LincStation N2 review: Next-gen all-SSD 10GbE NAS for just $309? Yep

You may remember last summer when LincPlus sent me the LincStation N1 6-Bay NAS to test; it was the first "diskless" NAS I had ever tested, and I was quite excited to see what the possibilities were, what with being a homelab hobbyist myself! Fast forward to today, and LincPlus are back with its next-gen LincStation N2, which we will be taking a look at.

Seeing as the N2 is an incremental upgrade, I decided to put them side by side so we can see which components LincPlus upgraded gen to gen; the bolded parts below are where there is a difference:

As you can see from the specs, this is a pretty powerful NAS, it comes with an Intel N100 which was introduced in Q1 of 2023. This means that it now supports AV1 decoding, it can also decode H.264, VP8, VP9, H.265 (8 bit), H.265 (10 bit).

The CPU is part of the Alder Lake offering and sits at the bottom of Intel's entry level mobile processors, allbeit with an impressive TDP for the features it offers.

As before, we are seeing another NAS with an acceptable, if not great, amount of RAM. As a reminder, up until a couple of years ago, it was commonplace to only get 2 or 4GB max on a flagship Synology or QNAP home NAS. Ever since the likes of TerraMaster and more have entered the market with ample RAM sizes included in their NAS offerings, it has gone a long way in forcing the hands of the traditional makers to up their game a bit.

First impressions

Unlike the N1, there is no outer cardboard packaging for the N2, which resulted in a bit of transportation damage on one of the corners of the box, most of the height is taken up by accessories, as you will see. Everything you need to get yourself started is included.

In the box

• LincPlus LincStation N2
• Power adapter
• User Manual [full online guide]
• Screws (for SSD bays)

Design

First off I just want to say that LincPlus decided to go with exactly the same outer shell as its predecessor, so my findings will not have changed on that front. It's still pretty cool to look at, although the top plastic covering is still a bit of a fingerprint magnet. I was constantly wiping it down before taking a photograph. According to the official specs sent to me, it is made from a metal casing with a top plastic cover, the kind of plastic that, when you wipe down, never seems to look clean or uniform color. As you can see from the above photo, the SSD sleds are also made from plastic. They are a bit flimsy, but they serve the job well. Ten screws were also included so you can fasten the 2.5" SSDs into the sleds, and still have a couple of spares.

The front cover hides the SSD sleds and Type C port on the front, it's a bit awkward to pull down with a fingernail as there is no mechanism to open it with a push spring or whatever, it's simply a slide down door. There is also a light strip on the front that is set to a slow pulse of white. This behavior can be configured in a web browser by pointing to tower.local:50000

The page is public, so it does not require login credentials to configure the LED control test, Hard disk status, LED Switch, or RGB Light Strip, which is the above pic. One thing that changed between the N1 and N2 is that the page is now in English, where previously it was in Chinese, and required in-page translation.

It's quite light at just 800 grams, and it is passively cooled too, so you will not hear a thing from it when it is doing its thing. Here it is next to two AA batteries, for scale.

On the front, in the center, there are seven LEDs. You may be thinking, why seven if there are only six bays? Well, this particular NAS also has an LED representing connectivity (note: our LAN indicator is not lit up because I moved it to take some nice looking photos), along with LED indicators for the SSD storage drives and power. On the front right is the power button, which is also lit when on, and below that, an indicator for the door, which must be pulled down to open.

Around the back, from left to right, there is a 3.5mm audio jack, an HDMI port, one USB Type-A 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) port, a single 10 GbE Ethernet port, and a connector for the barrel port's 60W power source. Thanks to it being an external PSU, it goes a long way in reducing excess heat in the LincStation N2. There's still no Kensington Security Slot present, which is a bit of a shame, considering it's a data storage device.

On the left and right of the LincStation N2, it's just the two-tone brushed metal and plastic top covering.

