*update* the indiegogo campaign for this device is now live (here indiegogo.com/projects/lincstation-world-s-1st-unraid-6-bay-all-ssd-nas#/ ), so any further questions/feedback on this might be better shared and heard over there in the discussion section. They have two tiers live, one of which is even cheaper (which I find kinda mad, giving the margins for profit here... but ok....), so take a look.
I pulled the trigger on it. It’s my first NAS. 2.5gb will be plenty for me. I can understand some criticism, but I can’t find much comparable in this price range.
Excellent videos👍 This Linkstation N1's aggressive pricing will be appealing to those who were holding back on getting the comparable Asustor Flashstor, which also has Celeron N5105. My rule of thumb: If it sounds too good to be true, then . . . Kindest regards, friends and neighbours.
Another great review mate, but that single ethernet port makes the SSDs just a gimmick. I was searching for a good replacement for my old dual hdd Synology NAS and I found a great vfm solution that you should also check it out. I bought the Tbao R3 mini pc with dual bay drive support, (Ryzen 5500U,16Gb,512GB NVME,2.5Gx2, Vega 7 iGPU). Furthermore, I have also purchased an Unraid license, set it up, and this little thingy blew my mind. Jellyfin is working perfect, and it can also use the AMD iGPU for video transcoding without any issues.
Thanks NAScompares for clarfying the SATA drive height. I don't think that Lincplus even knows the limitations. Their FAQ's now lists the SATA size as 9.5mm so even less. On their discussions page the project manager claims 20TB as its max using six 4TB drives with one as "Backup" (parity) which is impossible. It's more like a 12TB NAS using NVME w/parity or 16TB using 2TB SATAs in addition. They claim it should work with 8TB NVME drives but haven't confirmed it.
I guess you could use 4TB SATA SSD's to get 20TB but it's a shame that you have to use outdated technology. A six bay NVME would be better as well upgrade to the N100 CPU which is 25% faster than the older N5105.
Unraid has a JBOD system where you could have the Backup as parity mode. But it doesn't support TRIM in a JBOD configuration. Maybe that's what they mean ?
*Apparently, Unraid's disk and thus network performance should be much slower than that of Qnap and Synology,* for example, because Unraid does not work with the usual RAID, but has invented something itself. *Is that true?*
UnRAID uses a different parity system yes. But also, they recently embraced ZFS pools support and that results in massive performance boosts and parity with Q/S performance
@@nascompares Thank you *very* much for your great reviews and your answer!, I was hoping that another viewer of your videos would see my question - so I'm very happy you replied. Now I'll compare your suggested NAS enclosures and configurations for 8 or if possible 12 bays. Then I'll install Unraid 🙂
9:35 "it rocks out the gate with 16 gig memory with a price point of ($)279 which by the way with a quadcore Intel and being a six bay based system makes it *_more than half the price_* of all of these with the same hardware" So is the Linkstation more than half the price, or are you trying to say that it's cheaper than half the price of the other products you are pointing at?
That was quite a mouthful, yeah! Basically, it (at $279) is less than 50% of the price of many other N5105 4 Bay NAS devices... Which tend to be about $600...and this is SSD focused and has 16GB, when all of the others have 4GB
Great review. The current processor offers roughly the same performance as the 12-year old Intel Core i5-2500 (Sandy Bridge). The Alder Lake-N chips only support single channel memory .. so better performances but some limitations. A better choice could be AMD Ryzen V1500B (Synology choice for 2023 models)
Well... having it shipped with an Unraid licence is a bit rich knowing they still don't support Trim on JBOD setup with SSDs... (unless you start using ZFS and for that... the CPU is far too slow and there is not enough RAM) - as for the 2.5Gbit/s limitation... to be honest, only 4 cores wouldn't be sufficient to sustain 10G connectivity if the system has o also deal with normal workload.... Which means using a full SSD NAS (a cheap one) is meant to be a compact, low consumption, low maintenance and silent NAS. Which I have been looking for a long time ;-)
OK, so on one hand you complain about the 2.5 Gbit NIC saying it will nerf the SSD performance as they will saturate the NIC at something like 250 MB/s. Next you complain about the M.2 NVMe slots running at PCIe Gen3 x1 again nerfing the SSDs to something like 700 MBs. Now I agree that is still unbalanced, but giving more than one PCIe lane to each NVMe drive would be serious overkill as it is already nerfed by the NIC. Another point is that this is a $280 device, and you are complaining about it not having a 10Gb NIC? It's entry an level, not enterprise level NAS. You suggest it's use for portable storage when travelling. Few portable computers will have more than a 2.5Gb NIC, and you're not likely to use more than one or two at a time when travelling. Besides it seems most notebook users today breaks out in hives the moment you even mention cabled networking. Finally with the CPU used there's simply not enough PCIe lanes to go about to create advanced fast networking and splurge on multiple lanes for the M.2 slots. So that means they need a more expensive and faster processor, upping the cost a good deal. TANSTAAFL! In my opinion they've made decent choices not this particular machine. But it would have worked almost as well with SATA SSD's, so that's something to remember. NVMe and M.2 is nice and compact, but in this case it doesn't really give a massive improvement over SATA SSD's. Rebuilds will be faster, but that's about it. SATA SSDs are still cheaper per GB and there are less thermal issues with them.
