Minisforum S5 Fits 40TB of NVMe in a Fanless NAS

A Silent NAS With No Spinning Parts At All

The all-flash NAS has been the homelab enthusiast's daydream for about five years, and the reason it stayed a daydream was price per terabyte. That gap has narrowed enough that Minisforum has made the S5 official: a fanless, hard-drive-free network storage box that takes five NVMe drives, tops out around 40TB, and makes no noise whatsoever because there is nothing inside it that moves.

• Processor: Intel Core 3 304, a five-core Wildcat Lake chip with one P-core and four low-power E-cores, 15W base power, boosting to 4.3 GHz
• Storage: five M.2 2280 slots on PCIe 4.0 x1 each, up to 40TB total, plus a 64GB onboard UFS module for the OS
• Memory: 16GB soldered LPDDR5, with Wi-Fi 7 on board
• Networking and ports: 10GbE and 2.5GbE RJ45, two 40Gbps USB4 ports, two USB 3.2 Type-A and HDMI 2.1

Why a Fanless Design Works Here

Fanless mini PCs are common. A fanless NAS is harder, because traditionally the drives are the heat problem and the drives are also the thing you cannot move away from the chassis. Take the spinning disks out, pair five low-power SSDs with a 15W CPU, and the thermal budget suddenly fits inside a passive aluminium case that doubles as one large heatsink.

Minisforum has also done something sensible with the PCIe budget. Each M.2 slot gets a single PCIe 4.0 lane rather than four, which distributes bandwidth evenly across all five drives and keeps per-drive heat output in a range a passive case can shed. That is roughly 2GB/s per drive, with combined throughput rated up to 10.8GB/s.

What Does One PCIe Lane Per Drive Actually Cost You?

This is the spec that will generate the most argument, so it is worth being straight about it. A single Gen4 lane caps each drive well below what a modern NVMe SSD can do in isolation. If your workload is one large sequential transfer to one drive, you are leaving performance on the table.

For the job this box is built for, it matters much less than it looks. The 10GbE port tops out around 1.25GB/s, so a single drive on one lane already saturates the fastest network interface on the unit several times over. The bandwidth that counts is aggregate throughput across a pool serving several clients at once, and there the five-lane spread is the right call. The honest caveat is elsewhere: the memory is soldered and non-ECC, which is a real consideration if you were planning a ZFS build and care about that.

Where the S5 Sits in the Mini NAS Market

Wildcat Lake has been quietly excellent for this category all year — low enough power to go fanless, modern enough I/O to carry 10GbE and USB4 — and the S5 is the cleanest expression of it yet. Compare it against the Beelink ME Pro 2 hybrid NAS, which takes the same platform in a hybrid direction, or the ACEMAGIC Kron K5 benchmarks for a sense of what the Core 3 304 does in general-purpose work.

Minisforum ships the S5 with MiniCloud, its own NAS-focused OS, on the internal UFS module — which conveniently leaves all five M.2 slots free for storage rather than losing one to a boot drive. Anyone who would rather run TrueNAS or Unraid has a standard x86 box to do it on.

The unit is expected around mid-October, and pricing has not been announced as of this week. A larger S7 model is also in the lineup. For a machine intended to sit on a shelf in a living room and never be heard, the absence of a fan is not a spec-sheet footnote — it is the entire point. More builds and boards in our mini computer coverage.

Sources: Liliputing — September 17, 2026; FanlessTech — September 17, 2026.