On the bottom, there are two bay doors, each of which contains two NVMe slots, and these are flanked by two rather long rubber feet with a good half-centimeter height to assist the passive cooling of the unit. As you can see above, the bay doors include preinstalled thermal pads for the SSDs.

Upon removing the two bay doors of the NVMe slots you'll find a mostly plastic enclosure, however the doors themselves are metal with thermal pad covering. One thing I like about these slots is that they do not use a screw or bolt to hold the drives in place. It is a pull spring clip system. So you pull the clip up, add the drive and let go, which clamps it into place [image]. However, this system only works for 2280 lengths. In addition, on the left NVMe bay you have easy access to the removable eMMC flash drive.

Setup

BIOS

As with the N1, the Aptio BIOS can also be accessed during boot on the LincStation N2 by mashing the DEL key. One thing to note however, on booting you only have one second to change the boot options, for the choice to run Memtest86+, or other Unraid related boot options. If you're too slow than the N2 will boot to Unraid, which is the default choice.

Populating the LincStation N2

TEAMGROUP supplied us with two MP44Q 4TB NVMe SSDs and two QX 4TB 3D NAND QLC 2.5 Inch SATA III SSDs. The MP44Q are PCIe 4.0 x4 drives and currently cost $235.99 on Amazon or Newegg. The 2.5-inch QX drives are a little cheaper at $189.99 on Amazon or Newegg. Sabrent supplied us with a couple of Rocket 4 Plus 2TB drives ($186.99 on Amazon), which we also used.

Documentation

The documentation booklet's 24 pages in English, German, or French, included in the box is quite clear on how to populate the LincStation N2 with SSDs, with instructions on how to activate the Unraid Basic key (with the activation code card that is included), along with how to setup a disk array and basic getting started tips.

Initial Setup

The setup also changed slightly from the N1 to the N2. After pointing your web browser to http://tower.local/you are required to set a password for root; previously, it was already determined as root / 123456.

The LincStation N2 comes preinstalled with Unraid on the internal flash disk, so all you are really required to do is set your user account and set up a disk array. Unraid defaults to a RAID5-style array, which is perfectly fine for our use. The BASIC (or trial) license of Unraid supports up to six storage devices, which can make things a bit difficult with wanting to transfer data from a external disk to a fully populated array. A Plus license costs $59, so you would have to decide if that's worth the extra expense.

The main dashboard of Unraid

After logging in, you are presented with the main dashboard of Unraid, and at this point, I checked for updates and was offered 7.0.1, which was updated from 6.12.14. I checked the release notes and known issues before upgrading, and aside from ZFS storage pools not being downgradable back to 6.x (once migrated) it seemed like a painless update.

I assigned all six SSDs to the array, this meant I was unable to assign a cache device due to license limitations, but seeing as all of our disks are solid state drives, we won't be needing a cache disk.

After troubleshooting the inability to access to SMB shares, I was finally able to access the share I created on my LAN by typing \\TOWER\public in File Explorer, which enabled its visibility double clicking within Network to TOWER.

The internal array check (of six disks) reported an average speed of 325 MB/sec, which is not that quick, considering the slowest (2.5 inch) disks support up to 600 MB/sec on their own. The OS is written to the internal flash drive, but in order to install apps, an array must be present since the /appdata/ folder is saved on the disk array.

I ran a CrystalDiskMark test on a mapped network drive from within Windows 11 24H2 PC connected over a 10 GbE hub, and as you can see there is quite a major difference in network transfer speeds thanks to the upgraded 10 GbE port with almost four and a half times difference in (sequential) read speed and almost four times faster writing speeds.

We can break it down further:

• Sequential read on the N2 was up to 4.57x or 357% better than on the N1
• Random read on the N2 was up to 54% better than on the N1
• Sequential write on the N2 was up to 3.98x or 298% better than on the N1
• Random write on the N2 was up to 2.39x or 139% better than on the N1

The 10GbE upgrade from gen to gen is really showing its worth right here.

