This is interesting.

Stumbled across this video of them assembling them in the factory:

SSD NAS thing...

Up to SIX M.2 SSD's you can install, to make a pretty large NAS thing.
Intel based, can run Windoze or Linux or any other x64 NAS software.
Clever and efficient thermal design to keep everything cool and yet still quiet.

They cost US$269 on special now, to pre-order.
N95+16GB LPDDR5-4800 memory (soldered) +64G eMMC (No SSD)
Roughly one month lead time.

You could easily install Windoze or Linux on the eMMC, or you also have the option of using one of the M.2 slots as the system drive.

Link to the NAS box thing itself...

I'm impressed with this thing.
I doubt I would buy one, but I'm impressed with how small, quiet and power-efficient this would be, despite the potential to store a f-ing huge amount of data.

SSD's are probably not really recommended for always-on NAS machines, but I still think this is a really interesting design!  

---

Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops!

I love these factory videos. :)
I have a couple of pretty old fanless Beelink machines and I think they're great. Apart from having to change the battery on one I've had no problems with them. Slow, unexpandable and small storage on them, but you don't always need anything more.

There is another reason to avoid SSD for NAS. Micron has announced that it is going to drop the Crucial brand domestic memory to concentrate on high end stuff for AI. Other big manufacturers could follow if they see the dollar signs and that could  lead to mostly the lower quality stuff being available at any affordable price - never mind a lot more fake stuff. Not good for NAS.

Yes, SSD and RAM prices are INSANE now - thanks, AI.....

AI has it's place and uses, but the Human species seems to be trying to force AI into EVERYTHING.  I saw a video on YouTube the other day, where someone was asking WHY the hell AI is now in Microsoft Notepad.

I mean - seriously - NOTEPAD?
It's just a simple text editor.
Why the hell would you want or need Co-Pilot embedded there? (rhetorical)
It's just getting insane.

AI is a bubble, and all bubbles burst at some point, and people are already predicting that the AI bubble is not far from bursting.  We'll have to wait and see if that really does happen, but I fully expect that it will - it's just a matter of time.

  Grogster said  

AI is a bubble, and all bubbles burst at some point

The bursting of a financial bubble does not invalidate the underlying technology. (Tulips obviously an exception.) Vibe coding with AI is incredibly productive, and that won't change if Anthropic or OpenAI or even Google lose 75% of their stock market value.

Railroads, skyscrapers, networking all had burst bubbles, but went on to add greatly to wealth and well-being. The graph of Moore's Law does not even show the 2000 tech crash.

"All Day, Every Day" with AI is coming soon for many in the tech, financial, legal, and other fields.

AI definitely has its place as an incredibly useful tool, but AI at the expense of all is WRONG.
Taking massive amounts of fresh water for cooling is WRONG.
Grabbing all the local generation and incoming power line capacity is WRONG.
Buying up land in speculation for future data centres that may never get building permission is WRONG.
Running massive gas turbines 24/7/365 to power the beasts while damaging the atmosphere and increasing the rate of global warming even further is WRONG.

We can't replace the water or fix global warming.

Control it's implementation. Use it sparingly and wisely and where it will do maximum good. Don't use it for enhanced cat pictures and glorifying software where it *might* save 10s per day if anyone can figure out how.

AI isn't "wrong", only its usage cases are often wrong.

  Mixtel90 said  

We can't replace the water or fix global warming.

Control it's implementation. Use it sparingly and wisely and where it will do maximum good. Don't use it for enhanced cat pictures and glorifying software where it *might* save 10s per day if anyone can figure out how.

AI isn't "wrong", only its usage cases are often wrong.

The pathway is not yet clear, but AI is likely to come closer to fixing global warming than just about anything else (although I do think it could come close to being fixed with present technology--solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries).

"Enhanced cat pictures" make for trifling usage, as does its use for random chatting--even multiplied by hundreds of millions. The cost of those uses has declined dramatically--it's making new models and doing real work--coding, legal analysis, medical product investigation, etc.--that are costly, but as far as the "real work" goes, not as costly as the human time it replaces (and that replacement is another issue).

As far as electricity demand goes, it's truly significant (and I'd agree that the use of turbines to power Musk's datacenter is ghastly), but in the 50s, 60s, and into the 70s, electricity generation growth in the U.S. was greater than the projected need now for datacenters.

