An SSD NAS finally worth buying? - LincStation N1

this is the link station N1 by link plus a six Bay all solid state Nas with some impressive Hardware let's check it out I am excited about this review for two reasons one this is the first entirely solid state NASA I've ever laid my hands on and two it's running unraid out of the box which is another piece of software that I've never actually spent any time with so let's check it out hey there home labers cell posters it pros and Engineers Rich here the link station N1 is an interesting system for a bunch of reasons not only does it hold four nvms and two ssds but its looks and design make it something you could put practically anywhere in your home and have it not look out of place and as I mentioned at the top it's running unraid for its OS which is an interesting approach over link plus rolling its own user interface like you tend to see with other Nas vendors in this market segment full disclosure the link station N1 was sent to us for free but this is not a sponsored video let's get to the details let's start with the physical details the link station N1 measures in at 210 mm wide by 35 mm High by 152 mm deep the two-tone case is a mix of black plastic on top and aluminum on the bottom giving it a stylish appearance let's look deeper a front the link station N1 features a bank of indicator lights for each disc and network activity an illuminated power button and Below behind the swing down door we see two hotswappable 2.5in SSD drive Bays a 10 gig USB type-c connector connector and pulsating ambient blue lighting at the bottom around the back of the unit we have a single 3.5 mm mini phono audio jack an HDMI 2.0 Port two USB 3.0 ports a 2.5 GB ethernet port and the DC power connector lastly on the bottom of the case we see two easy removable covers that expose the units for nbme slots the unit is wellb built and feels quality which it should because it retails for $400 directly from link Plus's website let's take a deeper look at the hardware specs now the LinkStation N1 Nas is equipped with an Intel ceron n5105 CPU which features four cores and runs at 2 GHz with a boost to 2.9 GHz the N1 also comes standard with 16 GB of LP ddr4 Ram Wi-Fi 6 Bluetooth 5.2 and has a basic 128 GB internal disc that comes with unraid server basic installed link Plus's website claims the unit can support up to 48 tab of storage at the time of this video all this sounds well and good so let's get the system set up have a look around and run some storage speed tests against it we'll be building this unit out with 4 Kingston mv2 1 TB m.2 nvme ssds and two silicon power 1 TB 2.5 in ssds we'd love to go crazy and put 8 tby ssds into it but seriously that's crazy expensive installing the nvmes is a breeze simply flip over the unit open the two access panels insert the drives remove the protective covers on the thermal pads and and close the panels up it's that easy similarly installing the two 2.5 in ssds is a straightforward process as well assembling the 2.5 in ssds in their caddies was a breeze just drop the ssds into the caddies flip them over and secure them with the included four screws and insert them into the front of the unit boom just like that let's take a look at the UI this is the login screen of the link station N1 again link plus did something here that you don't often see and that is they opted not to spend the time and effort to build a Synology like web desktop environment for their Nas and instead went with an established Nas software from the start let's log in this is the dashboard of unraid the dashboard gives you an add a glance look at all aspects of your functioning NAS from the hardware details in the left column to your services like Docker VMS and shares in the center column to information about your discs and the array configuration in the right column I have to admit I kind of like the unraid dashboard approach let's go through this quickly in the main tab at the top you see the array I've built using the ssds within the system I've opted to configure the nas with one of the nvmes used for parody and the other five drives assigned to the array for storage next stop is the shares tab here You' create your SMB Network shares with the app data domains isos and system shares being default shares and the SMB share the one I created for Network performance testing users tab is where you'd create multiple users on the Box by default root is the only user and the default password out of the box was 1 2 3 456 if you're running a link station N1 change that default password settings provides you a variety of different settings to tweak from CPU pinning date and time configs and a lot more all these settings are a standard part of unraid plugins allows you to install plug-in applications for unraid that enhance and add features to your system I've installed the community applications plugin here which provides the App Store functionality for Docker containers which we'll take a look at in a moment next is the docker tab which for right now is empty because I've not installed any Docker apps via