This Tiny NAS Changed How I Think About 2-Bay Storage

This is one of the smallest two bay NAS devices I've ever put on my bench, and immediately does something most of them don't. It feels serious. No creaky plastic trays, no toy-ike enclosures, no questionable components, just solid metal, proven hardware, and a design that feels both modern and classic at the same time, and honestly looks cool enough to live in just about any space. This is the Beink Mi Pro, a tiny fully modular NAS built around Intel's ultraefficient N series SOC with a drawer style mainboard that's potentially upgradeable. You'll get two traditional drive bays, three NVME slots, and support for basically any DIY NAS operating system you want to run. It's also the coolest and quietest NAS I've ever tested in this class, which already puts it in rip company. Stick around because once you start looking past the size, this little box starts challenging some very comfortable assumptions about what a tube bay NAS is supposed to be. >> Hey guys, CJ with Elevated Systems and this is the Mi Pro from Beink. It follows up and is an expansion of their Mi NAS lineup which started with the Mi Mini that I reviewed a few months back. That original system was compact and genuinely clever, but it leaned entirely on NVME storage. With the steady climb in NVMe prices, filling all six slots quickly turns into a very expensive setup. The Mi Pro takes a different approach. It trades the allNVME design for two full-size 3.5 in hard drive bays while still keeping three additional NVME slots for fast SSD expansion. The interesting part is that it manages to do all of this with barely an increase in physical size. So before getting into performance, power behavior, or how it behaves once it's fully loaded, I want to start at the beginning. Let's take a look at what Beink ships in the box and how this thing comes together during the initial setup. Beink complements the tiny footprint of the Mi Pro with equally minimal packaging. The NAS arrives in a simple cardboard box with foam end caps and a protective plastic wrap. At first glance, it looks like there's nothing else included in the box, and that's intentional. All the accessories are tucked away inside the drive trays. Once you remove the magnetically attached rear cover and use the included hex key that's stored on the bottom of the NAS, you can remove two screws per tray and slide them out. Inside, you'll find the 100 W wall wart style power supply, an HDMI cable, an Ethernet cable, and the drive mounting screws. The design gets even more interesting from there. By removing four additional screws, the entire mainboard assembly slides straight out of the chassis. It's a very efficient and genuinely innovative layout. And depending on how well this NAS sells, it opens the door to possible future upgrades. Beink has even hinted at the potential for AMD or ARMbased versions down the line. If you've been following the channel for a while, you know I'm a big fan of modular and upgradeable hardware. This is honestly what I imagine a NAS might look like if framework designed one, and it ends up being one of the standout features of the Mi Pro. The hardware on the mainboard itself is modest, efficient, and well matched to what the device is designed to do. The unit I'm testing is powered by Intel's Alderlake N95 SoC that gives you four 12th gen singlethreaded Grace mount efficiency cores with a base clock of 1.7 GHz and a boost clock up to 3.6 GHz. all within a 15watt TDP. The SOC also includes integrated Intel UHD graphics, which matters more than it might sound in an NAS. In this context, [music] the IGPU provides efficient hardware media encoding and decoding, making it useful for media servers and light transcoding workloads without placing unnecessary load on the CPU. This configuration includes 12 GB of LPDDR54800 memory soldered directly to the mainboard and a 512 GB WD NVME SSD which comes preloaded with Windows 11 Home. [snorts] Cooling is handled by an overbuilt vapor chamber CPU cooler paired with a blower style fan with air flow designed to pull cool air across both the NVME and hard drive bays before passing over the CPU. On the front of the device, external IO is clean and functional. You get an LED ring power button, a 5 gigabit USB typeA port, and a recessed reset and clear CMOS buttons. Around the back, there is a 3.5 millimeter audio jack, a fullfeatured USBC port with 10 GB data support and display port alt mode, two USB 2.0 type A ports, HDMI 2.0, both 5 GB and 2.5 GB Ethernet ports, and the DC power input. There's also a Wi-Fi 6 module installed on the internal back plane near the front of the device, though I won't be using wireless networking in this setup. All of that is packed into a chassis measuring just 166 mm deep, 120 mm wide, and 112 mm tall. Beyond the modular design, the overall build quality is another strong point. Beink generally doesn't cheap out