network or TB over IP or IP over TB. I was still quite happy with this USB 4 connection on this. Again, we could have used external storage drives and we would have hit 3,000 there. We did it once uh with the Minis Forum that we mentioned earlier on that has the same CPU and we were able to hit 3,000 uh megabytes per second read comfortably via those USB ports. But I think it will be scaled down on this because those USB 4s are 20 Gbits per second each. So, do keep that in mind. Again, if you want to take advantage of the direct connectivity, it's a real shame that it's not as freely available outside of uh the inclusive OS running on FN OS, which isn't going to be for everyone, but still, it's nice that they're at least moving towards that with that in-house OS. But color me impressed, not only does this system have a PCIe Gen 4 slot, which is a physical 16, but it is Gen 4* 4 speed, and that's across both CPU revisions. On top of that, there is also Oculink. So whether it is that you want to scale up your network connectivity, scale up GPU support or scale up more or even AI cards with standard PCIe upgrades or you want to use eGPUs or things like this, the MG1 from Minis Forum, which is an external graphics card, this supports it. You've got that element of flexibility. Up until now, Oculink has always seemingly been something where you have to choose either or when it comes to PCI or Oculink. This allowed me to attach this and this external graphics card appeared in Unrade. And because it appeared in Unrade, chances are I could pass it through to VMs. I never got the chance to do it. Follow-up video. But still, nonetheless, I love that flexibility in its deployment. For such a compact system to give me that amount of flexibility is borderline unheard of. And when we look at the internal M.2 two NVMEs and their performance. We've got two M.2s at Gen 4* 1 and we have one slot at Gen 4* 2. Two of them, by the way, are 22110 fulllength SSDs for those that want to take advantage of power loss protection M.2s. Now, in terms of performance inside with terminal over SSH, we're able to achieve the following performance. In terms of read performance, we saw uh 1.7 uh gigabytes pers on the four* 1 slot and 3.3 gigabytes pers on the Gen 4* 2 slot there. Now, when it came to write performance, uh we achieved on the four* 1 slots 1.6 GB pers and we hit an impressive 3.1 GB pers on the four* 2 slot there. So, again, lovely stuff. And when we were transferring data, by the way, between them, we were still able to hit 1.2 2 to 1.3 GB pers transfer. Something that we generally find a bottleneck on in a lot of other cases. Obviously, that was restricted by the overall performance of the Gen 4* 1 slots, but still really nice that we're still able to hit more than a gigabyte of transfer data between them. Now, if capacity is the name of the game, there is actually an adapter for this device that allows you to turn those three M.2 two slots at 2 * 4 * 1 and one at 4* 2 into a 2 * U.2 card with an M.2 as well. So you can use that M.2 for your OS drive and be able to take advantage of much much higher capacity drives all the way up by the way to 15 mm height there. The fan assignment and the fan height from that board is actually not too shabby. There's plenty of room to play with and although U.2 to particularly that capacity is pretty darn expensive. I like that they've gone to the trouble of including that. For me though, given that we've already spoken about Minis Forum and that six times M.2 card almost a year ago now, I would be more interested to see that card inside this. Next up, let's talk about those CPUs cuz as mentioned, the Pro and the nonpro have got different CPUs which wildly and drastically change the pricing structure here and other things as well. So the CPU side by side uh we have got in the nonpro version an 8 core 16thread CPU and we have a 12 core and 24thread CPU inside the pro series model that is an I AI specialized CPU as well with a huge rating for terror operations per second but also the two of them the pro series device has got a slight edge in terms of graphical uh potential there at 2.9 GHz performance for the graphics there on first and 2.7 GHz on the nonpro CPU when needed. Indeed, between the two of them, although both of them can be clocked up to 5.1 GHz total maximum speed, the nonpro device has a base clock speed uh of 3.3 GHz there. So, keep that in mind. Whereas the Pro Series device can actually go as low as 2 GHz, which in 24/7 environments might actually be more desirable. This is what I meant earlier on when I was talking about power consumption between these two devices not quite being a done deal because the idle might actually be higher on the nonpro device because of that small factor. But the nonpro device has actually got more lanes. The CPU inside the N5 standard edition is a 20 lane CPU whereas the Pro Series device is using a 16 lane CPU. Obviously, you, the end user, are never really going to be able to change anything cuz suppose these devices are preset at the BIOS level. But still, it's an interesting quirk between the two of them that generally we find that the more expenses have got more lanes that can be spread out. And it