Introduction
This all started with my hunt for a fast, SSD-capable NAS that wouldn’t break the bank. My existing NAS — a traditional HDD-based setup — is over five years old and only supports 1 GbE networking, not 2.5 GbE. While it works fine for backups, I wanted something faster for active cache and high-speed access.
After hours of Google searches, YouTube reviews, and spec comparisons, I stumbled upon the Beelink ME Mini. The specs looked great:
- Six NVMe slots with a massive heatsink
- Compact form factor
- Minimal desk footprint
The pictures looked promising, but in person… this thing is tiny.
The First Hurdle — Ordering One
Here’s where my first issue began — availability.
It wasn’t on Amazon (at least, not in the configuration I wanted) or other common online stores. The only real option was to pre-order directly from Beelink’s website.
Amazon listings did exist, but they were pre-populated with 2×1 TB drives, which wasn’t for me. I had my sights set on filling all six slots with 4 TB drives right from the start.
The Beelink site stated: Ships within 30 days of order.
Mine shipped a bit early — about two days ahead of the 30-day mark — from California.
First Impressions
When it arrived, I was blown away by the size. I own a couple of mini PCs, but this one is small. It fits easily on a desk without looking bulky.
Installing the NVMe drives, however, revealed an odd design choice: you have to remove the four rubber feet to access the screws. No extras are included. This is a bit annoying for a device marketed toward tinkerers, but after waiting a month, I wasn’t about to complain… yet.
Prepping for the Install
I used Ventoy to prepare my boot drive with all the ISOs I needed. Looking back, this was a good decision — otherwise, I would have wasted hours creating multiple separate bootable USBs.
The Beelink comes with Windows preinstalled, but with its relatively low-powered CPU, it’s sluggish out of the box. It insisted on going through the entire Windows setup process, and attempts to skip it or boot straight into USB failed.
Eventually, I forced my way into the BIOS, disabled all other boot devices except USB, and restarted.
The First Real Roadblock
With Ventoy loaded, I selected the TrueNAS Scale 25.04.2.1 installer.
A few minutes into the installation, I hit this error:
failed to find partition number 2 on mmcblk0
At first, I didn’t panic. This was my first time using Ventoy, and I had only heard about it from a few YouTube videos. My immediate thought was: Okay, maybe Ventoy is the issue.
Was it the ISO?
Was it the Beelink?
Or was it my boot method?
Naturally, I didn’t suspect the Beelink — it was brand new out of the box. But here’s the thing: the real culprit was, in fact, the Beelink ME Mini itself.
Digging for Answers
After seeing the error above, I did what any of us would do — I turned to Google and the TrueNAS community forums.
It turns out this error is fairly common when installing TrueNAS Core or Scale on systems with eMMC storage. The Beelink ME Mini ships with eMMC onboard, and that was the root of my problem.
The community’s advice was simple:
Don’t use the latest 25.04 version. Instead, install TrueNAS Scale 24.04, which works better with eMMC.
Original post: TrueNAS Community Forum
Easier said than done.
Finding the right version took some digging — I even downloaded the wrong ISO first, and that led to a different installation failure. But after tracking down the correct 24.04 release, I finally had a smooth installation.
Score one for Beelink — at least the system was now running TrueNAS Scale.
The Next Blow — Drive Failures
With TrueNAS Scale 24.04 finally installed, I decided to update it to the latest version. The update went through without a hitch, and for a brief moment, I thought my Beelink ME Mini journey had turned the corner.
That optimism didn’t last long.
As soon as I started creating my storage pool, read/write errors began flooding in. These weren’t minor warnings — they were serious enough to stop the pool creation process entirely.
I had bought my NVMe drives from Amazon and Best Buy, both on discount deals. They were supposedly brand new, but at that moment, I began to suspect I’d been scammed by an Amazon third-party seller.
A quick round of Googling — and even asking ChatGPT — confirmed that the type of errors I was seeing were indeed worrisome. Everything pointed toward the need to replace the drives.
But here’s the twist: the drives were, in fact, brand new with zero runtime.
The real problem became clear when I booted into SystemRescue (using my trusty Ventoy USB) to investigate further. Out of six NVMe drives, only three were being detected. The other three simply weren’t loading at all.
This narrowed my suspicion: it wasn’t the drives — it was something in the Beelink itself.
My first troubleshooting step?
Update the BIOS and disable any aggressive power-saving settings that might be putting the NVMe drives into low-power mode.
BIOS Update and Power Problems
Updating the BIOS was my first real attempt at fixing the missing-drive issue. I disabled aggressive power-saving features and restarted the system, hoping this would allow all six NVMe drives to spin up and stay online.
No luck.
The storage pool still refused to initialize due to persistent read/write errors. Since I had no data on the drives yet, I tried removing and recreating pools multiple times. I even went as far as performing factory resets and fresh OS installations — including reverting back to the original 24.04 release without any updates — just to see if the newer builds were the problem.
It wasn’t.
The errors persisted, and with every forced restart, at least one drive would be marked offline.
A Design Flaw in Disguise
Further research pointed to what I now consider a major design flaw:
The Beelink ME Mini ships with a 45W power supply, which is barely enough to power the CPU, eMMC storage, and all six NVMe drives simultaneously.