I think you have missed the point a little about the video. In the full review that came out last week (mentioned in the intro), this is all covered and the reasoning and logic (i.e the CPU vs Cost, and it's impact of the rest of the architecture) is delved into. However this is a 5 Good / 5 Bad comparison video. Giving you, the viewer, 5 individual reasons that this solution might suit your needs, and 5 reasons it might not. At several times I say how the "barriers/negatives" are a result of that CPU/Price point, but more importantly, there ARE going to be users who can, for example, perfectly accept 1GB SSD speeds, an older CPU and are on a tight budget... But need it for several users at once and therefore 2.5G might be too strict a limit. I can't just defend ever individual barrier because it's 'the price and cpu' and some uses AREN'T just shopping for price. This video is not a review, it's a pros and cons list
Just seems odd though and on the height issue it wouldnt take much redesign on their part to extend the sides a few millimeters before production begins.@@nascompares
It is going to be my 1st NAS. Which 2TB nvmes should i buy (specs) based on what speeds are supprted under the hood? I do not want to waste money on the latest n greatest nvmes. Budget is a constraint otherwise would have gone with asus flahstor.
10gig lan will top at 1,3 G/s and four x1 ssd raid0 will top more than 3G/s so you will always bottlenecked somehow. This is a product for casual users like me and im very ok with 2,5 lan for this price.
I just gotta mention that you actually could plug in a USB-C to 2,5Gb Ethernet dongle so you end up with 2 ports. It will look stupid, but anyway.. Probably not gonna be able to aggregate those two though.
@@floriantthebault521 Yeah. But that’s why it’s a dumb product. Why pay for a bunch of expensive NVMe storage when it’s going to be kneecapped by the network speed? The product as it is shouldn’t exist. You can get close to 2.5 Gbps out of a regular HDD NAS with RAID.
@@praetorxyn okay… so… I’m not a good example… I did build my own NAS out of only Sata SSD… i didn’t care about the speed (only a 2.5G NIC and a 2G internet) but… with noctua fans and an all-SSD, I got a truly silent and powerful NAS for me and the family. Which might also be the whole point of this kind of NAS in the video. That and the space. Ultra-thin and silent. To be put right beside the TV (many of those SSD NAS have HDMI, like the Asustor)
@@floriantthebault521 Unless somebody lives in like a shoebox apartment in Tokyo or something, the difference in space is pretty irrelevant IMO, as typical HDD NAS are still pretty tiny. They're cheaper, the storage is FAR cheaper, etc. Silence is the only decent argument for a SSD NAS besides speed. But on a typical HDD NAS, you won't hear the system itself at all unless you're heavily taxing the CPU to make the fan spin up. The drives themselves are USUALLY quiet unless you're doing some big file transfer or something, but they still make noise. I think this is something you get used to, as when I first got my NAS it bothered me al ot, and I got four inch thick foam pads to set the NAS on to dampen the vibrations. At this point I don't really notice it, and it sits about 3 feet away from me on my desk. If you have a house wired for ethernet and you put the NAS in a closet or something like you should, I don't think the sound is really a factor. As for the HDMI out, I've never seen the point, as it's Network Attached Storage. You can put it anywhere in your house and stream the contents to your TV, it doesn't have to be connected directly, that's largely the point of having network attached storage.
They did make their crowdfunding live this morning (I recorded my vid above last week), so you should message them in the comments section about it, see if they will consider alt builds?
10 GBe via USB C. Not gonna back this product, might consider buying it in retail but 2.5gbe is rather nicer than 10gbe when it comes to power consumption. Electricity prices are crazy here and I wouldn't want my 24/7 NAS to have 10gbe. 2.5gbe is also kinda crap because all the nics are dodgy (intel ones are shit, but supported by unraid/truenas out of the box, Realtek ones are shit but slightly more reliable than intel, however the drivers are a mess coz proprietary and a no-no especially with truenas core). The extra speed and bandwidth isn't really worth it especially on low power NAS; either more pcie lanes are needed, the nics and cabling is a bit pricier but not too big of a deal, you need fast drives to fully utilize it and HDDs don't, flash storage is exponentially pricer and not available in big sizes - but idle power consumption and max power is the main kicker for me.