Heat

I do not own a thermal camera, but as far as heat goes, this unit can get a bit hot. If we rely on the fact that Unraid is correctly reporting disk temperatures, the max temperature I recorded was during the Disk Array check with the Parity disk reporting a temperature of around 54C (other drives reported between 43 and 51C) which is still well below PCIe Gen 4 drive's max rating of 85C.

With a CrystalDiskMark benchmark, none of the Teamgroup (T-FORCE) SSDs went over 40C, and the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus drives did not exceed 31C.

Unraid comes with a community app store that contains tens of thousands of apps. In some cases, there are multiple flavors of the same app, such as Plex, so do look out for the OFFICIAL stamped in the top right corner of the app to be sure you are installing the intended version, or maybe you prefer a different take on the app, it's up to you! I installed Plex, and all I had to do was assign a temp directory for Plex Transcode and add a path for my media. After copying some media files over and accessing the new Plex server from my Google TV, I could start streaming immediately.

Conclusion

The ups

As of writing, you can get this for the early bird pricing of only $309, which is 30% off its slightly higher than N1's $399 MSRP pricing of $439. This makes it a seriously competitive product. I'll not mince words, for what it delivers, it is good value for your money. Things I like about the N2 include the newer, and more efficient Alder Lake CPU, with support for AV1 decoding and— for obvious reasons, the upgrade from 2.5 GbE to 10GbE gives it a massive boost over its predecessor.

You are also not locked into Unraid. If you want, you can remove the eMMC flash drive, located in the left NVMe bay, and flash it with something else, like TrueNAS, Xpenology, or some other NAS OS. However, be warned that Unraid (once activated) locks to the GUID of the eMMC flash drive, so it's best to ensure you have a backed up image of the flash drive's contents, and be careful not to misplace it should you opt to replace it with a different flash drive.

The downs

One of things we can't ignore, is the current cost of large-capacity SSD drives, which eclipse their older HDD counterparts in price. So, moving to an all-SSD NAS can be a painful investment. In addition, this NAS also only has one Ethernet port, but on the flip side, an all-SSD NAS means less heat dissipation, and it is far more energy efficient, especially with the mere 6W max TDP of the Intel N100.

So let us talk about why this has a lower score than the LincStation N1. For me, this loses a point in comparison to the N1 for removing WiFi and Bluetooth support, arguably important features for a homelab/media-server setup. There's still only one Ethernet port, which means no bonding; okay, 10GbE is plenty of bandwidth, and it's still quite expensive versus 1/2.5 GbE solutions, so we can possibly forgive LincPlus for this.

In addition, it's a shame they stuck with the same materials of the N1, it would have been nice to be able to distinguish them apart, but also fix the horrible plastic fingerprint magnet top covering. However, it is $40 more expensive with the main differences being a newer CPU, the 10 GbE, and removed WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2. I was not privvy to the reasoning behind these omissions.

Is it worth it?

It is less than half the $729 cost of the (arguably more powerful) 8-bay TerraMaster F8 Plus we reviewed last fall, as well as half the cost than Synology's DS923+, which costs $618.99, or the slightly cheaper $471.20 QNAP TS-464, of which, if you're okay with fiddling, technically have six bays if you populate the HDD bays with 2.5-inch SATA SSDs and assign the two NVMe drives as a volume.

There is also a lot of community support regarding the apps you can install in Unraid on the LincStation N2, so you won't have to look far and wide to get yourself up and running. So it ain't all bad. I'd argue that this is still great value for money.

According to the User Manual, the LincStation N2 has a domestic warranty period of 12 months (from the date of purchase) which is not extendable and covers the basics such as build workmanship and breakdowns during normal use.

As of publishing the LincStation N2 is available exclusively through Kickstarter, with an earlybird pricing of $309 that will remain active until next Sunday (April 6), otherwise the MSRP is $429 with an estimated delivery in April 2025.

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