Raspberry Pi 5 NAS board with RAID support and quick Ethernet launches

The Radxa Taco may look familiar to attentive readers, and the manufacturer is now at least offering a new model, the V1.61, for preorder. The listed price is $65, plus the cost of the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5. Rather than using a standard single-board computer in its usual form, it relies on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5. As a result, the Radxa Taco supports not only storage connectivity but networking as well. 

It further has two Ethernet ports, with one supporting a maximum data rate of 1 Gbps and the other 2.5 Gbps. Not being limited to Gigabit Ethernet makes sense. Even traditional HDDs can already saturate a gigabit connection. There is also an M.2 2230 slot that allows the use of wireless network cards with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. The system is designed to accommodate five separate storage drives. Both 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch drives are supported. That means conventional HDDs, smaller 2.5-inch hard drives mainly known from laptops, and of course SATA SSDs can all be installed. 

A microSD card slot is included as well, and that is typically where the OS will be installed. This gives users a great deal of flexibility, though they are also responsible for installing and updating the OS themselves. RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10 are supported. GPIO headers are available. Two USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports also allow external storage devices to be connected.