@@jj-icejoe6642 That's not a problem SSD were never meant to go into the array. The label of array (by name) is only used on Unraid and it is only for spinning HDD. On any other NAS OS (TrueNas, Qnap, Synology) they are called storage pools just like how Unraid has a Pool Devices. Should I complain then that I can not place drives in the array of TrueNas, Qnap, and Synology products cause they have no area named that? End of the day parity & Trim were added to Unraid earlier this year and functions like any other NAS OS.
*update* the indiegogo campaign for this device is now live (here indiegogo.com/projects/lincstation-world-s-1st-unraid-6-bay-all-ssd-nas#/ ), so any further questions/feedback on this might be better shared and heard over there in the discussion section. They have two tiers live, one of which is even cheaper (which I find kinda mad, giving the margins for profit here... but ok....), so take a look.
What was the power consumption at the wall?
I pulled the trigger on it. It’s my first NAS. 2.5gb will be plenty for me. I can understand some criticism, but I can’t find much comparable in this price range.
All v valid points! Nice
Excellent videos👍
This Linkstation N1's aggressive pricing will be appealing to those who were holding back on getting the comparable Asustor Flashstor, which also has Celeron N5105.
My rule of thumb: If it sounds too good to be true, then . . .
Kindest regards, friends and neighbours.
Moving that mic closer to you really enhanced overall sound/voice quality Rob. Maybe add an overhead mic boom to the studio setup?
I think their next attempt will be interesting. They will learn a lot from this one and hopefully act on what they learn
V true
Could you make a video on how the software works and how to back up to Mac as Time Machine and photos from phone etc … it will be helpful
Thanks for this video. I just backed it. I’d didn’t want to pay almost $500 for the asustor. This price is incredible.
Another great review mate, but that single ethernet port makes the SSDs just a gimmick. I was searching for a good replacement for my old dual hdd Synology NAS and I found a great vfm solution that you should also check it out. I bought the Tbao R3 mini pc with dual bay drive support, (Ryzen 5500U,16Gb,512GB NVME,2.5Gx2, Vega 7 iGPU). Furthermore, I have also purchased an Unraid license, set it up, and this little thingy blew my mind. Jellyfin is working perfect, and it can also use the AMD iGPU for video transcoding without any issues.
Thanks NAScompares for clarfying the SATA drive height. I don't think that Lincplus even knows the limitations. Their FAQ's now lists the SATA size as 9.5mm so even less. On their discussions page the project manager claims 20TB as its max using six 4TB drives with one as "Backup" (parity) which is impossible. It's more like a 12TB NAS using NVME w/parity or 16TB using 2TB SATAs in addition. They claim it should work with 8TB NVME drives but haven't confirmed it.
I guess you could use 4TB SATA SSD's to get 20TB but it's a shame that you have to use outdated technology. A six bay NVME would be better as well upgrade to the N100 CPU which is 25% faster than the older N5105.
Unraid has a JBOD system where you could have the Backup as parity mode. But it doesn't support TRIM in a JBOD configuration. Maybe that's what they mean ?
*Apparently, Unraid's disk and thus network performance should be much slower than that of Qnap and Synology,* for example, because Unraid does not work with the usual RAID, but has invented something itself. *Is that true?*
UnRAID uses a different parity system yes. But also, they recently embraced ZFS pools support and that results in massive performance boosts and parity with Q/S performance
@@nascompares Thank you *very* much for your great reviews and your answer!, I was hoping that another viewer of your videos would see my question - so I'm very happy you replied. Now I'll compare your suggested NAS enclosures and configurations for 8 or if possible 12 bays. Then I'll install Unraid 🙂
9:35 "it rocks out the gate with 16 gig memory with a price point of ($)279 which by the way with a quadcore Intel and being a six bay based system makes it *_more than half the price_* of all of these with the same hardware"
So is the Linkstation more than half the price, or are you trying to say that it's cheaper than half the price of the other products you are pointing at?
That was quite a mouthful, yeah! Basically, it (at $279) is less than 50% of the price of many other N5105 4 Bay NAS devices... Which tend to be about $600...and this is SSD focused and has 16GB, when all of the others have 4GB
As you highlighted - too many areas where the product does not go far enough . . .
