MeLE Quieter4C Fanless Mini PC 12th Alder Lake N100 (up to 3.4GHz 4C/4T) 8GB LPDDR4x 256GB Storage Micro Desktop Computer, Support 4K Triple Display, Dual HDMI, All-in-One USB-C WiFi 5 BT5.1 Ethernet

Pushing the USB 3 limits for PLEX server.
I liked the price and size of the MeLE so I thought I would try to set up a PLEX server with one. Some pros and cons always come up with most products and so I thought I would put down my thoughts if anyone wanted to try this.The price, size and form factor obviously are first in line as pros. Not having any issues in the first start and install of windows was excellent and a look at settings shows that it is indeed windows 10 pro. Nice. Did not try to run Ubuntu or Linux that is for another time.You have the ability to set up auto start in the bios so that when power goes on it auto boots. This allows you to have the MeLE unit remote with a zwave or wifi controlled outlet to reboot if needed. You can setup Windows to auto logon by running a non windows app called autologon.exe. (older versions of windows 10 and older had this built in, look in settings). Windows remote desktop connection allows you to log on using your laptop or a desktop windows PC. The only problem here is that windows logs out the MeLE user and the auto logon for that user doesn’t re-logon the MeLE user when you log out with the remote logon. This is a windows problem that can be overcome if needed using a non windows app. I logon if I need to then just reboot so it will again do the auto logon. I know this is a kludge but it works for me. It does appear to run just fine headless (no HDMI screen or emulator plugged into an HDMI port) Nice.So my idea was to see how much storage I could add using 3 of the USB 3 ports. I had 3 WD Elements USB drives to plug in and I wanted to see if the MeLE could handle them. A 4TB, 2TB and 1TB drives as you can see in the picture. I also had a keyboard mouse receiver plugged into the 4th USB port. I set up my PLEX server to put movies on the 4TB, shows on the 2TB and pictures on the 1TB drive. Initially one of the things I experienced was that the mouse had to be within about 10 inches to the USB receiver or it lost it ability to be usable. As time went on the MeLE would turn itself off usually within about a three hour period. I had a energy consumption Watts history recorder on the 120v circuit and in looking back at that there was not a spike in consumption which caused a problem but I think most likely the bios shut it down due to temperature problems. The unit was using up to 14 watts of power at it’s peak and when nothing was being recorded averaged about 8 watts. The MeLE would turn itself off after about an hour of recording on the 2TB drive where the power consumption hovered around 13 watts for that period.Now that I have narrowed the problem down somewhat I will do further testing. I have reset my libraries in PLEX to just the 4TB USB drive and unplugged the other two. The first thing I noticed was that when nothing is recording the energy consumption of the 120v to the MeLE hovers around 3.5 watts. Another thing I noticed is that the mouse is working normally now. More testing is needed. I have also considered injecting additional 5 volt power through a USB Y cable. I will update this post as time goes on.Update:12-14-21 It seems that for the unit I received at least, that any kind of long term recording using a USB 3 WD Drive will cause the unit to shut down after extended video recording. With the 4TB only plugged in the unit shut down after recording 3 movies back to back…. about 6 hours. I have recorded now for two days to the internal drive and have not had a shutdown problem yet. I am waiting now for the Y cable so I can try it by injecting additional 5Volts from an alternate source. If that works I will try a powered USB 3 hub and try recording with more drives connected. Will update findings as I go along.Update:12-21-2021 Adding power to the USB drive through a Y cable worked great. The 4 TB WD drive can record for long periods without a shutdown with the addition of 5 Volt power to the drive. So now I purchased a Coolgear powered USB 3 hub with 4 powered USB ports from Amazon. Nice steel housing and included cable and power supply. Nice. I have hooked up 2- 4 TB WD USB 3 drives and 1 – 2 TB WD USB 3 drive and will change my settings in PLEX server to use all 3. I have a HD Homerun Scribe for a tuner. Movies recorded on a 4TB drive, Shows on a 4TB drive and pictures on the 2 TB drive. Will update when I have done more testing and usage. I might add there would only be 2 concurrent max accessing the media at any one time.Update:12-25-2021 Have used now for a few days with no problems. I have had 2 videos recording from the HD Flex (one on the movie 4 TB USB drive)(one on the shows 4 TB USB drive, a photo screen saver running off the 2 TB USB drive, PLEX server running on the internal drive and two users accessing from two different ROKU devices….. all running concurrently. This was actually better than I expected. This is as far as I am going to go since this is where I wanted to be. I was not actually expecting to have it work for my PLEX server needs so I am amazed. So now all that is left is to mount it vertically to my server/Unifi mounting board and leave it be. Oh yeah… it comes with a mounting plate so you can either mount it to the back of a screen or like me to a vertical plywood board where everything else resides. Nice.

Good system. Drivers hard to find. Analog audio nasty
The system is pretty zippy for the price and power consumption. Replaced my Quad-Core i5 desktop with this. Some resource-heavy tasks don’t like the system, but normal stuff runs fine. It’s about as powerful as a low-priced home/student laptop. It gets pretty warm, so I got an external USB 80mm fan to keep it cool.The onboard analog audio sucks bigtime. It has a power-saving thing that turns off the card when no media is active. It makes a HUGE pop when you close the media. There is also a loud hiss when the media is idle. I spent the better part of a day trying to disable the power-save thing, but no BIOS setting, Registry entry, or driver swap had any effect. I had to buy a USB audio card it was so bad. I haven’t tried the HDMI audio. It might work better. The external USB audio dongle I got works great.It comes with an Asian version of Windows with English as an option. I wiped the drive and reinstalled a US version of Windows without too much trouble except the drivers are not easy to find. Windows does not recognize most of the hardware. After much looking, I found a poorly organized collection of drivers on the manufacture’s support forum. Try to get a snapshot of the hardware before reformatting.

I was skeptical about buying a mini PC with no fan but I must say the thermal performance on this thing is quite good. In a 70F/20C room at 90% CPU load the processor didn’t exceed 75C and it was under this load for awhile while I was testing it. It runs 2 1080P monitors decently with the ability to work on one while you watch videos on the other. It handles this task perfectly fine. I did update the iGPU drivers and got slightly better performance after doing so. The bios is UEFI and this machine has TPM 2.0 so Windows 11 installation should be possible, though I have not tried that yet. I did test the machine at 4K 60Hz and while it handles it fine, the machine doesn’t play 4K video so well with some higher bitrate streams stuttering a bit. 1080P video playback even at 60FPS is good though. Gaming wise I have tried a couple of basic games- Persona 4, Portal 1, GTA: San Andreas, Geometry Wars, and Space Crew. The only game it ran really well was GTA: SA. Persona 4 runs ok at 720P though there are some skipped frames. Space crew was a slide show as was Geometry Wars, surprisingly. Portal ran at about 50FPS but stuttered slightly @ 720P.If you want a dead silent basic use PC this fits the bill. I recommend this machine. Just don’t have wild expectations for performance. It is a Celeron J. It does have HD 600 graphics. It’s not a powerhouse. For what it is though, it is decent, and I give it 5 stars.

Good