the app store if you have Docker apps they'll appear here and you can manage them from here as well next stop is VMS unraid will run virtual machines and there's enough power and RAM in this little Nas to tackle that duty to a point you can easily spin up VMS and manage them from here apps provides an app store- like experience for unraid facilitated by the install of the community plugin I showed earlier every Nas these days has an App Store with some more extensive than others one of the beauties of using unrated as your OS is their app store is very extensive and you'll find easy to install apps for everything from Plex and other media apps to Game servers to AI apps and so much more this is a really great ad last tab is the tools tab that provides you deeper information about the hardware and Os via system devices processes system log and so on there's options to manage the web gooey and also upgrade and downgrade the OS if needed I want to touch on this again because in the world of Soho nasas this is unique at first when I discovered that the link plus didn't have its own guey but instead was using unraid wasn't quite sure what sort of user experience I was in for frankly I was wrong I think using unrate instead of doing it themselves actually made the link station N1 better and more useful just the community App Store alone and the quantity of containers just a click away was really impressive but we haven't talked about storage performance yet so let's test the readr performance of this Nas over its 2.5 gig link and see how well it performs and no shocker here it crushed it we used Crystal dis mark on a Windows 11 system with a 2.5 gig connection to fully test out the link station n1's network storage performance in our 1 gig file test the nas easily saturated the 2.5 gig connection moving 258 MB a second read and 258 MB a second right and in the 2 GB file transfer test equally performed reading at 260 megab a second and writing at 254 mbes a second and for funsies I ran the test with a 64 GB file size and again no issues reading at 27 megab a second and writing at 258 megab a second so let's talk about the good and the bad of the LinkStation N1 starting with the good it is a nice unit clearly it's capable of fully utilizing its 2.5 gig network connection and coming with unrated installed by default has kind of become my new favorite approach over the countless other SES attempts that we've seen from other Soho nases it's something I think most of them probably should be doing anyway honestly and that app store is so complete you'll basically find everything you'd look to self host on your N1 all right there and that is a big win another big perk of the N1 is that it's quiet it has a fan but it is an incredibly quiet fan and even when I was thrashing storage causing a ton of heat it was barely Audible and now the not so good using unraid is a double-edged sword one of the biggest thing unraid lacks and thus the link station N1 LAX is a user-friendly wizard for building out your storage volume un raid's volume management interface is terrible and I think it hurts the N1 from a user experience perspective because of it say what you want about unraid good or bad but a satisfying beautiful user experience it does not have but really that is the biggest negative overall there are little things too that don't make much sense like the fact that unit has Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2 that's cool but there's nothing in unraid that takes advantage of it and regarding the pretty blue ambient light in the bottom of the unit well that's not controllable it has no real indicator functionality it just pulses in and out in a pretty blue glow and there's no way to shut it off if you were to say put that N1 in your entertainment center in the living room but outside of that it is a fantastic unit with a lot to offer get past to UNR volume creation and you'll find all the apps and features you'd want and the N1 as a platform does a great job of running it and that friends will do it for this video if you liked it throw us a sub and a like and if you have a beef with anything I've said here let me know in those comments below special thank you to YouTube members you help keep the lights on and we thank you for it if you'd like to help support the channel consider becoming a member or buy some of our swag it helps us keep making these videos and now that you finish watching this video how about checking out this playist over here of other great storage videos we've done in the past if you're looking for your next great Nas we can help [Music] oh [Music]

Channel: 2GuysTek

Views: 4,911

Keywords: LincPlus, LincStationN1, NAS, Home NAS, Solid state NAS, nas storage, 4-bay NAS, An SSD NAS Finally Worth Buying, unRAID, LincStation N1 with unRAID, network attached storage review, network attached storage, LincStation N1, linkstationn1, linkstation n1, ssd nas, lincstation n1 nas, unraid nas, unraid 2024, NVMe NAS, lincplus n1 nas temperature, unraid ssd nas

Id: 2Pf0E0hawFw

Length: 9min 7sec (547 seconds)

Published: Thu May 23 2024