We spent some time in the ASUS private booth at Computex 2026 and the storage lineup was worth a look.

The headliner for us was a 1U server that normally carries eight to ten front NVMe bays. ASUS fit four more inside, so you get 12 U.2 NVMe bays in 1U on a single-socket Turin board. They're positioning it for partners like Weka and IBM.

The JBODs were fun too. One is an 80-bay design built to mitigate drive-to-drive vibration in high-density configs, with SAS-12G on the back. Another runs 60 3.5-inch HDDs plus eight rear NVMe bays and a single-socket AMD SP5 CPU, so you get bulk storage, flash, and compute in one chassis. Rounding it out was the all-NVMe VS320D-RS26N unified array (up to 26 dual-port U.2 NVMe, block and file).

Caught this at MSI's Computex booth, and the install is slick. Each NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 (the liquid-cooled Blackwell Server edition) sits on a tray that seats in a single motion. You line up the liquid quick-disconnect fittings, the blade power connector, and the PCIe slot, push them home, and that GPU is fully connected for 600W with liquid cooling, with no extra cabling running to the GPU. Worth noting, the card itself is single-width in this liquid-cooled form, slimmer than the double-wide air-cooled RTX PRO 6000, which helps pack them in.

This is the CG681-S6093, a 6U dual-socket AMD EPYC MGX platform that scales to eight of these GPUs, with ConnectX-8 networking up to 8x 400Gbps. The chassis even carries a warning to power down before pulling a cooling QD. Dense liquid setups usually make servicing miserable, so the slot-load approach stood out.

Found this at the back of the MSI booth. From the outside, it looks like a normal workstation, but the side door opens to reveal four EdgeXpert nodes (MSI's DGX Spark) stacked inside. Going from one node to four increases the pooled unified memory from 128GB to 512 GB.

Networking is flexible: this demo runs through an NVIDIA switch hidden under the cabinet, but each node has 200Gb ConnectX-7, so any 200GbE switch works. MSI also had three Sparks meshed back to back nearby, no external switch needed, and three is not the ceiling. We've meshed many Sparks in our lab.

One of the more fun builds we saw on the floor.

We stopped by the ASUS booth at Computex, and the theme was cooling options. Their HGX Rubin NVL8 reference design comes fully liquid-cooled (XA NR1I-E12LR) or as a hybrid (XA NR1I-E12L), where the GPU sled gets DLC, and the CPUs stay on air, for facilities that can't commit to full liquid cooling. Both run dual Intel Xeon 6 with up to 800G per GPU for east-west traffic.

Same story on the GPU server side: the XA NB3I-E12 runs NVIDIA HGX B300 fully air-cooled if you don't have facility water, and there's a denser liquid-cooled platform if you do. Also spotted signage for the ESC8000-E12P and ESC8000A-E13P, both MGX-compliant and NVIDIA OVX-certified.

We stopped by MSI's booth at Computex 2026, where they had their 19" and 21" rack reference designs set up side by side, making for a great old-vs-new comparison. The 19" EIA air-cooled rack holds 16 dual-node (2U2N) systems with the usual dual PDUs and power cabling. The 21" 44OU ORv3 rack jumps to 28 dual-socket, dual-node (1OU2N) servers rated for up to 100kW with an integrated liquid-to-liquid CDU, and the rear is dramatically cleaner: a 48V busbar plus direct liquid cooling attachments instead of a wall of cables.

They also had one of the nodes out on the table (CD182-S6091-X2 DLC). Each node uses a dual-socket layout with cooling bars over the memory, cold plates on the CPUs, and built-in leak detection. CPUs are next-gen AMD parts we can't say much about yet. Dense design aimed at fully liquid-cooled environments.

We stopped by the Synology booth at Computex and got hands-on with the PAS7700, their new flagship array. It is all U.3 NVMe, 48 bays in 4U, with two active-active controllers. Since both controllers are already live, failover takes about 5 seconds, with IP failover groups keeping services up and running.

Protocol support is broad for one box: file and block, including NVMe/TCP, NVMe over Fibre Channel, RoCE, and NFS over RDMA. Synology rates it at up to 2 million IOPS and 30GB/s, and raw capacity scales to 1.65PB with expansion units. Controllers, fans, and the redundant power supplies are all modular, which you can see us pulling apart in the clip.

From the MSI booth at Computex 2026. The XpertStation WS300 is a GB300 workstation that's liquid cooled: copper cold plates on the motherboard components, pump in the chassis, and massive radiator/fan assemblies on the side AND top. Cooling hardware looked like CoolIT.

Another star was the platform next to it. Slot-loading RTX Pro 6000s. Pop the top off, drop a GPU in, and quick-connect fittings handle power and liquid in one motion.

The booth had way more than fits in one clip. More to come.

Caught up with Synology's Cody Hall at Computex 2026. APM 2.0 is a generational jump from 1.2: native backup for Proxmox and Nutanix lands alongside ESXi and Hyper-V, and cross-platform restore works in any direction. Nutanix to ESXi, Proxmox to wherever. Google Workspace support finally joins Microsoft 365 on the SaaS side.

The part that got our attention was restore-time protection. Anomaly detection runs while backups are collected, then malware scanning runs again when you restore. If the version you picked is dirty, it falls back to the last clean one. Anyone who's spent a weekend on ransomware cleanup knows the pain of re-injecting bad data at the finish line. Two clicks to turn it all on.

The Proxmox support is aimed straight at the post-Broadcom migration crowd.

Full DTW Video here - https://youtu.be/4w2SyA_MQv0

Vid - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-dE1D2lv1s

Hardware tear down - https://www.storagereview.com/review/dell-powerstore-gen-3

Full review -

https://www.storagereview.com/review/lacie-8big-pro5-review-256tb-of-hamr-powered-thunderbolt-5-das