Thought I might share this for anyone that’s running into the same problem as me. Since the Beelink S12 Pro is a popular choice for some in this community, especially if you are running video transcoding (mediaservers).
After one and a half years of 24/7 activity I’ve started having issues with my Proxmox VMs and LXCs running my selfhosted services. First I’ve only noticed some services were becoming unreliable, but after a while it spread to different VMs, so it looked like the host must be the issue.
After reading through the logs it became apparent, that my M.2 SSD had I/O errors and was about to fail. S.M.A.R.T reported high temps. 53°C idle / up to 80°C when running overnight Backups, so the issue was pretty clear. My SSD was constantly overheating which caused it to fail in the end.
New SSD, fresh Proxmox install (finally did the upgrade from 8 to 9). Restored my Backups and some settings and everything was running again in no time (❤️ Proxmox backups). Instantly checked the SMART temp values and same issue as before. Temps way too high.
Did some reading and tweaked some settings to reduce the load on I/O, but nope still way too hot.
Next I removed the empty 2.5 disk bay taking up space above the M.2 and installed a heatsink with 10mm height, which made it slightly better but not that much. Temps dropped to 49°C idle / 71°C when running backups.
This made me rethink the problem. Reducing I/O and adding a heatsink didn’t seem to reduce heat by that much. Why? Some additional reading and pondering about the problem helped me find the issue. The CPU is right on the other side of the board from SSD. The CPU was cooking my SSD from below… Even tried tweaking the fan settings in BIOS to cool down the CPU so my SSD wouldn’t melt, but didn’t really help in the end. My beelink just became louder.
Last resort was using a sledgehammer to crack the nut: Bought a 80mm Noctua 5V PWM fan. 3D printed a new bottom plate for the beelink and am now blasting my SSD on full speed with air. Even at full speed 24/7 the additional power cost is extremely low.
Result: 28°C idle / 35°C when running backups.
My Beelink now looks like some Frankenstein creation, but I’m just happy my servers and backups are stable again. Maybe I’ll add a cover to make it a bit easier on the eyes.
FYI: I’m currently running 6 LXCs and 1 VM on this poor thing. Two of which are running >20 docker containers.
I ran into similar issues before, but adding a passive cooler brought the temperatures down sufficiently.
However when researching the issue there were several people that claimed that ~70° C is actually the design temperature for these SSDs, which would explain why they usually don’t come with a cooler.
Really depends on the drive. The one that died and my new SSD both have specified operating temps from 0°C to 70°C Exceeding operating temps for longer periods of time will cause damage to the drive and often activates throttling.