There’s an ever-expanding number of mini PCs on the market, but many of these tiny desktops lack some of the features found on larger computers. Some have only a few ports. Most lack optical disc drives. And while some have solid state drives or hard drives, few have both.

And then there’s the new Zotac ZBOX R series. These little desktop computers have room for two 2.5 inch drives and some models have an additional mSATA SSD slot.

What’s really unusual is that the R series computers support RAID 0 and RAID 1 configurations.

zbox r_01

That means you can set up one of these computers to either write data across multiple disks for increased performance or duplicate all the data from one disk to another (which reduces performance a bit, but helps protect your data in the event that one of the drives fails).

Zotac is offering two R series models at launch, the ZBOX RI531 series and the ZBOC RI323.

ZBOX RI531

This model features an Intel Core i3-5010U Haswell processor with Intel HD 5500 graphics, Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11ac WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, HDMI and DisplayPort, four USB 3.0 ports, an SDXC card reader, and two DDR3-1600 memory slots.

The RI531 has an mSATA SSD slot and two 2.5 inch slots for hard drives or SSDs.

Zotac will offer a barebones model without any memory or storage, as well as a Plus model that features 4GB of RAM and a 64GB mSATA SSD.

ZBOX RI323

While this model looks a lot like the RI531 on the outside, under the hood it has a less powerful (and cheaper) Intel Celeron 2961Y Haswell processor and lacks the mSATA slot.

The rest of the features are largely the same, but for now it looks like Zotac will only offer the RI323 as a barebones model. There’s no Plus version.

Both computers support Windows 7 or later.

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4 replies on “Zotac launches ZBOX R series mini-PCs with support for RAID configurations”

  1. Pretty good specs, but I’m waiting for something like this with 4x hdd bays. Essentially, I want a NUC-style PC built inside a NAS-like enclosure.

    1. It will probably have to be twice as thick as this model, especially if you want hot swappable 2.5″ drive bays… 🙂

      1. I would expect it to be far thicker. Im thinking about 15cm tall at least

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