on materials, even with their more budget friendly mini PCs, and the Mi Pro is no exception. The entire chassis is made from solid aluminum, including the drive trays. The rear panel uses a metal mesh design, and the front panel is wrapped in a highquality woven fabric with Beink's updated logo. It gives the device a clean, understated look, and as someone who owned a Marshall Minia back in the day, I can definitely appreciate the styling. The Nash [music] sits on rubber antiibration feet, and the drive trays include both rubber isolation gaskets and thermal pads for the drives PCBs. Because the trays are aluminum and mount directly to the aluminum frame, that design should help with both vibration control and heat dissipation. On the bottom of the device, a removable aluminum panel provides access to the three NVME SSD [music] slots. One is a PCI gen 3x2 slot that comes populated with the boot drive and the other two are PCI gen 3x1 slots. That lane configuration is a limitation of the N95, which only provides nine PCI lanes total. Blink lips support for NVME SSDs up to 4 terabytes per slot. And I populated the two gen 3x1 slots with 1 TB gen 3 NVME drives. Those gen 3x1 slots are more than sufficient for a system capped by 5 GB networking. There's no real benefit to installing higherend gen 4 gen 5 drives here. you'd just be overspending without gaining performance, and you'd be cutting into the systems overall 100 watt power budget for no practical return. For bulk storage, the Mi Pro supports two 3.5 in hard drives with Beck listing a maximum capacity of up to 30 terabytes per bay. At the time of filming, the N95 version of the Mi Pro is listed at $449. There's also an N150based version available for roughly $80 more. And I'll get into when that upgrade actually makes sense later when we talk about performance and conclusions. With my NVME drives installed and two WD Red 4 TBTE hard drives mounted in the trays, the system was ready to move on to operating system installation and the initial setup. The Mi Pro does ship with Windows 11 Home. And based purely on the specs and port selection, this is absolutely a fully capable mini PC. If you wanted to run it as a lower power Windows media PC, it can do that. You could even set it up with Windows Storage Spaces and use it as a basic network attached storage solution. That said, Windows 11 is very bloated for the N95 class system. My assumption is that Blink included it simply because they needed to ship the device with an operating system. From a hardware standpoint though, this platform makes a lot more sense as a lightweight storage focused server running a purpose-built NAS operating system. For testing, I actually installed two different NAS operating systems. I started with Zema OS, and to keep a long story short, it just wasn't as refined, featurerich, or userfriendly as I'd hoped at this point. The installation locks you into a single file system choice. The UI feels underdeveloped with limited access to system level settings, and I wasn't able to get SMB shares reliably accessible from clients on my home network. After spending time digging through forums and community feeds, it became clear that these weren't isolated problems. A lot of users are running into the same limitations around storage flexibility, UI depth, and file sharing reliability. Where Zema OS really lost me is when resolving basic Nash issues require dropping into the command line. That part doesn't bother me personally. I I have a master's degree in information systems and I'm comfortable working at the CLI when I need to. But the moment basic NAS functionality requires terminal level troubleshooting, it's fair to say the OS has drifted out of simple tube NAS for normal humans territory. At that point, I changed direction and went with the tried andrue option, pun fully intended, and installed TRAS Community Edition. I did a full TRNA installation and setup walkthrough in my Mi Mini video. And if you're planning to install Trunass on the Mi Pro, the process is almost identical. The main difference here is that the Mi Pro doesn't include an embedded eMMC drive. Because of that, I installed the OS directly onto the included 512 GB NVME SSD. Per the true NASA installation guide, I also disabled CSM support and secure boot in the UEFI before starting the install. When it comes to storage pool layout, there are a lot of valid ways to configure a system like this with two identical hard drives and two identical SSDs. You could build a single pool with two mirrored VDEs. You could run a hard drive pool with one or two NVMe drives as L2 ARC. You could use NVMe as Slog. There's no single correct answer here. I'm not going to try to tell you what the best option is. I'm just going to tell you exactly what I did because it directly impacts the testing. I built two separate pools, a ZFS mirror hard drive pool and a ZFS mirror NVME pool. That gives me 4 TB