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this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2025
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Just in case the only thing you're looking for is the price, I'll save you a click.
Beelink hasn’t announced how much the ME mini will cost or when it will be available for purcahse yet.
Thank you
No prob. My comment was from two week ago.
There is an update on the site:
Update: The Beelink ME mini is priced at 1295 CNY in China, which is about $177 at the current exchange rate. It’s likely to cost a bit more outside of China. A number of performance testing, unboxing & teardown, and other articles are also available at Chinese shopping & product recommendation site smzdm.
But Beelink released the product with the same specs except this one has a N150 instead of a N200.
Beelink ME mini 6-Slot Home Storage NAS Mini PC Intel® Twin Lake N150
Price Currently:
12GB LPDDR5+64EMMC+2TB Crucial SSD - $329 ~~$400~~
12GB LPDDR5+64EMMC+4TB (2TB*2) Crucial SSD - $429 ~~$529~~ Currently not available.
I don't think this is a new productvso maybe they are just getting rid of their N150 stock. The one in China has an N200.
The hero we need
The ME mini features 12GB of LPDDR5-4800 memory, which means the RAM will be soldered to the mainboard and not user upgradeable.
Aaaaand I'm out.
Edit: Hijacking my own comment to update the update
Update: The Beelink ME mini is priced at 1295 CNY in China, which is about $177 at the current exchange rate. It’s likely to cost a bit more outside of China.
Yeah that's just so dumb. Also, i wouldn't be comfortable with the OS on eMMC storage. That's hardly known for reliability. So close and yet so far.
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Solderer ram is slightly more power efficient. And this is probably a laptop board.
That said, 12gb is slightly too low for my liking. Though an N200 CPU does not have much headroom to upgrade for anyway.
Solderer ram is slightly more power efficient.
That may be true but I don't really care either way.
And this is probably a laptop board.
Pretty sure a laptop board would not fit in this thing. It's most definitely a dedicated board for this machine.
Though an N200 CPU does not have much headroom to upgrade for anyway.
You can use at least 32GB.
not to mention there are 48 and 64gb dimms out now too that work with basically all alder lake atoms
Eh, 12GB is plenty for me. I'm currently using ~3GB out of 16GB, so I'm nowhere close to that cap. My NAS really doesn't do much.
I mean, that's fine if that works for you, but consider more than just your current situation. If you ever wanted to upgrade it or it ever failed sometime in the future, you'd be boned. Personally I have had RAM fail and it cost me about $8 and 10 minutes to repair, rather than several hundred dollars replacing the entire machine.
Sure. I just don't see myself needing more than 8GB RAM, especially w/ fast NVMe drives as swap. It's a simple NAS running Jellyfin (max 1-2 clients) and a handful of other services.
If I need more RAM, chances are I'll also need more CPU as well, in which case a larger upgrade is in order. If I truly only need more RAM, I could pretty easily move some services to an SBC like a Raspberry Pi.
It's certainly a bummer, but not a deal breaker. If the price is right and I can find inexpensive enough NVMe drives, I can compromise a bit on RAM.
especially w/ fast NVMe drives as swap
These won't be fast, as detailed in the OP:
Since Intel’s Alder Lake-N processors only have 9 PCIe lanes which have to be shared between the SSDs and other hardware, the M.2 slots include five PCIe 3.0 single-lane connections, and one PCIe 3.0 x2 connection
PCIe 3.0 is 1 GB/s per lane. So nothing life changing, but still reasonably fast (way faster a HDD). If you rarely need swap, you should be fine for the few times you do.
Fair enough, mate. Good luck.
Hmm. Let’s say I add 6 SSDs, 2TB each, for a total of 600€. In a RAID6 configuration, that gives me 8TB of storage. Compare that to a classical NAS with 2×8 TB HDDs for a total of 350€.
The HDDs will draw around 4W idle each, 8W in total. Assuming 0.3€/kWh, over a span of 5 years, that is approximately 100€. The power consumption of the SSDs will be negligible.
So, just in terms of storage, the SSD solution is around 33% more expensive over 5 years. If you include the cost of the NAS itself, the price increment is even less noticeable.
HDDs will draw around 4W idle each, 8W in total
Whether your drives are idle is also a very use-case specific thing and I wouldn't spend any time trying to generalize based on that math as a "oh this is how it works for everyone".
In my case, I've got 5 drives all spun up at all times because of torrrent clients, Jellyfin users, and just general media acquisition and public content serving.
