MINISFORUM N5 Pro-P370 Review: The AI NAS That Changes Everything

What Is the MINISFORUM N5 Pro-P370?

The NAS market just got disrupted. MINISFORUM — the brand best known for pushing the limits of mini PCs — has launched the N5 Pro-P370, a 5-bay desktop NAS powered by AMD's latest Ryzen AI 9 HX Pro 370 processor. This is not a typical NAS. It's a fully-fledged AI workstation, media server, and expandable desktop computer that happens to also eat storage for breakfast.

With an OCuLink port, PCIe ×16 expansion slot, dual high-speed LAN (10GbE + 5GbE), and support for up to 144TB of combined storage, the N5 Pro-P370 is targeting a very specific buyer: power users who are tired of compromising between performance and storage. At £799 for the base configuration, it's a serious investment — but the specification sheet reads like a wishlist, not a product listing.

Design and Build Quality

The N5 Pro-P370 measures 199×199×252mm — compact for what it delivers, but noticeably larger than something like a Synology DS423+. The all-metal chassis feels premium, and MINISFORUM has engineered in a clever slide-out motherboard design that makes internal upgrades far less painful than traditional NAS towers. You can add RAM, swap drives, and install expansion cards without fighting with the case.

Cooling is handled by dual 92mm fans plus a dedicated CPU fan — a necessary setup given the Ryzen AI 9 HX Pro 370 TDP. Under sustained loads (large file transfers combined with transcoding, for example) the fans are audible but not intrusive. For a home office or lab environment it's perfectly acceptable.

Performance: AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX Pro 370

The headline feature is the processor. The AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX Pro 370 is a 12-core, 24-thread chip based on AMD's Zen 5 architecture, boosting up to 5.1GHz. To put that in perspective: this is faster than processors found in many current gaming laptops and desktop workstations, and it's sitting inside a NAS device.

The "AI" in the name isn't marketing fluff — the HX Pro 370 includes AMD's XDNA NPU (Neural Processing Unit) delivering up to 50 TOPS of AI compute. This is what powers MinisCloud's AI photo recognition and semantic search, and it's what makes running local AI models (like Llama, Whisper, or Stable Diffusion) genuinely practical on this hardware without needing a discrete GPU.

For a NAS, the implications are significant. Hardware-accelerated 4K and 8K video transcoding, real-time face recognition across photo libraries, and AI-assisted search all run natively on the CPU without taxing your network or requiring cloud services. Everything stays local and private.

Storage: 5 Bays + 3 NVMe Slots = Serious Capacity

The storage configuration is one of the N5 Pro-P370's strongest cards. Five SATA bays accommodate standard 3.5" hard drives up to 30TB each — giving you a maximum of 150TB of spinning storage in RAID, JBOD, or ZFS configurations. Add three M.2/U.2 NVMe slots (configurable as 1× M.2 + 2× U.2) for high-speed SSD caching or additional fast storage, and you're looking at a combined maximum well over 144TB.

For context: a typical 4-bay Synology starts running out of room the moment you seriously commit to 4K video or RAW photo libraries. The N5 Pro-P370 is built for people who have already outgrown that problem, or can see themselves hitting it within a year.

Networking: 10GbE + 5GbE Simultaneously

Most NAS devices at this price ship with 2.5GbE. The N5 Pro-P370 ships with a dedicated 10GbE port AND a 5GbE port — both active simultaneously. That's up to 15Gbps of aggregate throughput on your local network.

In practice this means saturating the transfer speed of multiple high-speed NVMe SSDs simultaneously is possible. Editing 4K video directly from the NAS over 10GbE without dropped frames is not just possible — it's routine. For studios, photographers, or anyone with a 10GbE-capable network switch, this transforms the device from a backup target into a genuine primary working storage solution.

OCuLink and PCIe ×16: The eGPU Wildcard

Here's where the N5 Pro-P370 becomes genuinely unique. OCuLink is a PCIe-based external connector that carries full PCIe bandwidth — unlike Thunderbolt, which has overhead and bandwidth limitations. Connecting an OCuLink-compatible GPU enclosure to this NAS turns it into a legitimate GPU compute server.

What can you do with that? Run Stable Diffusion locally at full speed. Accelerate video transcoding to real-time or faster. Run local LLMs with GPU acceleration. Play PC games via the HDMI output. The N5 Pro-P370 already has 2× USB4 ports capable of 8K video output and 20Gbps data — add a GPU and you have a workstation that also happens to hold 144TB of storage.

The internal PCIe ×16 slot adds further flexibility: 10GbE network cards, additional storage HBA controllers, or an internal GPU are all viable options.

MinisCloud OS: NAS Software Reimagined

MinisCloud OS is MINISFORUM's answer to Synology DSM and TrueNAS — and it takes a distinctly AI-first approach. The photo library app uses on-device AI for face recognition, scene detection, and semantic search (search "beach holiday 2024" and it finds the right photos). The media server supports 4K hardware transcoding with a poster-wall UI that rivals Plex. The audio system handles lossless formats and DSD decoding.

Remote access is built in with NAT traversal — no need to configure port forwarding or set up a VPN. Multi-user accounts with isolation and encrypted sharing work out of the box. One-click backup syncs across Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android.

The honest caveat: MinisCloud OS is newer software and doesn't yet have the years of refinement and plugin ecosystem that Synology DSM or TrueNAS Scale have accumulated. Power users who need specific apps or very granular ZFS control may still prefer booting into Windows and running TrueNAS in a VM. But for most users, MinisCloud OS covers everything needed beautifully.

Who Should Buy the MINISFORUM N5 Pro-P370?

Buy it if you: need more than 20TB of fast, accessible storage; run a home studio, photography business, or video production workflow; want a self-hosted cloud that doesn't rely on Dropbox or Google; are building a home lab or local AI setup; need 10GbE NAS performance without spending £2,000+ on enterprise gear.

Skip it if you: just want a basic file share or backup target for one or two computers — a Synology DS223 at £200 will serve you far better for that use case. The N5 Pro-P370 is purposefully built for demanding workloads.

Verdict: A Category-Defining NAS

The MINISFORUM N5 Pro-P370 is the most capable compact NAS device available in 2026. The combination of an AMD Ryzen AI processor, OCuLink eGPU support, dual 10GbE+5GbE networking, 5 storage bays, and MinisCloud's AI-powered OS in a £799 package would have seemed impossible two years ago.

It's not for everyone — the base model needs RAM and drives to be genuinely useful, and the price climbs quickly once you spec it up. But for power users who know what they need, this is the answer to the question "why can't my NAS do more?" It can. This one does.

Rating: 4.6/5 — Outstanding performance and expandability at a competitive price for the specification. Minor deductions for the RAM-less base configuration and the still-maturing MinisCloud OS ecosystem.