There seems to be a growing interest in NAS devices among consumers and this is reflected in the amount of companies now offering them. The LincPlus LincStation N1 is one such device, the first from the company, and it ties into another trend as well – with the dramatic fall in the prices of SSD storage over the past few years, it is meant to be used with NVMe units for a lot more speed, as well as lower power consumption and no noise as an added bonus. It also comes with Unraid, which is one of the favourite platforms in the homelab community. Let’s see what the LincStation N1 does and how it stacks up to the competition.
Disclaimer: LincPlus kindly sent me a unit gratis for the purpose of this review. The LincStation N1 sells for $399. Additional information on the official website. You can get 5% off using the code
TL;DR: recap
| Pros |
Cons |
| + Superbly small and compact
+ Completely silent + Very good performance + One-year Unraid licence included with the price + You can install other operating systems |
– 2.5 Gbps connection is too slow to take advantage of NVMe drives
– Unraid has some unusual defaults and settings compared to other NAS platforms – The software to control LEDs is only in Chinese – Using the HDMI port requires installing a different OS or a lot of tinkering |
Rating: 8/10
Packaging & Accessories
The LincPlus LincStation N1 comes in a simple cardboard box with little in terms of padding; under it we find the external power supply unit (which is very very small!) with its detachable 8-figure power cable, a manual and a card with the Unraid licence code.
LincPlus LincStation N1 Hardware
The LincPlus LincStation N1 is part of a new wave of NAS devices which is based on SSDs – it actually is one of the very first such devices to come to the market. Thanks to this, it is very small and quite unlike traditional NASes: it is 20.9 x 15.1 x 3.7 cm, which is significantly smaller than other NASes I have tried in the past. The upper part of the chassis is made of black plastic, whereas the lower half is made of brushed aluminium.
The front has a small lid which opens to reveal two bays for 2.5″ drives as well as a USB-C port. There are also LED indicators (power, network status and drive status), as well as an RGB LED strip which lights up the whole lower side and which can be programmed. The back hosts the power connector, a 2.5 Gbps Ethernet connector, two USB 3.0 ports, an HDMI port as well as an unexpected 3.5 mm jack output. There is therefore a good variety of available connectors, including the USB-C one which adds flexibility. Flipping the device upside down reveals two metal lids, under which there are four M.2 connectors which can be used to house the same number of 2280 NVMe drives.
The LincPlus LincStation N1 is based on the Intel Celeron N5105 CPU, a quad-core (and quad-thread) processor which has seen a lot of success in the NAS space due to its low TDP of just 6 W. It is, however, an old CPU by now, as it was launched back in 2021. It supports up to 16 GB of DDR4 or LPDDR4 RAM and that is exactly the amount you get on the LincStation N1 as LPDDR4 operating at 2,933 MHz; it is not expandable as it is soldered to the board. The amount of RAM is quite generous and allows you to install a lot of different applications and even manage some VMs. The CPU has a relatively large heatspreader: the whole lower half of the device is in fact directly connected to the CPU, making the NAS fanless and therefore completely silent.
Now, one issue the most attentive and technical-minded readers will have thought of is that of PCIe lanes. The Jasper Lake CPU is actually quite limited in that regards, with just eight PCIe 3.0 lanes, which brings us to the issue of managing four PCIe NVMe drives: the CPU simply does not manage all of them at full speed at the same time, and it only dedicates a single PCIe 3.0 lane to each drive. But it doesn’t really matter! The reason why it doesn’t is that the transfers are limited to 2.5 Gpbs by the network anyway, so you still won’t be able to exceed that limit, even if all the drives had all their theoretical maximum bandwidth available at the same time.
This brings us to another consideration, which is the choice of using 2.5 Gbps network connectivity. While it is enough for traditional hard drives with spinning platters, as it maxes out at around 300 MB/s (theoretically at 312.5 MB/s, but there is the overhead of the layer 2 and 3 protocols that takes some of that away), it is way too low to take actual advantage of NVMe drives which normally operate at 1.000+ MB/s. This is a missed opportunity which makes the LincStation N1 less effective than it could have been. Using SATA SSDs or hard disks in the 2.5″ bays makes this limitation less important as the speeds thus achieved are normally comparable to those offered by the network connection.
The operating system, Unraid, is installed on a USB key which can be found inside the SSD compartment on the left hand side. This means you can easily keep the Unraid installation in case you want to install a different operating system.