Final product delivery and price unknown
Tbh the indiegogo page is now live, some some of those Qs are getting answered. Not all though
Great review. The current processor offers roughly the same performance as the 12-year old Intel Core i5-2500 (Sandy Bridge). The Alder Lake-N chips only support single channel memory .. so better performances but some limitations. A better choice could be AMD Ryzen V1500B (Synology choice for 2023 models)
Well... having it shipped with an Unraid licence is a bit rich knowing they still don't support Trim on JBOD setup with SSDs... (unless you start using ZFS and for that... the CPU is far too slow and there is not enough RAM) - as for the 2.5Gbit/s limitation... to be honest, only 4 cores wouldn't be sufficient to sustain 10G connectivity if the system has o also deal with normal workload.... Which means using a full SSD NAS (a cheap one) is meant to be a compact, low consumption, low maintenance and silent NAS. Which I have been looking for a long time ;-)
OK, so on one hand you complain about the 2.5 Gbit NIC saying it will nerf the SSD performance as they will saturate the NIC at something like 250 MB/s. Next you complain about the M.2 NVMe slots running at PCIe Gen3 x1 again nerfing the SSDs to something like 700 MBs. Now I agree that is still unbalanced, but giving more than one PCIe lane to each NVMe drive would be serious overkill as it is already nerfed by the NIC.
Another point is that this is a $280 device, and you are complaining about it not having a 10Gb NIC? It's entry an level, not enterprise level NAS. You suggest it's use for portable storage when travelling. Few portable computers will have more than a 2.5Gb NIC, and you're not likely to use more than one or two at a time when travelling. Besides it seems most notebook users today breaks out in hives the moment you even mention cabled networking.
Finally with the CPU used there's simply not enough PCIe lanes to go about to create advanced fast networking and splurge on multiple lanes for the M.2 slots. So that means they need a more expensive and faster processor, upping the cost a good deal.
TANSTAAFL!
In my opinion they've made decent choices not this particular machine. But it would have worked almost as well with SATA SSD's, so that's something to remember. NVMe and M.2 is nice and compact, but in this case it doesn't really give a massive improvement over SATA SSD's. Rebuilds will be faster, but that's about it. SATA SSDs are still cheaper per GB and there are less thermal issues with them.
I think you have missed the point a little about the video. In the full review that came out last week (mentioned in the intro), this is all covered and the reasoning and logic (i.e the CPU vs Cost, and it's impact of the rest of the architecture) is delved into. However this is a 5 Good / 5 Bad comparison video. Giving you, the viewer, 5 individual reasons that this solution might suit your needs, and 5 reasons it might not. At several times I say how the "barriers/negatives" are a result of that CPU/Price point, but more importantly, there ARE going to be users who can, for example, perfectly accept 1GB SSD speeds, an older CPU and are on a tight budget... But need it for several users at once and therefore 2.5G might be too strict a limit. I can't just defend ever individual barrier because it's 'the price and cpu' and some uses AREN'T just shopping for price. This video is not a review, it's a pros and cons list
It’s almost exactly what I want. But as everyone has said, the 2.5gbe is a dropped pie.
Tbh I'm more put out by 1x Ethernet, than 2.5GbE...but yeah, you are right
If I had the capability to design this is very close to what I would do.
I think its an an odd choice to put two SATA drives in the system when extra ssd drives could have been added.
Perhaps for 2.5 SATA HDD? Then you have a decent amount of affordable mechanical drive storage for 'cold'. That said, the 12mm height hurts that a bit
Just seems odd though and on the height issue it wouldnt take much redesign on their part to extend the sides a few millimeters before production begins.@@nascompares
SATA drives CAN be SSD... guess you don't know what exactly you mean?
It is going to be my 1st NAS. Which 2TB nvmes should i buy (specs) based on what speeds are supprted under the hood? I do not want to waste money on the latest n greatest nvmes. Budget is a constraint otherwise would have gone with asus flahstor.
If you haven't already gotten them, look at the Patriot Viper V4300 Lite. It works great in my PS5.
Could you include both SATA and NVME SSD’s in the same Unraid Array?
Yes, but I wouldn't advice it unless the software can take advantage of tiering
You can do that in Unraid, they have a JBOD file system that allows to do just that. Though it doesn't support TRIM and it can F-up the parity disks.
10gig lan will top at 1,3 G/s and four x1 ssd raid0 will top more than 3G/s so you will always bottlenecked somehow. This is a product for casual users like me and im very ok with 2,5 lan for this price.
Going to be my first nas)
Nice
I just gotta mention that you actually could plug in a USB-C to 2,5Gb Ethernet dongle so you end up with 2 ports. It will look stupid, but anyway.. Probably not gonna be able to aggregate those two though.