This thing would dramatically reduce my power footprint and save me giant buckets of money over it's lifespan while being smaller/faster IO performance/lower noise.
(My current nas sucks down about 120-140w 24/7, so....)
My current nas sucks down about 120-140w 24/7, so…
Ouch. I'm around 50W, and my HW isn't anything special: Ryzen 1700 + 2 HDDs + 1 SSD.
Yeah it's the drives and the controller for all the drives that are making the power usage what it is. I could replace some of the older drives with a newer one and be able to ditch the smaller drives and controllers, but it seems a waste to do that until they die.
Also, I wouldn't mind ditching for a Sufficient(TM) amount of nvme storage, but SSDs aren't actually getting cheaper and are probably going to do the opposite, so I'll likely end up doing uh, nothing,
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But that is neglecting the performance aspect.
Something like this can be very good for offloading large amounts of data onto a parity backed array either to be moved to a proper long term storage solution later or to be actively worked.
High resolution / bitrate footage comes to mind, where you may be offloading multiple cameras at once and need high write performance.
It's pretty unlikely that SSDs will have price parity with spinning rust anytime soon, but the value in them has always been performance.
Yes, absolutely. Right now, SSDs are probably superior in comparison to HDDs in every category except for price (and long-term data integrity when switched off). But when you consider large parity raids and take into account the cost of electricity, even the price difference might only be small, making SSDs even more attractive.
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Are people really doing NAS with SSD? Not just for cache?
If you live in a small place and dont have massive storage needs, it can make sense for the sake of the quietness.
This. I can't afford reliable always-on storage now, but I plan to build for SSDs rather than HDDs because I don't have a separate room to put it into.
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I have a long-term dream to build a fanless SSD-powered NAS
Self-hosted, silent, fast - what's not to love, aside from steep price tag?
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Yes, for purposes of noise, size, speed and power efficiency
More reliable, less power draw than HDDs, faster and far more space efficient.
Unless you are data hoarding random torrents, 6 to 12 TB is plenty.
More reliable
Heavily depends. If you want to use it as long-term cold storage you absolutely should not use SSDs, they're losing data when left unpowered for too long. While HDDs are also not perfect in retaining data forever, they won't fail as quickly when left on a shelf.
Good and true point, but arguably most NASs are built to be used, not to be not-used…
Well, they arguably can also be used as one big long-term storage. Not sure who'd need to save so much data for a long time, but there surely will be at least some people who do and buy the "modern solution" over old HDDs thinking they're better in general. As the "family backup" for example, or as cold storage solution in faculties that can be quickly accessed if needed.
Read somewhere about a professor who used SSDs to "permanently" store important data on SSDs (perhaps in the comments of the article above) for a few years. Well, wasn't that permanent…
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I did, because of energy efficiency and quietness. But also I heavily compromised on the amount of space.
Yep. Smaller, more energy efficient (extremes expensive electricity here, over 1€/kW at peak time summers), and more temperature resiliant (had to shut the rust based nas down in peak summer months as it could not keep drives cool enough with 3k rpm ippc fans)
11x 4tb drives in mine. Raidz3. Paired with a Xeon and 64gb of ram. All in a 5L case.
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I was just thinking "bah ssd, that'll be expensive" but a quick search on Amazon suggests prices have dropped quite a bit.
12Gb soldered on memory though. That's a shame.
That's quite the RAM for a NAS, no? I think mine has 512MB.
With a SOC like that, that no way will only serve as a NAS, i can see my self easily hosting a dozen container on it and a couple VMs. That said, 12Gb is quite sufficient for my need.
Sure, but then you're looking not for a NAS but more for a minilab right? Personally I just split it in 2, one ol' trustworthy NAS and then some thinkcentre tiny to mess with.
Using a machine like this just as a NAS is a bit of waste. It's a full blown PC that would work very nicely as a home server for Jellyfin etc. The RAM will limit the utility, though.
Depends on your usecase. This could very well be more than just a NAS.
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I wish I could find something like this (low power kinda thing) that could take like 40 sata ssds.
I have a whole stack of 500 GB ssds from a datacenter decommission that I've been sitting on.
The 2TB units found their way into my ceph cluster... but those machines are live vms... A smaller little guy that can stack all these 500 gb would be nice to give to my cousin or something and use as offsite backup.
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Curious what pricing will be like. I use a beelink as a router rn
I hope for it to be somewhere in the $200-250 range. Everything above kinda makes it unattractive when the Flashstor 6 exists.
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