There are many greater inefficiencies that the world suffers under--30 million acres in the U.S. in corn for ethanol crops with an energy return on investment hovering around 1, and internal combustion engines for transportation as a whole.

It's not necessarily a case of the amount of electricity generation or cooling water, but where it is. Large areas of the US simply can't afford to provide water as they are already semi-desert and are getting rapidly worse. Texas has a lot of generation now but it's effectively electrically isolated from other states, you use power there and you can't import it from elsewhere if you start to run out. Datacentres aren't efficient enough to run from renewable energy.

Unless datacentres increase in efficiency very quickly indeed then something nasty will happen, especially in the US, as Trump places the wants of big corporations well above the survival needs of the population. No aircon because of the datacentre load? That's fine, you'll be ok. Here's today's free bottle of water.

I have one of these systems, and as a warning they like to corrupt data on the SSDs if you put 6 of them in there since they can't handle the power transients (there is supposedly a newer revision that 'fixes' the problem) if you have Gen4 drives (or anything with more power consumption than what the tested with (which were evidently low power Gen3 drives).

  Mixtel90 said  

Texas has a lot of generation now but it's effectively electrically isolated from other states, you use power there and you can't import it from elsewhere if you start to run out. Datacentres aren't efficient enough to run from renewable energy.

Water is a different question, but Texas is probably the least likely place in the U.S. to run out of electricity. West Texas is the best place in the U.S. for combined wind and solar, and massive transmission capacity additions to Dallas area are being built now and will soon come into service. (Hate to mention it, but they also have a lot of gas.)

Projected Datacenter clean-tech supported (projected):

  Quote  

Google has committed to 24/7 carbon‑free energy for its data centers by 2030, using a mix of wind, solar, and storage contracted from nearby projects.

Examples in the U.S.:

Virginia data centers: supplied via a 24/7 carbon‑free‑energy package including solar, wind, hydro, and batteries in the PJM grid.
​
Ohio data centers: backed by a 15‑year PPA for 1.5 TWh of solar power from TotalEnergies’ Montpelier solar farm.
​
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
AWS aims for 100% renewable energy by 2025 and has signed numerous U.S. wind and solar PPAs to match data‑center load.

​

There’s no denying that this little NAS box is a seductive piece of tech, that wouldn’t look out of place alongside my Georg Jenson rain gauge as far as aesthetics go, though I probably wouldn’t leave it out in the rain.  I cannot help think though that it is an exercise in sub-optimisation for most intended users.  When I look around my home / lab at all my computer bits, the desktop, the large format screen, the A3 printer, the 3d printer, servers, routers, switches, the list goes on, do I really need to shave down the volume of the NAS box to that extent?  If the brief to the designer of that box had specified an enclosure with 50% to 100% more cubic volume I think the result could have been something that was more serviceable, with better heat flow management and equally as elegant, sitting out of the way on a shelf somewhere.  Of course if my lab comprised only a notebook that travelled between locations that housed the big peripherals then it might be a good solution, albeit a more risky one compared to the cloud.

One use I saw for it, more then JUST as a NAS box, was as a mediaplayer for your lounge, that ALREADY contains all the media, so you don't need to have it networked to a NAS in another room, or another part of the same roome etc.

Looking around the Beelink website, I see they also do a slightly larger thing, that you can install standard spinning HDD's as well as three M.2 SSD's.  That might be closer to a traditional NAS in terms of using HDD's vs SSD's.

It was a bit more expensive though, and cute though they both are, you can build a similar NAS box thing, much cheaper using 2nd hand bits, as you kinda hint at, and if space is not a premium, then what does it matter if you use a full size PC case?

Those dinky wee Beelink things would be VERY useful and in place, if you owned a tiny-home or caravan etc, where space really is a big deal, and there may not really be room to squeeze in a full size tower or desktop case.

Having said all that, my current NAS runs on a mini-ITX board with just a dual-core Intel Celeron CPU and only 4GB of RAM.  As it is all inside a mini-ITX case, it is still pretty small, but it cost me nothing other then a large capacity HDD, as I recycled the case, mainboard, PSU and RAM from my spares.