On the TrueNAS forums, one user suggested:
- Remove the NVMe in Slot 1 and only run five drives
- Disable CPU Turbo Boost
- Disable all VirtIO features
While disabling VirtIO didn’t bother me much, disabling Turbo Boost would significantly hurt performance — and I specifically bought this NAS for fast cache performance. If I was going to cripple it that badly, I might as well have stuck with a traditional NAS.
At this stage, I was ready to make compromises:
- Find another use for one NVMe drive
- Disable Wi-Fi and Bluetooth modules to free up power
- Redirect as much power as possible to the NVMe drives
I was this close to giving up on my original plan.
Exploring Other NAS OS Options
Before giving up completely, I planned to try replacing TrueNAS with other NAS operating systems to see if that would fix the issues:
- CasaOS
- OpenMediaVault (OMV)
- Unraid
- Proxmox
Each has its own pros and cons, but none were perfect fits for the Beelink ME Mini in my use case.
For example:
- Users have reported similar hardware compatibility issues with CasaOS and OpenMediaVault on this device.
- Unraid is known for ease of use but comes with a performance drawback — you generally get the speed of only one drive in the array, which defeats the purpose of running multiple NVMe drives as fast cache.
- Proxmox is a powerful virtualization platform, but it’s not really designed as a NAS OS. Running VMs or containers on the ME Mini’s limited Intel N150 CPU could easily overwhelm the system and cause instability.
So while these are great projects in their own right, none quite matched the performance and features I was looking for. TrueNAS remained the front-runner despite its challenges.
An Unexpected Breakthrough
Then, one comment in the TrueNAS forums stopped me in my tracks.
A user named pmh claimed he had successfully installed TrueNAS Core on the ME Mini’s eMMC storage and had been running it for 48+ hours with zero downtime.
I was stunned.
Here I was, struggling to even bring up a storage pool, and he was running a stable system.
Naturally, I had to try it.
And surprisingly — it worked.
No installation errors.
No issues creating pools.
No weird slowdowns or power-related glitches.
TrueNAS Core didn’t magically turn the ME Mini into a supercomputer — I still couldn’t expect to run multiple VMs or heavy Docker workloads with its Intel N150 CPU — but it did finally deliver what I bought it for: a fast, stable NAS for cache storage.
And after everything I’d gone through, I was more than happy to take that win.
The Lingering Concerns
While TrueNAS Core finally gave me a working NAS, it’s far from a perfect solution — and it comes with its own worries.
For one, iXsystems has already announced the end of active development for TrueNAS Core. They’ve encouraged all users to migrate to TrueNAS Scale, which is where new features and improvements are happening. Core will continue to receive security patches, but no major updates or new functionality.
As someone still relatively new to TrueNAS, I’m not certain whether the issues I faced with Scale were due to driver incompatibility with the Beelink hardware or the inherent power limitations of the ME Mini. Either way, I’m sure there are people out there with more experience who could benchmark this device and nail down the exact cause.
My bigger concern is security. On Core, the UI can only be accessed using the root account — a practice that’s generally considered risky, even for a home lab. This is another reason I’d prefer to be on Scale in the long term, as it supports more modern and flexible authentication options.
For now, I’ll keep running TrueNAS Core on the Beelink ME Mini — it’s stable, and it’s doing the job I bought it for. But my hope is that either Beelink or the TrueNAS community can resolve the Scale issues so I can migrate. That’s still my preferred OS for this system.
Key Takeaways
- The Beelink ME Mini is a powerful, compact device with six NVMe slots but has power supply limitations that can cause hardware instability.
- TrueNAS Scale 25.04 currently has issues with eMMC storage on this device; rolling back to 24.04 helped, but persistent drive errors remain a challenge.
- TrueNAS Core works more reliably on the ME Mini, but it’s no longer actively developed beyond security patches.
- Other NAS OS alternatives have their own drawbacks and compatibility problems on this hardware.
- Power management and BIOS settings are critical to getting all NVMe drives online.
- The ME Mini is suitable for a fast NAS cache but not for heavy virtualization workloads due to CPU and power constraints.
Conclusion
The Beelink ME Mini holds great promise as a compact, high-speed NAS device, but it comes with some growing pains. From availability challenges and installation quirks to frustrating hardware and power limitations, my journey has been a rollercoaster.
TrueNAS Core is my current solution, offering a stable NAS environment on this tiny powerhouse. But I’m still hoping for future updates and community support that will let me fully unlock the potential of TrueNAS Scale on this device.
If you’re considering the Beelink ME Mini for your NAS needs, I hope my experience saves you some headaches — and helps you make the best decision for your setup.
Image Credit:
Photo courtesy of Beelink
Top comments (2)
Thank you for this! I just purchased the ME mini and out of the gate started having issues, this covered (so far) all of the probs I'm running into and saved me immeasurable time and frustration, thank you thank you thank you! I owe you a couple of days, at least, friend!
I've just purchased mine, and is still to be shipped. For sure you saved me a lot of time and stress.
Let's hope is not a waste of money, and they fix these problems soon.