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.
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.
If it was cost effective maybe but I think this is a bit pricy
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.
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.
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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Exactly, it’s very small for a “NAS”, that’s the main advantage. Sub 1liter if my math is right.
You didn’t count the cost of size and environmental damage.
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.
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.
Well yes but it is a NAS not a homelab right?
Again, not necessarily. I have something very similar I use as a server.
ZFS needs a lot of ram
For those zettabyte SSDs 😁 ?
I don’t know what it is except the acronym, why whould someone use ZFS?
ZFS is powerful for reliability and data protection. It is designed to hold lots of data and to tolerate hardware failures. One key aspect of ZFS is that it caches data in ram for reads so having lots of ram speeds up read performance.
Thanks!
Yeah, my NAS uses 3GB out of my 16GB total. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it use more than 5GB.
RemindMe 10 years
You are probably right, mine is from 2013 😰
I was recently told that 16GB wasn’t much for ZFS…
Maybe it isn’t bad if you have good SSDs
If it’s less than $200, it might be worth it. Doubtful though.
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Curious what pricing will be like. I use a beelink as a router rn
Ihope for it to be somewhere in the $200-250 range. Everything above kinda makes it unattractive when the Flashstor 6 exists.
Thanks for posting. Would like to use this for multiple reasons.
This would be perfect if I could fit 24th NVMe devices in this, but not looking to pay more then ~300-350 CAD in a device with no hdd/ssd
How much do you expect to pay for the 24 NVMe disks?
Probably $3.5 tops
Bout Tree fiddy?
