Beelink ME Pro 2 Hybrid NAS Adds 10GbE and Thunderbolt

A Small NAS That Finally Has the Network to Match Its Drives

Beelink refreshed its two-bay hybrid NAS on July 25, 2026, and the ME Pro 2 makes a trade that home-lab builders have been asking for: fewer M.2 slots, much faster everything else. The previous ME Pro ran Intel N95/N150 silicon with three M.2 Gen3 slots and a 5GbE port. The new one moves to Intel's Wildcat Lake Core 3 304, drops to a single M.2 Gen4 slot, and picks up 10GbE plus two Thunderbolt 4 ports.

• CPU: Intel Core 3 304 — 1 P-core (up to 4.3 GHz) plus 4 low-power E-cores, 6MB L3, built on Intel 18A
• AI silicon: 15 TOPS NPU and 9 TOPS Xe3 graphics for 24 TOPS combined
• Storage: 2× SATA bays (2.5"/3.5") plus 1× M.2 PCIe 4.0 NVMe, with 512GB UFS 3.1 for the OS
• Price: $619, pre-orders open now, shipping expected August 2026

Why Trade M.2 Slots for 10GbE?

Because on a two-bay box, the network was the bottleneck long before the drives were. A 5GbE link caps out around 600 MB/s in practice; a pair of modern SATA drives in a mirror can saturate that during a large restore, and an NVMe cache tier blows straight past it. Moving to 10GbE means the storage is the limit again, which is the correct order of things.

The M.2 reduction stings less than the spec sheet suggests, because Beelink added 512GB of UFS 3.1 for the operating system. On the old model, one of those three M.2 slots was usually spent on a boot drive. Here the OS lives on dedicated flash and the single Gen4 slot is free for a fast cache or scratch volume. Net practical loss: one usable slot, not two.

The two Thunderbolt 4 / USB4 ports at 40 Gbps are the other addition, and they change what the box can be. Direct-attach a Thunderbolt enclosure and the storage ceiling moves well past what the two internal bays allow.

Capacity and the Rest of the Sheet

Memory is 16GB DDR5-5600 in a SO-DIMM, upgradeable to 64GB — generous headroom for ZFS or a handful of containers. Networking pairs the 10GbE port with 2.5GbE, Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.4. Display and I/O cover HDMI, one USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A and two USB 2.0 Type-A. The chassis measures 166 × 121 × 112 mm at roughly 2.1 kg, runs off a 120W supply, and is rated from −10°C to 45°C.

What Operating System Should You Run on It?

It ships with Windows 11 Pro, which is not what most buyers will keep. Beelink lists compatibility with TrueNAS, Unraid, Proxmox and Ubuntu Server, and that list covers essentially every sensible plan. TrueNAS for a ZFS-first storage appliance, Unraid for mixed drive sizes and easy container hosting, Proxmox if the NAS is really a virtualisation host that happens to have drive bays.

The 24 TOPS of combined NPU and GPU compute is the interesting wildcard. That is enough for local photo indexing, on-device transcription, or a small always-on inference service running alongside file sharing — the sort of workload that used to justify a second machine.

How It Fits Beelink's Wildcat Lake Push

Beelink has been rolling the Core 3 304 across its lineup since May, and the pattern is consistent: this chip is the company's answer for quiet, low-power, always-on boxes. The EQi brought 10GbE down to $509 as a desktop mini PC, and the same silicon shows up in budget machines like the BOSGAME E6 ECO at $380. The ME Pro 2 is the storage-shaped member of that family, and at $619 with 10GbE and Thunderbolt included it is priced sensibly against building the equivalent yourself.

What to Watch Next

The open questions are real-world power draw under sustained ZFS load, thermals with two 3.5" drives in a 2.1 kg chassis, and whether the single PCIe 4.0 x1 M.2 link constrains cache performance. Independent reviews should land close to the August ship date. For anyone building a compact, fast, quiet storage node, this is one of the more sensibly specified options in our mini computer coverage this quarter.

Sources: CNX Software — July 25, 2026; Notebookcheck — July 2026; TechPowerUp — July 2026.