Friday, May 8th 2026
Minisforum Unveils S5 and S7 All-Flash NAS Units with Intel Core Series 3 Processors
Minisforum and Intel held a joint launch event in Xiamen, introducing two new all-flash NAS systems built around Intel Series 3 processors, the compact S5 and the seven-bay S7. The S5 is the more distinctive of the two. It runs Intel Core Series 3 (Wildcat Lake), Intel's 18A-based platform for edge, laptops and commercial devices and adopts a no-HDDs approach featuring five M.2 2280 PCIe 4.0 x1 SSD slots. The fanless design combined with the all-SSD layout means it runs completely silent. Minisforum is even pitching it at home theater setups and anywhere noise is a concern. Memory goes up to 16 GB of LPDDR5X-7200, and connectivity includes a 10 GbE RJ45, a 2.5 GbE RJ45, two USB4 40 Gbps ports, two USB 3.2 Type-A ports, and HDMI 2.1. Wi-Fi 7 is also on board, and combined SSD throughput is rated at up to 10.8 GB/s.
The S7 is built on the MS-03 workstation platform and steps up to seven NVMe slots for heavier storage workloads. Networking is more enterprise-oriented, with dual 10G SFP+ fiber ports, a 10G RJ45, a 2.5G RJ45, and two USB4 40 Gbps ports. An LED status display lets users check system and storage activity making it more suited to home-lab and power user setups. Both systems support Minisforum MinisOpenClaw AI agent, which includes features like AI semantic photo search and installs in one click. No pricing or release date has been announced.
Sources:
Videocardz, Minisforum
The S7 is built on the MS-03 workstation platform and steps up to seven NVMe slots for heavier storage workloads. Networking is more enterprise-oriented, with dual 10G SFP+ fiber ports, a 10G RJ45, a 2.5G RJ45, and two USB4 40 Gbps ports. An LED status display lets users check system and storage activity making it more suited to home-lab and power user setups. Both systems support Minisforum MinisOpenClaw AI agent, which includes features like AI semantic photo search and installs in one click. No pricing or release date has been announced.
13 Comments on Minisforum Unveils S5 and S7 All-Flash NAS Units with Intel Core Series 3 Processors
Mid-range drives that I used to buy for $50 or so are now getting closer to $150. Heck, even used market is all messed up, cause during my search I saw some ridiculous lots.... not too long ago people would not even list those, but now every third listing is a big lot of drives with less than 70% health(even as low as 50%).
Given that this thing has no price or release date yet, by the time it hits the shelves, it'll cost over $2000 if not more for a barebone (due to upcoming CPU shortage) with another $2000 in RAM and SSDs(very optimistically). That's more than I spent on my 24U rack and an entire home lab.
Not "quiet" as in "server rack quiet". Quiet as in "is this thing on?" The F8 comes close in some situations.
Assuming these S5's don't have coil whine, I would very much be interested in one. Maybe even more than one. The S5's CPU should also be a bit better than the N305/N355's out there, Xe3 should even come with hardware transcoding support for the more recent high efficiency codecs.