The LincStation N1’s motherboard hosts a few other interesting components: 128 GB of eMMC memory, as well as an Intel AX201 card which provides compatibility with WiFi 6 (802.11ax) as well as Bluetooth 5.2. While these components are present, however, they are not available under Unraid: you will have to use a different operating system to take advantage of them, or pass them through to a virtual machine or container.
LincPlus LincStation N1 Software
The LincPlus LincStation N1 uses an operating system called Unraid: much like most connected devices, it is based on Linux, and it is tailor-made for NAS devices. It is normally sold to enthusiasts who install it on their devices, often assembled by themselves. In this case, however, it comes preloaded on the LincStation N1, complete with a licence. It works like many other NAS operating systems: once you have powered on the device, you can connect to its management console using a Web browser; the user interface is rather clean and clear, with all operations just a few clicks away.
Before doing a more in-depth analysis, let’s look at things from a broader perspective. Unraid is not a platform for the faint of heart or for those who aren’t at least somewhat familiar with computing; it is a “power user” platform that won’t hold your hand too much. It is not, in other words, a competitor to other solutions like Synology or QNAP, which are meant to be used by both seasoned sysadmins and the tech illiterate. This means it doesn’t come with a desktop-like interface with easy-to-use applications to manage your files; likewise, it does not come with any out-of-the-box applications to manage a multimedia collection. On the other hand, however, it gives you a lot of control and flexibility which, if used, allow you to tailor the platform to your needs and liking.
When you first boot the device, you can connect to it by typing tower.local in your browser’s URL bar; after setting the password, you are then greeted by a screen that asks you to either insert your licence key or to start a free 30-day trial. Even though the NAS comes with a licence, I recommend using the trial before using it: the licence is only valid for one year, so the additional 30 days of usage come in handy. It should be noted that the NAS will keep on working even after the licence has expired, but it won’t receive any more updates.
Once you have activated your licence (whether it is a trial or the full one), you are presented with the main storage settings screen. You can set up both an array and a pool. An array is the main storage of your NAS, so it’s where your data is going to be; a pool acts like a cache. This is normally done so that you can have your data on slow but relatively inexpensive mechanical hard drives and a cache to speed up the transfer on faster but more expensive SSDs. In the case of the LincStation N1, this distinction can apply if you use spinning hard drives in the 2.5″ slots, but it otherwise won’t matter as the NAS is meant to be used with all-SSD storage. This is also terminology which is unique to Unraid and is highly confusing even to experts and people used to work with NAS devices (which is why on my first attempt I created a pool and had to format the drives again using the command line…). As they say: read the manual!
When I started trying out the LincStation N1, I had some issues with the Web interface not working so I tried to fix this. If you, like me, are used to working with Linux devices (though, to be honest, I guess not many of you are!), one of the first things you’d probably do is to try to connect via SSH to see what’s happening – and you would fail! Since some minor revision of Unraid 6, SSH is disabled by default, which can be seen as a good thing as it can increase security. You will have to enable it through the settings in the Web interface (which creates a bit of a problem if it doesn’t work, as you can imagine), or start the service from the command line directly on the device. In the latter case, you will have to take advantage of the integrated HDMI port and hook up a keyboard to the device. Again, if you are used to modern Linux, you won’t find SystemD here – Unraid is based on Slackware, which uses the old way to manage services, so rather than issuing e.g. systemctl start sshd, you need to do /etc/rc.d/rc.ssh start. A minor difference, but one you need to keep in mind!
While not specifically an issue with the LincStation N1, it is a bit baffling that Unraid does not automatically start the array at boot – this means that if you reboot the device, you will have to manually start the disks in order for them to be available. This is easily fixed by going into the “Disks” section of settings and enabling autostart, but it is baffling that it is not the default behaviour like every single other NAS OS out there (for obvious reasons, too!).
Speaking of booting, one thing to keep in mind is that LincPlus advertises the ability of the LincStation N1 to output content directly through its built-in HDMI port. In order to take advantage of it, however, you have to select the GUI mode at startup; this is not the default mode, so if you boot the device normally it will default to a terminal shell, which most people will probably be unfamiliar with. The GUI mode itself is rather simple and minimalist: you only get a menu to access the Web GUI and to restart the machine – that’s it. You then have two options: the first is to play content through the browser using software from a container or virtual machine running on the NAS; the second is to boot the LincStation N1 in text mode and then pass through the HDMI output to a virtual machine where the playback will actually happen. Either way, you can’t simply play content from the user interface of the LincStation N1.
