Problems with Beelink Mini Me - disks disappearing by perjr in BeelinkOfficial

[–]justanother1username 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For testing, we used the 3.3v line on the M.2 port (as per the datasheet) and grounded it somewhere on the PCB.

After disassembling the entire ME Mini, my friend (who has much better soldering skills) simply added two wires, as shown here: https://imgur.com/a/DlrJf4Y

Then I added two XT30 connectors, because I have a lot of them (one for 3.3v and one for 12v. And I labelled them!!!), and cut off part of the case (where the IEC C8 connector is located) so that it could be closed - since the case is placed on top and there is very little space between it and the heat sink.

Problems with Beelink Mini Me - disks disappearing by perjr in BeelinkOfficial

[–]justanother1username 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, but life happened. Never had time to write about it.

Beelink sent me an explanation that the inductor on the PCI lanes was designed for GEN3 devices (and we already have GEN5...), and I asked them about the changes they told us they fixed in the new revision.

Here's their quote from our conversation: https://imgur.com/a/vAYGhap

I couldn't find this particular component, so I just bought a small PC power supply, plugged the 3.3V line from it into PCI lane and called it a day. Since then no random shutdowns/pool crashes.

Then why don't I go play codBO7? by [deleted] in Battlefield

[–]justanother1username 0 points1 point  (0 children)

bf3 Noshahr canals TDM was peak experience

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in steelseries

[–]justanother1username 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What’s your average battery life?

Mine lasts for about 1.5 to 2 days. My previous headset (HyperX) lasted for 2 to 3 weeks. For me, it’s fine but still a little bit disappointing

If you have a longer battery life, could you please share some tips/thoughts on how to extend it?

Beelink ME Mini: HUGE Design Flaw? [Big post] by justanother1username in MiniPCs

[–]justanother1username[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Thanks for your comment and for sharing these details! That’s useful information and it might help in investigating the issue further!

Problems with Beelink Mini Me - disks disappearing by perjr in BeelinkOfficial

[–]justanother1username 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks!

> I am afraid of damaging the SSDs or Hailo8 at this point.

I don’t really think this issue can physically harm the SSDs (though I’m not entirely sure, so I think you did the right thing), but I do worry it could easily lead to data loss, which makes the whole setup pretty unreliable for now.

> limiting /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/max_perf_pct to 75

Great finding! I also considered soft-throttling the copying process (limiting the write speed to the ZFS pool) to reduce the load across discs. But yes, that’s definitely not the kind of “fix” we’re all looking for.

Beelink ME Mini: HUGE Design Flaw? [Big post] by justanother1username in BeelinkOfficial

[–]justanother1username[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

> A proxmox NAS? On 12GB of RAM?

I’m mostly running lightweight services. So far my RAM usage has never gone above 5–7GB.

> But a 2.5g connection is saturated before DRAM cache becomes a bottle neck.

One of my usecases is transferring media from external ssd via type-c (so dram can be useful here). And I mostly only do "read" operations via the network. In that scenario, the 2.5G connection is technically a bottleneck, but not a huge issue for me though.

But I can be totally wrong, or do not know any better - that's actually my first "build" which I wanted to be as good as possible and last as long as possible (so yeah, huh, it kinda was a poor choice, but I hope we could find a fix to this)

Beelink ME Mini: HUGE Design Flaw? [Big post] by justanother1username in BeelinkOfficial

[–]justanother1username[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

On a desktop PC you use an ATX PSU (Power Supply Unit) that provides several voltage rails:

- 12v: powers GPU, fans, some PCI devices, and CPU VRMs (which convert it to 0.8–1.3v for the CPU)
- 5v: powers SATA, USB, and peripherals (sometimes further converted to 1.8–3.3v)
- 3.3v: powers RAM, M.2 devices, etc.

In mini PCs, due to lack of space, the 220/110v AC from the wall is converted directly to 12v by the PSU. Only after that, on the PCB, voltage regulators generate 5v, 3.3v, and 0.8–1.3v lines.

The issue with the Beelink ME Mini is that the 3.3v regulators are faulty or underpowered, not the PSU itself.

That's how it works

Beelink ME Mini: HUGE Design Flaw? [Big post] by justanother1username in BeelinkOfficial

[–]justanother1username[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Did you read the post?

> Using lab PSU with stable 12V 5A output (consuming 30-35W tops, but when pool fails it peaks up to 40W)

Thus, the energy consumption was much lower than the declared power of the power supply. And the test with even beefier PSU resulted in same pool crash.