If the OS supports it, yes. I think I do say this at one point..but not 100% as this was a few weeks ago.
2.5 Gbps with even one SSD is ludicrous, but 10 Gbps wouldn't be much better against a RAID of SSDs.
Tell them in the comments/suggestions of the campaign for sure. Only way to push change tbh
The CPU wouldn't be able to handle line-rate 10Gbps, I think. They would have to change it and the price would change, too...
@@floriantthebault521 Yeah. But that’s why it’s a dumb product. Why pay for a bunch of expensive NVMe storage when it’s going to be kneecapped by the network speed? The product as it is shouldn’t exist. You can get close to 2.5 Gbps out of a regular HDD NAS with RAID.
@@praetorxyn okay… so… I’m not a good example… I did build my own NAS out of only Sata SSD… i didn’t care about the speed (only a 2.5G NIC and a 2G internet) but… with noctua fans and an all-SSD, I got a truly silent and powerful NAS for me and the family.
Which might also be the whole point of this kind of NAS in the video. That and the space. Ultra-thin and silent. To be put right beside the TV (many of those SSD NAS have HDMI, like the Asustor)
@@floriantthebault521 Unless somebody lives in like a shoebox apartment in Tokyo or something, the difference in space is pretty irrelevant IMO, as typical HDD NAS are still pretty tiny. They're cheaper, the storage is FAR cheaper, etc.
Silence is the only decent argument for a SSD NAS besides speed. But on a typical HDD NAS, you won't hear the system itself at all unless you're heavily taxing the CPU to make the fan spin up. The drives themselves are USUALLY quiet unless you're doing some big file transfer or something, but they still make noise. I think this is something you get used to, as when I first got my NAS it bothered me al ot, and I got four inch thick foam pads to set the NAS on to dampen the vibrations. At this point I don't really notice it, and it sits about 3 feet away from me on my desk. If you have a house wired for ethernet and you put the NAS in a closet or something like you should, I don't think the sound is really a factor.
As for the HDMI out, I've never seen the point, as it's Network Attached Storage. You can put it anywhere in your house and stream the contents to your TV, it doesn't have to be connected directly, that's largely the point of having network attached storage.
2.5gbe is a travesty tbh 😂😂😂
They did make their crowdfunding live this morning (I recorded my vid above last week), so you should message them in the comments section about it, see if they will consider alt builds?
10 GBe via USB C. Not gonna back this product, might consider buying it in retail but 2.5gbe is rather nicer than 10gbe when it comes to power consumption.
Electricity prices are crazy here and I wouldn't want my 24/7 NAS to have 10gbe. 2.5gbe is also kinda crap because all the nics are dodgy (intel ones are shit, but supported by unraid/truenas out of the box, Realtek ones are shit but slightly more reliable than intel, however the drivers are a mess coz proprietary and a no-no especially with truenas core). The extra speed and bandwidth isn't really worth it especially on low power NAS; either more pcie lanes are needed, the nics and cabling is a bit pricier but not too big of a deal, you need fast drives to fully utilize it and HDDs don't, flash storage is exponentially pricer and not available in big sizes - but idle power consumption and max power is the main kicker for me.
I like it
This looks like an ad. Such a weird hardware with unraid, it's hard to think any use-case for this.
im NOT backing one more thing.. first Dune Case went to shite.. now Storxa seems to be fcked... Crowdfunding sux big time.
I feel like I'm the deliverer of bad news! Sorry man
I rather buy directly too. Pay a bit more but be sure to at least get something
Lets hope it works out. They are very bad at communicating though, I feel like that deffo wouldnt work in "real" life @@nascompares
Yeah... No. Its not for me.
This one not a fanless design, i am dissapointed
I am receiving mine tomorrow. 😢 I'm worried Abt the fan noise now
No parity & Trim on SSD
If you set it up correctly there is both Trim and protection. They need to be setup as a pool and not in an array.
@@Dave_CDN_IrishDAB I know... Not in the array, that's the problem....
@@jj-icejoe6642 That's not a problem SSD were never meant to go into the array. The label of array (by name) is only used on Unraid and it is only for spinning HDD. On any other NAS OS (TrueNas, Qnap, Synology) they are called storage pools just like how Unraid has a Pool Devices. Should I complain then that I can not place drives in the array of TrueNas, Qnap, and Synology products cause they have no area named that? End of the day parity & Trim were added to Unraid earlier this year and functions like any other NAS OS.
@@Dave_CDN_IrishDAB Yes I know that but UnRaid without an array is for me a non sense and in this case, it's a problem for me.