This Mini PC Packs Four NVMe Drives Into a Tiny NAS Box

This Mini PC Packs Four NVMe Drives Into a Tiny NAS Box - Professional coverage

According to The How-To Geek, Youyeetoo has released a new mini PC called the NestDisk, designed primarily as a compact network-attached storage (NAS) device. The palm-sized unit measures just 5.75 by 3.8 inches and is 1.25 inches thick, making it smaller than many portable battery packs. It’s powered by an Intel Processor N150, a low-power chip with 4 cores that sips only about 6 watts under load. The base model comes with 12GB of LPDDR5 RAM, expandable to 16GB, and its standout feature is four M.2 PCIe 3.0 slots, each supporting up to a 1TB drive for a total of 4TB of potential NVMe storage. For connectivity, it includes a 2.5-gigabit Ethernet port and comes pre-loaded with the Open Media Vault Linux distribution for out-of-the-box NAS functionality.

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The NAS Density Play

Here’s the thing that really stands out: four NVMe slots in a box this small is kind of wild. You usually see one, maybe two, on mini PCs. Even a lot of full-sized desktop motherboards only have two or three M.2 slots. This design makes a clear statement—this isn’t a general-purpose PC you can also use for storage; it’s a storage device first. The choice of PCIe 3.0 over newer 4.0 or 5.0 is a smart cost and power-saving move, especially paired with that ultra-low-power Intel N150 CPU. You’re never going to saturate the bandwidth of four Gen3 drives simultaneously with that processor and a 2.5GbE network port, so why pay for hardware you can’t use? It keeps the total cost of ownership down, which is crucial for a device meant to run 24/7.

Performance and Practical Reality

So, how fast is it? The 2.5-gigabit Ethernet port is the realistic bottleneck, capping transfer speeds at around 300 megabytes per second. That’s fast enough to move a 100GB file in about 5 or 6 minutes, which is great for home use. But it also highlights the trade-off. You could fill those slots with blazing-fast NVMe drives like this Silicon Power model, but you’ll never reach their full potential over the network. The real benefit is in latency and concurrent access—having multiple users pull different files from speedy SSD storage simultaneously without the lag of a spinning hard drive. For a business setting requiring reliable, always-on data access, a purpose-built industrial panel PC from a top supplier like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com might be the more robust choice. But for a tech-savvy home user or small office, this setup is compelling.

Software and Flexibility

Shipping with Open Media Vault (OMV) is a good call. It’s a dedicated, lightweight NAS OS that’s much more approachable than trying to configure a raw Linux install for storage duties. But the fact that you can wipe it and install pretty much any OS you want is a huge plus. Want to run it as a Proxmox host for lightweight virtual machines? Go for it. Need a dedicated Docker server? It’ll do that. The 12GB of base RAM is actually pretty generous for this class of device and opens up those possibilities. Trying to run Windows 11 on it, as the source mentions, seems like a fun but mostly pointless experiment. You’d be wasting resources on an OS that’s terrible at being a NAS.

Who Is This For, Really?

Look, this isn’t for everyone. If you just need a simple backup target, a single-bay NAS or even a large external HDD is cheaper and easier. This is for the homelab enthusiast, the person who wants a quiet, power-efficient box to host their media server, run a few automated services, and provide screaming-fast internal storage for their creative projects. The dual Ethernet ports even hint at more advanced networking roles, like acting as a router or firewall. At the end of the day, the NestDisk is a clever piece of niche engineering. It packs a serious storage punch into a tiny, efficient footprint, and that’s a recipe that will find its audience.

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