Beelink ME Pro: No Business Being This Capable

13:45

Beelink ME Pro: No Business Being This Capable

Techno Tim 09.02.2026 73 563 просмотров 1 953 лайков

Machine-readable: Markdown · JSON API · Site index

Смотреть на YouTube

Поделиться Telegram VK Бот

Транскрипт Скачать .md

Анализ с AI

Описание видео

I took the Beelink ME Pro and tested it the way I’d actually use a small NAS/homelab box: 2× SATA drives for bulk storage, plus 3× NVMe (boot + fast app pool). Then I built pools, set up SMB shares, tested real file transfers on 2.5G vs 5G, and finished with apps + Plex to see what the hardware can really do. Beelink ME Pro: https://amzn.to/4tJMH8O (affiliate link) Beelink ME Pro: https://www.bee-link.com/products/beelink-me-pro (non-affiliate link) ME Pro was sent to be for testing. Video Notes: https://technotim.com/posts/beelink-me-pro/ Merch Shop 🛍️: https://l.technotim.com/shop Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/technotim Sponsor me on GitHub: https://github.com/sponsors/timothystewart6 Subscribe on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/technotim Become a YouTube member: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOk-gHyjcWZNj3Br4oxwh0A/join Gear Recommendations: https://l.technotim.com/gear Get Help in Our Discord Community: https://l.technotim.com/discord 2nd channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Technically-Tim (Affiliate links may be included in this description. I may receive a small commission at no cost to you.) 00:00 Intro - Why This Tiny NAS Is Interesting 01:03 Quick Tour - Ports, Networking, and Layout 02:12 Power - Brick and Draw 02:25 Inside Tour - Drive Trays and Heat Management 03:34 Installing Drives - NVMe + SATA Bays 04:20 Cooling - Blower 04:33 Modular - Swappable Boards? 04:50 First Boot - Windows + Firmware Updates + Network Setup 05:35 Installing TrueNAS - Ventoy Issue + Etcher Fix 06:00 Networking - 5GbE Link and VLAN 06:27 Storage Pools - Slow HDD Mirror + Fast NVMe Mirror + Power Draw 07:24 SMB Shares - Permissions + Datasets 07:36 Transfer Test - HDD Mirror Speed (2.5G Reality) 08:21 Transfer Test - NVMe Mirror Speed (5G Test) 09:02 Reporting - Temps, Disks, Network, ARC 09:42 Apps Pool - Putting Apps on NVMe 09:53 Plex Setup - Mounts + Permissions 10:05 Plex Test - Hardware Transcoding + intel_gpu_top 10:47 App Stress Test - Installing Popular Apps 11:05 Metrics Check - CPU/RAM Under Load 11:17 Plex Re-Test - Multi-Transcode Under Load 11:31 Conclusion - Where It Fits Under $400 Thank you for watching!

Оглавление (22 сегментов)

Intro - Why This Tiny NAS Is Interesting

This is the Beelink ME Pro, a tiny little NAS. It's compact, it's easy to work on, and the build quality feels really well thought out. Simple fasteners, a clean internal layout, a removable tray, and it's clearly designed for people who actually plan to open it up and work on it. Every piece of this feels well thought out, down to the thermal pads for the drives themselves. The other big reason this thing is interesting is power efficiency. It's the kind of hardware you can realistically run 24/7 without feeling like you're powering a space heater. It's quiet, low power, and capable still enough to be a legit home NAS. I tested a previous Beelink ME Mini before, and what made that interesting was the all NVMe storage. It's a little odd for a traditional NAS, but it's perfect for low latency stuff. More like a low-power Proxmox box running LXC containers. So coming into the ME Pro, it seems more purpose-built to be a NAS. I'm going to set it up and test it the way I think that most people will actually use it, then we'll see what it's actually capable of. The version that Beelink sent to me for testing has an