of mirrored bulk storage and 1 TBTE of mirrored high speed storage for fast shares and applications. Once again, keeping it simple, the true NAS installation and setup process was quick, clean, and error-free. Performance on the Mi Pro was just as solid as the hardware itself. And from this point forward, all testing is done using that [music] true NAS configuration. So to start, I ran Blackmagic disc speed test against both storage pools, the mirrored hard drive pool, and the mirrored SSD pool. Across multiple runs, the results were similar. Read and write speeds landed roughly between 430 and 490 megabytes per second on both pools. Now, at first glance, that might look odd, especially for the hard drive pool, but this test isn't measuring raw disc performance. What's really showing is a combination of ZFS caching behavior and network throughput. ZFS aggressively uses system memory as a read cache and blackmagic short sequential tests are extremely cache friendly. Once the data is warm in memory, reads are served largely from RAM and the 5 GB network link becomes the limiting factor. In real world condition, that ceiling sits right in this range. What this tells us is that both storage pools are fast enough to saturate the 5GB connection for short sequential workloads regardless of whether the underlying storage as SSDs or spinning discs. Things get more interesting once we move to workloads that actually reflect day-to-day NAS usage. For the extended transfer test, I copied roughly 355 files totaling about 48 GB. This kind of workload stresses the metadata handling, file creation, directory updates, and sustained IO. All [snorts] the things synthetic benchmarks [music] tend to gloss over. On the mirrored hard drive pool, once EFS and disc caches are exhausted, write speeds settled in at around 80 megabytes per second, while reads averaged about 175 megabytes per second. [music] That behavior is exactly what you expect from spinning discs in a ZFS mirror. Multifile rights are seek heavy and ZFS prioritizes data integrity over aggressive reordering or unsafe buffering. Every right has to be committed cleanly to both discs along with all associated metadata. Reads fare better because ZFS can balance read operations across both drives in the mirror, but writes are fundamentally limited by HDD seek latency. On the mirrored SSD pool, the picture improves noticeably. Writes averaged about 224 megabytes per second and reads climb backed up to roughly 446 megabytes per second. Once again, brushing right up against the limits of the 5GB connection with SSDs. [music] Seek penalties disappear and metadata operations are handled far more efficiently. Writes are still constrained by file system overhead and sustained IO behavior, but the pool is fast enough that reads can once again saturate the network once caching and read ahead come into play. The key point here is that short benchmarks and long transfers are testing very different things. Short sequential tests mostly tell you whether your network and memory subsystems are fast enough. Long multifile transfers tell you the truth about how your storage behave under load. In this case, the results line up exactly as they [music] should. The hard drive pool behaves like a healthy ZFS mirror under real world conditions and the SSD pools deliver meaningfully better sustained right performance and much stronger read performance. And in both cases, the system is capable of pushing the 5 GB link to [music] its practical limits when the workload allows it. Stepping back and looking at the system as a whole, this is a strong showing for the Intel N95 Mini NAS. Most importantly, the CPU and platform are not a bottleneck. The N95 keeps up with ZFS, SMB, and 5GB networking simultaneously without issue. What you're seeing in these results [music] is the storage doing exactly what it should and the network being pushed right to its ceiling. For a compact, low power NAS, that's exactly the outcome you want. Consistent behavior, honest performance characteristics, and no surprises once you've moved beyond synthetic benchmarks. Now, to look at overall system performance beyond raw storage and network benchmarks, I installed JellyFin and used it to stress the system with a range of real world media streaming scenarios. Starting with 4K direct playback, the experience was exactly what you'd expect on a modern Intel platform. Playback was smooth and responsive, and once the stream was established, the integrated GPU handled video processing efficiently. CPU usage dropped off almost entirely, which tells you everything you need to know about how well direct play workloads are handled here. For direct media play, the Intel N95 simply isn't a limiting factor. Things got more interesting once I introduced competing workloads. While a 4K direct stream was playing, I kicked off a large file transfer across the network. In that situation, the file transfer