Beelink has been quietly poking at the NAS space this year, starting with that ME Mini NAS that takes a bunch of M.2 drives in a tiny cube. Now they’re teasing the next step with the ME Pro, and honestly this one is a bit weird in a good way.
At a basic level, the ME Pro is a small NAS that supports either two or four 3.5 inch hard drives. That alone is nothing new. What is new is how Beelink designed the internals. Instead of everything being permanently bolted into the chassis, the compute side of the system lives on a removable tray that slides out from the bottom.
That tray holds basically everything you care about from a home lab perspective. CPU, RAM, M.2 slots, wireless, and even the fan all come out together. Beelink is showing this off as a way to potentially swap platforms later on, even jumping between Intel, AMD, or Arm if they ever offer those boards.
Right now, it sounds like launch models will be Intel based, specifically low power chips like the N95 or N150. Still, the fact that the board is removable at all is pretty interesting. In theory, you could keep your drives and just upgrade the brains of the NAS down the road instead of replacing the whole box.
From what you can see in the video, the CPU sits on the top of the board, while the RAM and M.2 slots live underneath. The drive cage is totally separate, which feels much more like a mini server layout than a typical consumer NAS.
Size wise, it stays pretty compact for full size drives. The two-bay version is small enough to tuck almost anywhere, and even the four bay model is still way smaller than most traditional NAS units that support 3.5-inch disks.
Networking also looks solid for a home lab build. You get both 5 GbE and 2.5 GbE out of the box, which is great for people who are already playing with faster networking but don’t want to jump straight to 10 GbE. There’s also HDMI and a decent mix of USB ports, so running something like Proxmox, TrueNAS, or even a lightweight Linux setup doesn’t seem out of the question.
What does everyone think about this one?