Quick Tour - Ports, Networking, and Layout

Intel N95, 4 core, 4 thread, up to 3. 4 GHz, 12 GB of LPDDR5 that's soldered on, and a 512 GB SSD for the system drive. There are other configs with more RAM and more storage and even an N150, but this is the one they sent for testing. The first thing I noticed is how compact it is. It's about as small as a two bay NAS can realistically be. It's also mostly metal, which I think is awesome, because it turns the whole chassis into one big heat spreader. The front has this fabric-like mesh panel, kind of like a HomePod. I'm not sure what the material is, but it's some kind of durable cloth. I do wish that the front was a little cleaner without the branding, but that's just a personal preference. On the front we've got USB-C and the power button, and on the back we've got 2. 5 gig ethernet which is an intel NIC and then a 5 gigabit ethernet NIC which is a real tech NIC we've got HDMI a couple of usb ports another USB-C that can drive display and a 3. 5 millimeter audio jack plus it has wi-fi 6 and bluetooth 5. 4 unlike the me mini this one

Power - Brick and Draw

is actually powered by an external dc brick and the brick is actually pretty small as far as power draw goes, with just the included NVMe installed and sitting idle, I saw around 15 watts of power. Once you start opening it up, you notice smart engineering right away, like the magnetic mesh

Inside Tour - Drive Trays and Heat Management

vent cover on the top that just pops off for quick access to the hard drives. It's hard to capture this on camera, but the precision of that cover is really, really nice. Taking it apart is honestly pretty fun. The case uses hex fasteners and Beelink includes the tool that you need stored underneath the unit, so you don't have to go hunting around for some random tool when you need to take this apart. When you pull the drive trays out, they include drive screws and rubber bumpers to dampen the vibration and the noise. They also have these thermal pads on the trays so the drives can transfer the heat into the metal case. And they include one extra screw. I love that because I'm always one screw short or I lose one, and it costs basically nothing for manufacturers to include a spare screw. Either that or I missed one. At first I couldn't find the NVMe slots. I assumed they'd be accessible by pulling the board or the tray, but nope. They're accessed from the bottom of the device. You pull off the silicone holder where the tool is, remove a few screws, and inside you've got the NVMe slots. My unit shipped with just one NVMe installed already, and the other two

Installing Drives - NVMe + SATA Bays

were empty slots. So I decided to install two WD Black SN8100 NVMe drives which are way overkill for this device. Another nice detail is that the thermal pads are already in place. One thing to note about the NVMe slots is that the layout is one PCIe 3. 0 x2 slots and two PCIe 3. 0 x1 slots. So even if you install newer gen 4 or gen 5 drives it's still going to run at PCIe 3. 0. But in practice, that's plenty. Roughly 1GB/s on x1 and around 2GB/s on x2, which is way more than enough to saturate 2. 5Gb or even 5Gb ethernet. Cooling wise, there's a single blower-style fan

Cooling - Blower

that pulls air in from the bottom, blows it over the CPU, then blows it by the hard drives, and then exhausts it out the back. It's a pretty cool design and it's actually really quiet. Also, yes, if you got that earlier, the board and tray assembly actually slide out. Beelink claims

Modular - Swappable Boards?

that this is a modular approach and they're going to offer AMD and even ARM devices in the future. We'll see if that actually happens, but it's a really cool idea. So after assembly, I powered it on and it was really quiet. Mostly just the drives and maybe

First Boot - Windows + Firmware Updates + Network Setup

a little bit of fan. Before I plugged it into my network, I booted it up, took a look at the BIOS, and confirmed everything was recognized. It shipped with Windows Home which was a surprise to me and another surprise is that it ran Windows, well, "pretty OK". Not amazing but "pretty OK". I booted up and confirmed that all the hardware was detected then I decided to update the firmware on the WD and NVMe drives I installed. The firmware tool required internet access so I put the device on my guest VLAN that had internet only, downloaded the firmware updater, updated both drives, and then shut it back down. Now it's time for something other than Windows. I decided to install a proper NAS OS and went with TrueNAS SCALE, and yeah something like

