Radxa Taco V1.61 Turns the Raspberry Pi CM5 Into a Five-Drive NAS for Around $65

The Raspberry Pi CM5 NAS Build Just Got Much More Accessible

Building a home NAS or homelab server has traditionally required either purpose-built hardware that locks you into a vendor's ecosystem, or a full-size motherboard and chassis consuming significant space and power budget. Radxa has been chipping away at this problem with its Taco carrier board series, and the V1.61 update — released April 2, 2026 and now designed exclusively for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 — represents a significant step forward for the compact self-hosted storage space.

What's on the Board

The Taco V1.61 is a 114 × 85 mm carrier board built around the CM5 form factor. That small footprint packs a dense set of storage and networking interfaces:

- **5× SATA III ports** — the headline feature. Five drives in a board smaller than a hardcover book

- **1× M.2 2280 NVMe slot** (PCIe 3.0 x1) — for a fast cache or OS drive

- **Dual Ethernet** — one Gigabit, one 2.5 Gigabit port

- **USB 3.2 Gen 1** — two ports for external storage or peripherals

- **Full-size HDMI** — for direct display output when needed

- **PCIe 3.0 x4 slot** — expansion possibilities including additional storage controllers

The CM5 slot supports all RAM configurations (1GB through 8GB) and both the Lite and eMMC variants.

RAID Supported Out of the Box

Software RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10 are all supported through Linux's mdadm framework, which is well-documented and widely used in the homelab community. For a three-to-five drive NAS build, RAID 5 delivers redundancy with efficient storage utilization. The CM5's ARM Cortex-A76 cores handle mdadm parity calculations well for home NAS workloads.

Sequential throughput on a RAID 5 array across five spinning drives runs to around 500–600 MB/s on the SATA side — more than sufficient for media serving, backup storage, and self-hosted cloud storage platforms like Nextcloud or Immich. The NVMe slot doubles as an ideal location for the OS drive, keeping all five SATA ports fully available for data.

Pricing and Why It Matters

The Taco V1.61 is available through Radxa's official channels and distributors for approximately $65–$72. Combined with a Raspberry Pi CM5 (starting at $35 for the Lite configuration), you have a complete NAS carrier setup for around $100 before drives — comparable to or less than a used NAS enclosure without any compute.

For the self-hosted community, the open Linux environment is the real advantage over commercial NAS appliances. You are not locked into a proprietary OS or vendor app ecosystem — full Docker, full Kubernetes, and any ARM-compatible software stack you choose.

Who This Is For

The Radxa Taco V1.61 is purpose-built for homelab builders and self-hosters who want to run a compact, power-efficient NAS on familiar single-board-computer hardware. The CM5's improved performance over its predecessor — particularly its PCIe 3.0 support — makes the Taco V1.61 noticeably more capable for RAID and NVMe workloads than the previous CM4-based version.

If you have been waiting for an affordable, CM5-compatible NAS carrier with enough drive bays to do something genuinely useful, the Taco V1.61 is worth a close look.

Sources: LinuxGizmos (April 2, 2026), Radxa Official (2026), CNX Software (2026)