makes me wonder where are those four other lanes going. Now, I know it's going to be a real kick in the bread tray that for nonpro buyers losing out on ECC is going to be something of a bummer. Again, they could have played around and got ECC CPUs there, but I think to have the lane assignment and to still be able to give everything about this system hardware. There aren't a lot of ECC CPUs that aren't already really, really expensive. And hell, ECC memory on its own is crazy expensive. When you look back at that page when it showed you the pricing, if you go for the Pro Series model which supports ECC and you go for the model that includes 96 GB of ECC memory, that 1,39 price leaps up to 1583. However, the memory they use, which is Kingston ECC memory, DDR5, even if you buy it directly from Kingston, it's £200 for every 48 gig stick without tax. So, they're not even making money on the ECC anyway. Bottom line, the options there for those that want to have ECC memory, but if you're going to, you know, save a bit of bun and go for the non SIP Pro Series model, you're going to have to stick with DDR5 on die. Now, as mentioned in the introduction, we're going to be doing VM testing and Plex Multimedia in their own video. Depending on their length, if they go over the 15minute mark, I might even make them both into independent videos and publish them a day or so apart. But a number of you that are looking at this device, yes, you're looking at unread. Yes, you're looking at true NAS, but this arrives with software. And for those of you that are hunting for a good turnkey n solution, is the Miniscloud OS any good? Now, let's talk about the software because it is something of a mixed bag. I'm going to start positive and leave the things I was less impressed with at the second half, but I'll say right now, I like that the N5 Pro arrives with an operating system. And I also like that it doesn't restrict you uh from using Unre, Open Media, Vault, you know, Cassa, Zimmer, anything you want to use. Having this on board is good. As mentioned, I'm not overly impressed by the fact that you've got to use up one of your M.2 slots. Also, I'm sorry about the clunking and noise here in the background. and I've had to squeeze this in between a few other reviews that I'm running right now. But just I'm going to start positive and I'm going to leave the stuff uh there definitely there is work to be done on this OS u to the second. You certainly can't fault the responsiveness and the applications and services here under the bonnet to put it into perspective when you go into the storage manager there. It is incredibly intuitive and straightforward for what you need to do. Say there's Sarter poolool here that's made up of those SA drives. Let's destroy that starter pool actually so I can show you how easy it is to uh follow the rules and regs here when you're breaking and putting stuff up. So, let's kill that starter pool. So, we got the MVME pool there. I've done a couple of NVMemes up there. We got the multidis pool there. And if we want, we can go in and actually assess and change some of that cuz there is ZFS support here. We've also got support of snapshots there with, you know, basically for anyone that's going to be using borderline unlimited realistically to most average user that's going to buy this. Obviously, isn't unlimited. Uh, but as you can see, we've already had the snapshot service there running there in the background. Autocreating on our existing pool and creating pools. Very, very straightforward. There's our option there at the top. Create pool. We got simple mode, advanced mode there. Go for advanced mode there. So, we can play with what we want to do. Um, not skip through it accidentally. We've got the two SATA drives I've just deleted. We can choose. And we've got the ZFS options there as well. So, let's go for a standard stripe there. Try and get some performance. And again, you've got the options there for encryption. You've got the options there for compression in line of course. We can go ahead and create ourselves that storage pool. Give it a name. Obviously, it's going to wipe those discs as well. And that's it. It's that straightforward to create ourselves a pool. And that's going to happen there in the background on the system. Now, I will add that the amount of control uh compared with something like TRNA, it's not there. Um, so for example, if we go into the storage pool, we can go into the smart information on the individual discs, find out more about temperature, that kind of stuff, what's going in. We can manage the disc a little bit there. There's no option there for uh performing benchmarks on the individual tool, but you can do individual checks. However, when it comes to the M.2 MVMEs, that option isn't there. When I go to the manage disc, I can't really see it. And really, when I was trying to assess the temperature of these discs, when I was going for my heavy right operations, the only time I knew about it was when I was getting those high temperature alerts when I was doing the repeated 10G testing over the course of an hour. So again, that's something that how much of the blame of this is on Minis forum, how much of it is on FNOS, it's hard to