Today, 06:51 AM
Hi guys, I came across your review of the Minisforum N5 Pro and was so excited to research this NAS which is more of an "All-in-one" server. Unfortunately, while I was looking into it, it seems there is a potentially serious reliability issue with the N5 Pro related to its onboard SATA controller (JMB585). Multiple users have reported that under sustained write or mixed I/O load, the controller appears to reset or reinitialize mid-operation. When this happens, ZFS ends up receiving corrupted data before checksums are written, which results in silent data corruption on the pool. Once ZFS later reads the data back, the checksum mismatch is detected — but at that point the corruption has already been committed.
Unfortunately, I cannot share links here, but if you lookup:
1) (Silent) Data Corruption on N5 Pro NAS: r/MINISFORUM
2) AOOSTAR WTR Max vs Minisforum N5 Pro: Level1techs forum
These threads describe the issue and show some logs that cover the issue. The Level1Techs thread has a few posts where the controller is described as unreliable under heavy I/O loads. What’s concerning is that this doesn’t appear to be a one-off drive failure — symptoms are consistent with controller-level resets, hitting all drives at once.
I’m not sure how widespread the problem is, but Minisforum hasn’t issued an official response yet. That uncertainty makes it hard to trust the N5 Pro as a primary NAS, which is a shame considering how strong the rest of the hardware is and how well it was positioned as an “all-in-one” homelab box.
Not sure if you're already aware of this issue, but would love it if you could raise this with Minisforum and see if they can acknowledge the issue or outline any planned fixes — firmware, board revision, etc. It would help a lot of people (including myself) make informed decisions. Thanks.
TL;DR:
Unfortunately, I cannot share links here, but if you lookup:
1) (Silent) Data Corruption on N5 Pro NAS: r/MINISFORUM
2) AOOSTAR WTR Max vs Minisforum N5 Pro: Level1techs forum
These threads describe the issue and show some logs that cover the issue. The Level1Techs thread has a few posts where the controller is described as unreliable under heavy I/O loads. What’s concerning is that this doesn’t appear to be a one-off drive failure — symptoms are consistent with controller-level resets, hitting all drives at once.
I’m not sure how widespread the problem is, but Minisforum hasn’t issued an official response yet. That uncertainty makes it hard to trust the N5 Pro as a primary NAS, which is a shame considering how strong the rest of the hardware is and how well it was positioned as an “all-in-one” homelab box.
Not sure if you're already aware of this issue, but would love it if you could raise this with Minisforum and see if they can acknowledge the issue or outline any planned fixes — firmware, board revision, etc. It would help a lot of people (including myself) make informed decisions. Thanks.
TL;DR:
Quote:N5 Pro’s JMB585 SATA controller may reset under load → corrupts in-flight writes → ZFS only catches it after corruption is written. Until Minisforum responds, data-integrity-focused users are hesitant to trust it as a NAS.