Installing TrueNAS - Ventoy Issue + Etcher Fix

Unraid would probably work fine too. The install was a little bit bumpy at first because my Ventoy stick was running an old version of Ventoy and I couldn't easily update it on my Mac. So instead of fighting it, I flashed it with a fresh USB installer using Etcher and installed TrueNAS SCALE 25. 10, the latest version, and it booted right up. Since this machine has both 2. 5 gigabit ethernet and 5 gigabit ethernet, I wanted to run it

Networking - 5GbE Link and VLAN

at 5 gigabits per second. My desk switch is only 2. 5 gigabits, so I plugged it into my USW Pro XG 8 PoE switch and it negotiated 5 gigabits right away. Pretty much my only 5 gigabit device on the network. So now that I trust the OS, I moved it onto the right VLAN and it showed up on my Switch as TrueNAS Mini. Once I was on TrueNAS, I cleaned things up and created pools.

Storage Pools - Slow HDD Mirror + Fast NVMe Mirror + Power Draw

The boot pool is the single NVMe drive that shipped with it. It's kind of huge for a boot drive, but it's simple and fast. Next I created a pool called slow, which was two 8TB Seagate Ironwolf drives in a mirror with encryption enabled. No log, no spare, no cache, no dedupe. In a mirror, the usable capacity is one of the drives, which is 8TB, but I have the added benefit that if one of the drives die, I'm still good. Then I created a pool called fast for the apps. The two WD Black NVMe drives in a mirror with encryption enabled. So now we've got "fast", which is an NVMe mirror for apps and containers, and "slow", which is a hard drive mirror for bulk storage. With all of the hardware now installed, one NVMe for the system, two NVMe drives for fast storage and two hard drives for slow storage, I took a quick power reading. At idle, it was drawing about 35 watts. Next, I set up SMB shares because I wanted to test both network and disk

SMB Shares - Permissions + Datasets

performance. I created a data set on the slow pool called movies, shared it over SMB, and configured ACLs so I could read and write to it. I wanted a real world test, so I copied some of my movie

Transfer Test - HDD Mirror Speed (2.5G Reality)

backup files over SMB, and yes, I own all of these movies. I started transferring files to the slow movie share. In btop, I was seeing around 239 megabytes upload, around 1. 9 gigabits per second, with peaks around 2. 97 gigabits per second. For reference, the Seagate Ironwolf drive is only spec'd to do around 200 megabytes per second, so this is probably a mix of buffering and how btop averages the samples over time. The important thing to note is that a mirror really just looks like a single drive in terms of speed. So for most people on 2. 5 gigabit ethernet, this already gets you pretty close to maxing out your network. You just won't see 5 gigabit ethernet speeds on spinning disks. Then I repeated the same test but on the fast pool, which is all NVMe. I created another

Transfer Test - NVMe Mirror Speed (5G Test)

data set called movies on the fast pool and shared it as fast movies. I set ACLs so my media user had read and write access, and then I copied the same set of movies and watched the throughput. In btop, I was seeing spikes up to about 4. 15 gigabits per second with peaks around 4. 19 gigabits per second, but it wasn't flat. It would dip down to sometimes as low as 1. 9 gigabits per second, depending on what part of the file copy it was on. So it's not maxing out and sustaining at 5 gigabits per second, but it's definitely fast and way beyond what spinning disks can do. I jumped into reporting just to validate what I was seeing. CPU temp went up slightly during

Reporting - Temps, Disks, Network, ARC

transfers. Disk graphs clearly showed the difference between NVMe activity and hard drive activity. The network graphs showed the hard drive testing hovering at around 2 to 2. 5 gigabit range, and the NVMe getting close to 5 gigabits. Then I checked the ZFS ARC stats. ARC grew from around 7 gigabytes to about 9 gigabytes during activity. And a quick note, sometimes I hear people complain that ZFS uses too much RAM, but that's kind of the point. ARC is cache. If the system has free memory, ZFS will use it to cache reads and make things feel faster. Unused RAM is basically wasted RAM. Now that I know that the fast pool is actually fast, I wanted to use it for what it's probably

Apps Pool - Putting Apps on NVMe

best at: containers. So I set the apps pool to fast and started installing apps. First app: Plex.