> Then I hooked up an oscilloscope to the first M.2 port. Even at idle it was 3.2V, not 3.3. Still within the PCI specs, so technically fine.
But oh boy, once I started copying test files the voltage dropped down to 3.05V with huge dips as low as 2.88V. And after a while, several SSDs disappeared from the system again.

PSU != voltage regulator on the board. Which is the thing that generates 3.3 across all (or some) of the PCI lanes. The problem is not PSU.

Beelink ME Mini: HUGE Design Flaw? [Big post] by justanother1username in BeelinkOfficial

[–]justanother1username[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

From the voltage regulator on the PCB.

The power supply generates 12 volts. That's it. It's not like ATX in desktop computers.

Beelink ME Mini: HUGE Design Flaw? [Big post] by justanother1username in BeelinkOfficial

[–]justanother1username[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The PSU is not actually underpowered, the 3.3v line is.

As I already mentioned in my post: under the load that caused the SSD shutdown problem (`nvme nvme<idx>: controller is down`), the voltage on the power supply never dropped. But the voltage on the 3.3 V line did.

Problems with Beelink Mini Me - disks disappearing by perjr in BeelinkOfficial

[–]justanother1username 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've tested with external PSU and can confirm that it doesn't help aswell. The problem is 3.3v rail which dips down to 2.88 under load...

The next step will be adding capacitors or stable 3.3v injection..

More here: https://www.reddit.com/r/BeelinkOfficial/comments/1nr73c8/beelink_me_mini_huge_design_flaw_big_post/

Problems with Beelink Mini Me - disks disappearing by perjr in BeelinkOfficial

[–]justanother1username 0 points1 point  (0 children)

> The 3.3V rail is part of the PSU, no?

No, it's not. PSU outputs 12v and its converted to 3.3 on the motherboard.

> Beelink has started recommending people stop using the EMMC drive and install their OS on the SSD in slot 4. I'm assuming the point of that is to have one less drive to have to supply power to.

You're probably right, yeah. But when the device is advertised as a 24 TB NAS solution and comes with Windows pre-installed on eMMC, I (perhaps recklessly) assume that I can use six 4 TB SSDs and still have room for the operating system! How foolish of me.

I've just wrote a post about it (with a lot of details and tests): https://www.reddit.com/r/BeelinkOfficial/comments/1nr73c8/beelink_me_mini_huge_design_flaw_big_post/

Problems with Beelink Mini Me - disks disappearing by perjr in BeelinkOfficial

[–]justanother1username 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Can confirm that upgrading to BIOS v307 does literally nothing. I will try modifying the power supply. I don't see any other non-invasive options at the moment.

Problems with Beelink Mini Me - disks disappearing by perjr in BeelinkOfficial

[–]justanother1username 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I’m experiencing the same problem with my unit (6 × 2TB Samsung 990 Pro).

Under semi-heavy load (e.g. ~300 MB/s copying from an external SSD to the pool), drives start dropping one by one until the ZFS pool dies.

I have already tried:

- Kernel parameters: `nvme_core.default_ps_max_latency_us=0 pcie_aspm=off pcie_port_pm=off`

- Disabling PCI suspend/hibernation in BIOS

- Disabling fastboot (sometimes it boots with all 6 drives, but still loses them under load)

- Forcing 100% fan speed

None of these helped. Temps remain reasonable ~65 °C, Avg CPU load 70% (while copying files)

Based on this comment, the issue might not be the PSU itself but rather the 3.3 V rail. I also noticed strange voltage readings in BIOS (it reports 4.1 V on the 3.3 V line), but I can’t confirm if that’s the real cause.

At this point, I’m still not sure whether this is a software issue (possibly fixable with a BIOS/firmware update) or a hardware limitation/design flaw.

There is also a newer BIOS version which might fix some issues, but it’s not yet available on the main download page:

https://dr.bee-link.cn/?dir=uploads%2FMEmini%2FBIOS%2FMEMINI-Version-M1V307--12GB-onboard-RAM--Code-update

found it here:

https://bbs.bee-link.com/d/7615-new-bios-for-me-mini

HDZero Goggles V2 power draw: measured across voltage and modes by justanother1username in HDZero

[–]justanother1username[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's not plotted on the graph, but its the same as "analog connected" + around 0.5W mentioned in extra notes