say, but given that this operating system is being bundled in with a device, it's hard to criticize them for that per se. Now, as mentioned, whatever you're going to need them from a NAS operating system, particularly a guey and a client application or accessing on the web browser or a mobile app, it's all pretty much here. Um if we go in uh to things like docker and creating our docker and you know uh deployable applications there the option is there. In fact when we go to the main layer of applications almost everything you're going to need is here. Everything from the HDMI output control for multimedia to time machine backups for Mac users or if you want to go ahead and create standard backups there back and forth between the system will create a brand new backup. Again go for a local folder there. We can go for that into the type of backup. again filtering for what we want to do. Then from there once we've created our video backup then we then choose what we want to do for the location on the NAS system. So we'll just go for something random. Go for that one there. And then from that we've created our backup. It's really that straightforward to operate our backup here between the system. There's cloud synchronization of course. So again we got some of the advanced options there. So we can add some of the additional filters but pretty much everything you need is going to be there to manage your backup. It's not the most polished, but when we're talking about things like hexos, giving uh a more, you know, intuitive interface to things like trunaz, this is a ZFS OS uh ZFS supporting OS that we've got a lot more modern control over. That goes down again to a lot of userfriendly language. If we're going to be managing uh local connections, whether we want to add uh control uh levels of control or authentication, it's all built in there. Whether you want to remote access the device, you've got a decent amount of control over uh just what services are running, how and when. If you want to bolt on cloud services, going to the file manager on the lefth hand side, we can go ahead and start adding external storage again via SMB. Not a huge amount of cloud support there, your Google Drive, your whatever. Um so again, the options are there, but they could still be added to over time. It is intuitive. It is straightforward. Creating individual folders, creating shared folders. Again, all very straightforward, very easy with intuitive options and native options for the right click there for, you know, sharing, for uploading, downloading. It's all straightforward and it was very responsive when I was dumping files there. So, let's just go ahead and dump all of those in there to that directory. Again, it does what it's supposed to do. It goes straight in straight forward. And snapshots are doing their thing. For example, I've just dumped that into the storage pool where we've seen an absolute pile of snapshots there. So, let's create a brand new snapshot there. We'll just give it any old name. We just dumped those files in, didn't we? So, we're just creating our brand new uh snapshot. It's going to go ahead. Let's action that now. And now it's created that snapshot. Why don't we go ahead and recreate one of our earlier snapshots? There we can see that's what it's going to turn it into. So, why don't we go ahead and action our snapshot roll back. Bang. Done. And you can lock those snapshots as well, by the way. And as you can see now, it's going to reinstate the snapshot. Let's go ahead go in. Go back into the folder. So, we close that out. Refresh. and that data is gone. It's that straightforward there. So, it's doing what it's supposed to do, but at the same time, there's always going to be the little gaps and chinks in the armor. So, for example, when we go into the multimedia there, it feels like it does need some design work there. There is AI photo recognition there, the intelligent searches. So, for example, if I go in there and I go for red car, we can go ahead and see if it can find any red cars. And again, it's finding red. It's finding, you know, I wouldn't say that's hugely accurate. there to go for something else. Let's go for man standing next to tree. Again, that's a little bit more accurate, but still it's not perfect. It does allow us at the very least to use customized search there. VII photo recognition, and we can adjust some of those options as well. And again, things like indexing are all built in there natively. And then goes for like uh if you want to go for the multimedia for like things like music playing out, and you can choose to stream those services or send them to different things. uh and if we go for uh the multimedia that's another area where localization I think could do with some work. So for example when it has scraped the metadata this should be uh by default in English given that I've chose the default language for the system and it's kind of like that throughout things like transcoding obviously are managed quite well and you got the hardware option and you got native hardware transcoding thanks to access directly to the transcoding engine rather than something like clicks but still nonetheless sorry a big old bin van driving by. You've got those