Affordable Minisforum N5 Air NAS launches with OCuLink, PCIe slot, and 144 TB storage support

The Minisforum N5 Air made a silent debut earlier in January 2026, and now, the company has officially launched the NAS. It's an affordable network-attached storage with five HDD bays, and there are three M.2 slots that can hold PCIe 4.0 SSDs.

With the HDD bays and M.2 slots equipped, the total storage support stands at 144 TB, which makes it a better option than some of the 5-bay NASs like the Synology DiskStation DS1525+ (available on Amazon). The Minisforum N5 Air also comes with much more capable hardware than some of the competing models.

More specifically, it's powered by the AMD Ryzen 7 255, which is a Hawk Point APU with the Radeon 780M iGPU. While this integrated GPU will be enough for some of the GPU-accelerated tasks, users can better equip their NAS setup by hooking up an external GPU with the N5 Air through the OCuLink port.

Another notable expansion medium is the PCIe x16 slot, which, for example, can be used for SSD cache arrays and NICs. There's support for multiple RAID modes, and Minisforum says that the cooling setup ensures that the installed drives offer their best performance even under load.

As for the design, the Minisforum N5 Air seems to have taken a page out of the Beelink ME Pro, featuring a design that lets users slide the motherboard out of the chassis. This, according to the brand, will allow easy SSD and RAM upgrades, and it will simplify maintenance as well.

Support for up to 96 GB of DDR5 RAM, a rich connectivity configuration with a USB4 port, MinisCloud OS, Docker support, and a sleek chassis are among the other notable highlights. Minisforum has put a starting launch price tag of $499 for the barebone version of the N5 Air AI NAS, while the option with 16 GB of RAM costs $679.