Plex Setup - Mounts + Permissions

I refreshed the catalog, installed Plex, enabled hardware related options, and mounted my movie library from the slow pool. I claimed the Plex server and named it TrueNAS Mini. Once Plex was

Plex Test - Hardware Transcoding + intel_gpu_top

working, I tested transcoding because I think that's where this Intel N-Series really shines. The N-Series CPUs include an iGPU with QuickSync, which is a small but efficient way to transcode your videos, especially on the fly. I tested transcoding with 4K movies down to various resolutions and bit rates. I was able to max out at around 5 simultaneous 4K transcodes, and that number will vary for you depending on the codec, bitrate, HDR, and subtitles. Plex said that hardware transcoding was active, but I wanted to prove it at the system level, so I ran Intel GPU top. You could see the GPU engine usage, confirming it was using the iGPU instead of hammering this little tiny CPU. Next I installed a bunch of the most popular apps

App Stress Test - Installing Popular Apps

and this isn't a perfect performance test because many of these apps are sitting on idle, but it does show you the install speed and how the system starts to feel once you start stacking on a bunch of apps. The NVMe pool makes installing and launching apps feel very snappy. With all of that running, I could see the CPU getting closer to its limits.

Metrics Check - CPU/RAM Under Load

Temps warmed up, the CPU usage climbed, and memory got pretty tight. Now services were using a big chunk of RAM, leaving less headroom for ARC. Then I turned Plex back on and ran the multi-transcode

Plex Re-Test - Multi-Transcode Under Load

test again while watching the system stats. Now, five 4K transcodes probably isn't realistic for most people, but it's a great stress test. And this little NAS handled it just fine.

Conclusion - Where It Fits Under $400

Alright, after all of that testing, I have a pretty good feel for this NAS now, so let's talk price and where this thing fits in. The sub $400 NAS market is crowded right now, and that really matters for pricing. The lowest end ME Pro configuration has been on sale for around $369. And in a market like this, it's hard to push up much higher without running into a bunch of solid Synology and QNAP style boxes and other budget NAS options. One thing I will say though is that I think Beelink has too many variations of this device. Personally, I'd love to see a simpler lineup. Just one solid N100 skew, maybe even bare bones, and then a 4-bay version down the road. And based on what I've been seeing on their YouTube, it looks like a 4-bay might actually be in the works. Now what I like about this little thing is the engineering and design that went into this. It's tiny, it's quiet, mostly metal, so the chassis feels like one big heatsink. And it's open in the practical sense, it's easy to get into and easy to service, and you're not boxed into one ecosystem. Run TrueNAS, run Proxmox, run Unraid, whatever you want. The other big differentiator in this price range is the hardware layout. You get dual networking, 2. 5 and 5 gigabit, plus multiple NVMe slots alongside the two SATA bays, and it actually comes with LPDDR5 memory out of the box. Most boxes under $400 are either appliance first, with a great UI and ecosystem but less flexible, or budget hardware first, usually capped at 2. 5 gigabit with fewer high-speed expansion options. or bare-bone systems where you still have to add your own RAM and your system drive. So if what you want is a simple appliance that just works, you might value a traditional NAS ecosystem more. But if you like the idea of a tiny, quiet, efficient box that can do NAS stuff and feels right at home running containers on fast storage, the ME Pro makes a pretty good case for itself. Either way, this was fun to test and now you just have to decide what matters more for your money: an appliance for simplicity or hardware for flexibility? Let me know in the comments what you think. Well, I hope you enjoyed this video. I'm Tim, thanks for watching (ASL).

Другие видео автора — Techno Tim

Ctrl+V

Экстракт Знаний в Telegram

Экстракты и дистилляты из лучших YouTube-каналов — сразу после публикации.

Подписаться

Лучшие методички за неделю — каждый понедельник