clearly took priority and the video stream dropped out. That behavior isn't surprising. Both operations are competing for the same network path. And TRNAS is doing exactly what it's designed to do, prioritizing sustained storage IO over best effort media delivery when everything is riding on a single interface. This is where the Mi Pros networking hardware becomes relevant. In addition to its 5 GB Ethernet port, the system also includes a second 2.5 GB nick. Trunass allows these interfaces to be placed on different network, which opens up the door to practical traffic separation. With the right setup, you can dedicate one interface to media streaming or general client access while reserving the faster link for bulk file transfers and backups. There isn't a single toggle in True NAS to bind individual services to a specific port. So, this kind of separation is handled through IP addressing and network design. It's a more advanced setup, but for anyone moving beyond turnkey NAS appliances, it's a good example of the kind of control and flexibility this platform offers. To test more typical multi-user scenarios, I also ran several simultaneous 1080p streams using a mix of direct playback, hardware accelerated transcoding, and software transcoding. All of the streams played smoothly, and the system remained responsive throughout. CPU usage peaked at around 35% which shows the N95 still has plenty of headroom for mixed workloads at this level. Where expectations need to be set is with heavy 4K transcoding. Direct play 4K content is handled effortlessly, but real-time 4K to 4K transcoding is a much heavier task and can push this class iGPU to its limit. If your media library regularly requires that kind of processing, stepping up to the N150 version with the newer XEL class graphics is a better fit. Now, taken as a whole, the system behaves exactly how you want a compact, low power media NAS to behave. When media can be direct played, the Intel N95 stays out of the way and delivers smooth, efficient playback. For typical home and small multi-user scenarios that mix direct streams with occasional transcoding, there's ample headroom with no sense that the platform is being overstretched. The limitations only start to show when heavier workloads are stacked on top of each other, particularly when a large network transfer directly competes with media streaming. True NAS gives you the tools designed around that behavior if needed, and the Mi Pro's dual nick layout provides meaningful flexibility for users willing to do a bit of network planning. Ultimately, this platform rewards well-prepared media libraries and realistic expectations. If your content is suited to direct playback, the experience is excellent. If your workflow depends on constant, high bit rate 4K transcoding, that's where this class of hardware naturally draws the line. Within its intended role, though, the Intel N95 delivers reliable, efficient media performance without surprises, which is exactly what you want from a home NAS. Now, because the Intel N95 is such a efficient platform, overall power usage on the Mi Pro ends up being driven far more by your storage configuration than by the CPU itself. that keeps everything well within the platform's overall power envelope. Thermals follow the same story. The single blower fan does a very good job of moving air through the chassis and across both the storage bays and the CPU. Even under sustained load, the hottest I saw the CPU reach was just 58° C with normal operation typically sitting in the low to mid30s. Drive temperatures were equally well controlled during large read and write operations. Both the WD Red hard drives and the Teamroup NVMe SSDs topped out at around 36 to 37° C. For hard drives, a normal operating range is roughly 35 to 45° with anything under 50° being ideal. So, these results are exactly where you want them. What really stood out though was acoustics. [music] Despite the low temperatures, I never once heard the system fan ramp up. It was effectively silent the entire time. The only audible noise came from the hard drives themselves with the occasional faint ticking during activity and even that was barely noticeable. Taking together the hardware layout, airflow design, and chassis construction all contribute to what is easily one of the quietest consumer NAS systems I've reviewed. Now, before wrapping this up, the last piece that really needs to be addressed is cost. For a lot of people, that's the first and most important factor when deciding what hardware to buy. A few months ago, based purely on the spec sheet, I probably would have said the Mi Pro felt a bit overpriced. That context has changed. The cost of components like LPDDR5 memory has climbed significantly and shrinking hardware into a compact well-bit enclosure tends to increase cost not reduce it. When you factor in the size, the materials and the overall build quality, this is very clearly