The never-ending need for storage in my office and home lab has meant I've built up a considerable stack of loud HDDs in a Synology unit over the years. But it's very noisy even at the best of times, and downright annoying when it decides to optimize things. I've always wanted a better solution inside my office that won't give me a headache, and this wonderful mini PC has given me the answer.

I've now been using this all-flash mini PC as my NAS for about a month, and I'm not going back to having noisy spinning drives in the room where I'm supposed to be productive. That larger unit is now banished to a closet several doors away, so I don't have to listen to it, but so it can handle backup duties for the devices in the house. But I'm keeping the all-SSD unit nearby because it's versatile enough to run my home lab on, while being so quiet I often don't realize it's powered on.

Sometimes a mini PC really surprises you

This miniature NAS has six M.2 slots to stuff with SSDs

I've been using the Beelink ME mini 6-slot Home Storage NAS mini PC for a few months now, mostly as an OPNsense router because the dual 2.5GbE NICs make it fantastic for that task. I only had a single 2TB SSD inside for most of that time, but I was always planning to get more to fill all the slots and use it as the NAS it was intended to be.

It's not as powerful as the mini PC I now use as a console replacement with my TV, but it doesn't need to be. The whole point of this particular Beelink model is the six M.2 slots for speedy storage, and that's how I'm using it now.

The slots might only be Gen 3 x1 but that's okay

Running two vdevs of three drives each is more than enough to saturate the 2.5GbE NICs

The Intel N150 that powers this little box of fun is fairly powerful, but it's lacking in PCIe lanes. While it has six M.2 slots for speedy NVMe SSDs, some compromises were made. The first slot is PCIe 3.0 x2, while the other five slots are PCIe 3.0 x1. You might be wondering why bother when NVMe can run at x4, and all these drives are PCIe 4.0.

Well, capacity is very much more important than speed for NAS use. I could technically put 48TB of SSD into this, although I've gone with a more sedate 12TB for now. The limiting factor for any NAS is usually the network speed, and with 2.5GbE NICs, even the first PCIe 3.0 x2 slot is technically enough to saturate the connection. With six drives set up in storage pools because of ZFS, it's more than enough to saturate even both of the 2.5GbE ports if I bonded them together.

The Crucial P310 2280 Gen 4 SSDs that I'm using are identical to the shorter version used for the Steam Deck, so I know their quality and will handle long-term storage well. That's backed up by a five-year warranty, and while they're DRAM-less, as long as I don't fill them to the brim, the QLC NAND will still perform well when read. Plus they're cheap, and I don't expect they're going to be written to that much, as the bulk of my storage is on a larger Synology model.

It's not just NAS storage I can use

Now, the operating system that the Beelink mini PC came with was fine, really. It handled file sharing and all the other things you'd expect from a NAS, but it was fairly basic. There is so much more that you can do with a mini PC, so the first thing I did was to put Proxmox on the eMMC partition, then add TrueNAS in as a VM. I prefer using it in a VM because once I've passed through the NVMe drives to TrueNAS, Proxmox can't see those drives anymore. That's important, because no matter what else I do in Proxmox with other VMs and LXCs, I can't mess up my NAS storage.

I could use TrueNAS to host more services as Docker containers, but I'm always a little wary of running services on the NAS OS, just in case I mess something critical up. But keeping some storage out just for Proxmox means I can install Technitium for DNS, OPNsense for routing, a couple of Linux VMs just in case I need to test something, and Docker to stuff any other containers into.

It gives me the best of both worlds; NAS data is easily accessible by anything attached to the network, including VMs and containers on the Proxmox host, while anything I do in Proxmox can't damage the NAS drives' data as they're not visible to the host, only if shared over the network.

My Synology has been banished to the closet

Where I mercifully can't hear it through the wall

Switching to an all-flash NAS hasn't really meant faster transfer speeds, because the six-drive array in my Synology NAS was plenty fast enough. But it has meant a blissful silence in my office, because SSDs don't make noise, the huge heatsink and tiny fan in the Beelink keeps everything cool quietly, and the Synology has been banished to the networking closet where it probably should have been already.

But it means that I can set up long-term backups using the 3-2-1 rule, replicating the smaller SSD NAS completely on the larger NAS, while also keeping crucial data backed up to cloud services for offsite retrieval. That's something that was sorely missing from my home office, and I'm glad I've gotten around to setting it up.

This all-flash NAS is superb

A few years ago I'd never have thought I could stuff 12TB of SSD into a tiny cube-shaped mini PC that I can easily palm. That it exists now, and is powerful enough to run multiple services alongside the NAS software is nothing short of amazing, and it makes me wonder what the next few years will bring. I've now switched all the devices in my office to all-flash storage, and it's so much quieter in here because of it. I am slightly worried about data longevity, which is why the Synology and its large HDDs are in the closet backing everything up, and I'll be keeping my eyes open for any sales where I can pick up replacement SSDs, because I know drives will fail eventually. But I won't go back to having noisy HDDs in the office, and I don't think anyone else should suffer either.