Making use of these peripherals, however, is not exactly straightforward. You need to enable the VM manager from the settings, then select it from the menu, and when creating a new VM select the graphics and sound cards in the setup (there are dedicated points in the list of options). The problem is that the sound card is not in its own group, which requires more tinkering – you need to enable advanced options in the VM manager settings and enable PCIe ACS override, then reboot. I could not make the GPU work, however, despite many attempts – it would only output a black screen. There might be a way to make it work, but it is beyond the scope of this review.
Installing a media centre through which you can manage your music and video collection is far easier. In the settings, you need to enable Docker. Click on the “apps” section, install the community apps plugin, then install the binhex-jellyfin application. This is a pre-configured, turnkey Jellyfin installation which does not require you to fiddle with settings – just give it access to the directory where the music and/or video files are. The UI will then give you an address you can copy and paste into your browser’s URL bar – and that’s it!
There is additional software provided by LincPlus which allows you to set the behaviour of the status LEDs as well as of the RGB LEDs. You can access this by connecting to port 50000 – so, to take my configuration as example, you would have to connect to 192.168.178.159:50000. This software appears to only be in Chinese, which makes it quite difficult to use it. Thankfully there is plenty of translators online, so you should be able to figure out how to fiddle with it.
As a final note, the LincPlus LincStation N1 supports the installation of other operating systems: on top of other NAS-specific OSes, like TrueNAS or OpenMediaVault, it also supports Windows, which means you can really choose whatever suits your needs best – or whatever you are most used to.
Sound
Unusually enough, the LincPlus LincStation N1 has a 3.5 mm output jack which allows you to have direct sound output from the NAS itself, as we’ve already seen. Just like with the HDMI port, however, you won’t be able to take advantage of it through the default OS, Unraid. In order to use it, you will have to either install a different operating system or pass the audio card through to a virtual machine or container.
In order to test the jack output, I booted a USB key containing elementary OS, a Linux distribution with a macOS-like interface (which I already mentioned in my article on how I converted an old iMac to a media centre). I then played music from my NAS; the result was very decent, with seemingly a lot of power on tap – with volume at just 25%, the Sennheiser HD 6XX I used were unbearably loud. The quality is more than decent, though there is a bit of hiss with more sensitive earphones.
Now, since this blog is ultimately about audio, you may be asking: what difference does the LincStation N1 make when compared to traditional NASes equipped with spinning drives? Well, the answer is simple: none. At least if we’re talking about how the NAS can change the way your bits will end up sounding like on your system. Thankfully bits are still bits, whether you use SSDs or hard drives – can you imagine if your pictures became redder if you used a hard drive and greener of you used an SSD?! No, the real difference in terms of sound is the fact that using SSDs makes the LincStation N1 completely silent. That does have an effect on your system in the sense that it removes background noise, which can be annoying. Using HDDs can produce some noise, but the amount depends entirely on the disks in use (some models are noisier than others). There are also practical considerations as the device can be kept together with your sound system, rather than in a cupboard somewhere, and this can be more practical when it comes to running cables.
Final Thoughts
The LincPlus LincStation N1 is a very interesting device which offers some very unique features and is part of a new wave of NAS devices made to take advantage of the ever-cheaper (and ever-faster) SSDs. It is compact, it has decent specifications and it is completely silent. It also offers two 2.5″ bays, which can be rather convenient if you wish to use SATA SSDs or old-fashioned hard disks. It also comes with Unraid, which is a very flexible and tinker-friendly operating system.
The features which we might consider interesting (as in, “different from the other devices on the market”) like the HDMI port or the 3.5 mm jack, however, are not available under Unraid and will require either installing a different operating system or tinkering with virtual machines and device passthrough, which can be challenging for those not used to it (and even for those used to it!). This is a bit of a missed opportunity and read-made instructions on how to do this would certainly boost the appeal of the device.
There is not much competition in the world of SOHO NAS devices with all-SSD configurations: the LincPlus LincStation N1 is the most affordable option, with the first-generation ASUSTOR Flashstor models costing more – but also offering more for a modest price increase. For ~$50 more, in fact, you can get the ASUSTOR Flashstor 6 Gen1, a device which has a much more user-friendly operating system, as well as two 2.5 Gbps ports instead of just one. You do lose the ability to use 2.5″ drives, though, which limits you to using much more expensive NVMe drives.
This doesn’t mean that the LincPlus LincStation N1 is inferior – rather, it means that it has different uses. If you want a completely silent device which can take a lot of storage, while also keeping the size down and offering a variety of options in the software domain, all while keeping the price to an affordable level, the LincStation N1 is a very interesting proposition that you definitely should consider.