a solid high-quality device. It doesn't feel like a toy or disposable in any way. The biggest value ad, at least in my view, is the modular design. The ability to upgrade the system in the future by sliding in a new mainboard is a meaningful advantage. That kind of forward-looking flexibility is rare in the consumer NAS space, and it adds long-term value in a way that's easy to overlook if you're only comparing spec sheets. Taking all of that into account, I think the current pricing is fair. That said, the Mi Pro isn't alone in the NAS market. There are other very solid 2 bay NAS options and one of the closest comparisons is the Terror Master F425 Plus. It's a similarly positioned 2B NAS built around Intel N150 with 8 GB of memory, dual 5 GB Ethernet, and triple NVME support selling at roughly the same price point. One advantage term Master brings to the table is its TAS operating system. I reviewed the 4B version of that platform and it's a solid turnkey solution. It's well suited for someone who doesn't want to think about which operating system to use, how to install it, or how to configure it. And it comes with reasonably strong after sales support experience if something goes wrong. Where I think the Mi Pro fits best is with users who want moderate network attached storage as part of a proper backup strategy, something like a one 123 backup approach, but who also want a more open, transparent, and user manageable operating system. It's a good fit for someone who's ready to move past a locked down turnkey NAS appliance, but doesn't need or want to build a full DIY home lab or storage server from scratch. For anyone considering the Mi Pro, my advice is fairly straightforward. If you're primarily looking for a simple, reliable storage server, the N95 version makes a lot of sense. It's efficient, quiet, and more than capable for that role. If your case leans more towards media serving or heavier transcoding or running additional applications, the N150 version is the better choice. I really hope Blink continues to develop this NAS lineup. A four or six bay version built around the same modular mainboard concept would be especially compelling. Being able to increase capacity and par by upgrading the chassis while reusing the main board from this system, which is typically the most expensive component, would be a huge value ad. If Beink follows through on that idea, this could turn into a very interesting long-term platform rather than just a single

Beelink ME Pro review: tiny modular 2-bay NAS with TrueNAS, 5GbE, Jellyfin testing Check out my ME Mini review Here! - https://youtu.be/TkFfTekB3eM Products Highlighted (Amazon Affiliate Links): Beelink ME Pro - https://amzn.to/4rpfspE Beelink ME Mini - https://amzn.to/4k9zuli Terramaster F2-435 Plus - https://amzn.to/4a5N30O WD Red 4TB - https://amzn.to/3NQA8Iu TEAMGROUP MP33 1TB - https://amzn.to/3NMSMkB Chapters: 00:00 - Opener 01:01 - Intro/Agenda 01:56 - Unboxing, Specs & Features 06:59 - NAS Operating Systems 08:57 - TrueNAS Configuration 10:12 - Performance Testing 14:05 - Media Server Performance 17:57 - Power, Thermal and Acoustic Performance 19:56 - Overall Value and the Competition 21:48 - Final Thoughts Find me on Social Media Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/elevatedsystems X: https://x.com/elevatedsystem1 My Studio Equipment (Paid Links) Blackmagic Pocket Cinema 6K Pro - https://amzn.to/3tA6ScP Panasonic Lumix DMC-G7 - https://amzn.to/2VjqKSR Panasonic Lumix DMC FZ300 - https://amzn.to/2WJnxw6 Sigma 18-35mm F1.8 Art DC HSM Lens - https://amzn.to/3quDgM0 Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 STM Lens -https://amzn.to/3uv13Of Panasonic LUMIX G Lens, 25mm, F1.7 - https://amzn.to/3A9f9Vi Magnus REX VT-5000 2-Stage Tripod - https://amzn.to/3GxsGJH Neewer 72.4-Inch Camera Tripod - https://amzn.to/3fsRuqU SMALLRIG Parabolic Softbox - https://amzn.to/3Hyvbxt SmallRig RC 120D COB Light - https://amzn.to/3S9Grp4 Kshioe Softbox Lighting Kit - https://amzn.to/3A5vZEq Neewer Camera Slider Motorized - https://amzn.to/3ltX54e Sennheiser MKE 600 Shotgun Mic - https://amzn.to/3fziRPv SAMSON Q2U Dynamic Microphone - https://amzn.to/3ikExBe Sennheiser XS Wireless Lavalier System - https://amzn.to/3ilSIpA PreSonus Eris E3.5 Studio Monitor - https://amzn.to/3CcVx4d Behringer U-Phoria UM2 USB DAC - https://amzn.to/3ZmyOOO Gator Frameworks Deluxe Boom Stand - https://amzn.to/3fs7Os3 Glide Gear TMP100 Teleprompter - https://amzn.to/3CdgIDy GLEAM Microphone Stand - https://amzn.to/3A4dth5 Davinci Resolve 17 & Speed Editor - https://amzn.to/3fsECRG AVerMedia Live Gamer ULTRA - https://amzn.to/3CCH5nV Apple 2022 Mac Studio - https://amzn.to/3GXW6mS LG 40WP95C-W 40” 5K2K Display - https://amzn.to/3ZtiiN6 INNOCN 15.6" OLED Portable Monitor. - https://amzn.to/3jEOqgu BenQ ScreenBar Halo - https://amzn.to/3XpUZ52 Audio file(s) provided by Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.combeelink me pro