options, but it still just needs a little bit more polish. Again, I'm trying to balance a line between uh being overly critical of the operating system and understanding where Minis Forum's uh work on this begins and ends. They are still using FNOS, which is in in development uh NAS operating system. Uh which if you want to use the Western version requires a commercial license. So, they are paying towards this, but how much of this is their own contribution, how much it isn't is hard to say. For example, a lot of the key applications are there, but certain features are still missing. So, for example, the password manager there, you can create a password vault, but I could not find any option for two-actor authentication, which is super annoying. There isn't a security scanner, something we talked about before that is strangely absent on some of these NAS operating systems that are built on NOS. The some of the localization for language is one thing, the localization for localized cloud services that you would get here is missing. Uh when I go into the application itself again, I know this is built using FNOS because if I log out and I look at uh when we're looking at the Rico, you can see it's the same software there and it was the same criticisms I had over the um Rico Naz operating system, I've got to extend to the F uh and the N5 Pro there. So again, the lack of two factor authentication there, um the lack of things like ice scutty support as well. But I will highlight that have made a lot more noise about this being an included NAS operating system. And although minis forum have, they've leveraged a lot more towards users using third-party operating systems there with this being really more classed as a kind of we've thrown it in as an extra for you. Bottom line, I'm glad they've included this operating system. I'm glad it's all there. The problem is it doesn't feel like a finished NAS operating system and it doesn't feel like a secure NAS operating system. And you know, if you're going to buy this, this isn't a reason to buy this device. It's a nice extra, but if you're going to buy this device, it comes really down to Unrade, True Naz, and more. Bottom line, does this device live up to, for me, 10 months of buildup? Mostly, genuinely, it's so close to what I was hoping it would be. I think the Pro Series model, that CPU, as incredibly powerful as it is, I think they may have hobbled themselves by going for such an expensive CPU inside this. And there are a few other options in the market that I think could have brought this down the tiniest pinch. Just looking at the MSA2, for example, the CPUs that that features, I'd be interested to have seen if that hardware configuration could have been migrated over to this as a first entry into the world of NAS. This thing is phenomenal. And the fact that they at least made the smart decision because they knew how expensive the Pro was going to be to have a Pro, a nonpro model out there was dead sensible to me. I think the pricing probably will come down, but not by vast amounts. And if you do have the bunts for it and you were going to go for True Naz, for unrade, for open media vault or whatever, this is a desirable proposition. As a multimedia only server, I think it's overkill. I've not had a chance to test the standard version, but the Pro Series model here, yes, I ran 10 4K click streams. I ran four insanely high 8K streams on this and the CPU was at about 40% at best. Yes, it can do Plex, but it would be huge overspend to get this just for that. For virtual machines, as I say, I got 12 Windows VMs and some Ubuntu VMs and change running on this thanks to this being that 24thread CPU. That's two vCPU uh um two uh vCPUs assigned to each one and 2 gig of memory. Bottom line, this thing is an absolute banger in terms of hardware. But if you're not going to use it all, then that's when you need to start looking at the standard class because that $500 could buy you another whole Naz or it could buy you another 4 terabytes per bay. I know a number of you want to see more about the VMs and the media and certainly want to see a comparison between this and a certain other cheeky little hybrid now we talked about a week ago. That's in the works. Trust me. And I'm really looking forward to talking about that device. But that aside, is this a good Naz? Yes, it bloody well is. Is it finished? No. Not in terms of software, but in terms of hardware, this thing for me is banger. And I really am looking forward to see Minis Forum stretch its muscles on this. Stay tuned for follow-up videos on this very soon. If you found this video helpful and you've enjoyed it, there are links to other videos that we've done on not only Minis Forum products but other banger Nazis here on the channel. If you found this video helpful and you going to go to some of the shops and for the products listed in the description below, please use those links. We get a small commission on any of those links and it helps us keep doing what we're doing. Ironically, not from the Min forum link going to their own website. So, use it, enjoy that code. We get sod for it, but it's there if you need it. But thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next