Morefine's new AI workstation puts 132TB above the CPU
The MNAS-X1 stacks four 3.5-inch bays on top of the motherboard, pairs an 800W supply with a Ryzen 7 PRO 8845HS, and starts at US$989 as a barebone.
Morefine has opened orders for the MNAS-X1, a compact workstation that replaces the usual stack of external storage with four hard drive bays sitting directly above the motherboard.
What's actually going on
The bays are the point. Four 3.5-inch drives mount in a removable tray on top of the case rather than beside the processor, which keeps the hottest components below the disks and leaves the drives in the coolest part of the chassis. Morefine lists support for drives up to 33TB each, which is where the headline 132TB figure comes from, and adds three M.2 NVMe slots with RAID support for fast working storage.
The compute side is a single AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 8845HS, an eight-core Zen 4 part running at 3.8GHz with a boost clock of up to 5.1GHz and a configurable power envelope of up to 54W. There are two SO-DIMM slots taking DDR5-5600 up to 96GB with ECC, plus one PCIe 4.0 x16 slot wired for eight lanes, which Morefine rates for a graphics card up to 330mm long and 66mm wide on a 400W power budget.
Power comes from an 800W supply. Connectivity runs to a USB4 port, several USB-A ports, an SD card reader, HDMI and dual 10GbE networking, and Morefine markets the machine for AI development, NAS duty and media serving. Pricing starts at US$989 for the barebone, which means memory, drives, an operating system and any graphics card are bought separately.
Why you should care
Local AI work has a storage problem that cloud hosting hides. Models, datasets and checkpoints are large, they are read constantly, and moving them over a network is slow in a way that a direct-attached array is not. A box that can hold a serious amount of data next to the accelerator that reads it is a different proposition to a mini PC with a single NVMe slot, and Morefine is one of a growing group of small manufacturers pitching exactly that.
Our opinion
Stacking drives above the mainboard is a solution that looks obvious the moment someone says it out loud, and it is hard to believe it took this long to become a product rather than a forum build. The honest caveat is the pricing. At US$989 for a barebone, the machine is a chassis, a CPU and a power supply, and anyone filling those four bays with 33TB drives is spending several times the base price before they run a single prompt. The 400W graphics budget is the number that decides whether this is genuinely an AI workstation or a very tidy NAS with a fast processor in it.