LincStation N1 Mini 6-Bay NAS Storage - Intel Celeron N5105 Quad-Core | 16GB RAM | 128G eMMC | 2x2.5 HDD Slots + 4xM.2 NVMe Slots | 2.5GbE | Network Attached Storage | 2-Year Warranty (Diskless)

[Will update as I progress through testing various operating systems and interesting attached USB devices]**Windows 11**23H2 installs without too many issues but Windows was unable to find *many* drivers. Using the most recent ISO (install date June 1, 2024) required downloading & installing the Intel 'Chipset INF Utility' from Intel's website, 'Intel Driver & Support Assistant (Intel DSA)' from Intel's website, 'Intel(R) GNA Scoring Accelerator' module driver from catalog.update.microsoft.com, and the 'Intel(R) Serial IO GPIO Host Controller - INT34C8' driver from catalog.update.microsoft.com. The last two are in cab format and need to be extracted.After that all missing driver warnings in device manager were resolved.The NVME lanes are PCIe gen3 x1, as reported by CrystalDiskInfo so you will not benefit from faster gen4 drives and speed per drive is capped at about 985MB/s which is the theoretical max throughput. I saw about <850MB/s with Crucial P3 4tb gen3 NVME drives for sequential 4k reads and significantly less on writes.The Jasper Lake platform does not support RST so there are no RAID options. I was able to install OS to a 2.5" SATA SSD and then create a striped 4x4tb data volume (Crucial P3) with Windows 11 Disk Manager. Performance was good enough to saturate a 2.5gbe network connection which is the best you could hope for, I guess.A Crucial X6 4tb USB 3.2 drive saw a little over 800MB/s sequential reads and writes on the USB-C front port which is very good and in line with other benchmarks for this drive. I have not tested the rear pair of USB 3 ports to determine if they are 3.2 gen 2 (10Gbps) as my devices are all USB-C and I did not have a gen 3.2 capable adapter (on order). Reviews & research I've done indicate they are so I'll be testing some of the 2 & 4 bay USB 3.2 enclosures I have.Realtek RT8125bg USB-C adapters worked great with the most recent Realtek driver. I'll be testing SMB multichannel and will update with througput (iperf) soon, hopefully.Next up will be Proxmox, OpenMedia Vault, and likely Debian 12.5 ('Bookworm') and possibly TrueNAS Scale.The downsides so far:1) NVME drives limited to Gen3 x1 which cripples just about every decent drive. There is no RST or RAID option available on this platform so OS level striping/mirroring/etc. is needed if you want fast throughput.2) UnRaid license that ships is limited to 6 drives.3) 2.5" drive bays are limited to <9.5mm which basically means you're stuck with <2tb SMR drives or SATA SSDs.4) N5105 is 4 cores but no hyperthreading so this will limit virtualization options. The 16gb of RAM is soldered so no upgrades their either.5) HDMI output was unusable on both of the TVs that I tried during Windows 11 installation. About 15% of top, bottom, left, and right are not viewable and unfortunately the two TVs I tried did not have adjustments for overscan. Attaching to an Asus 27" HDMI monitor was fine, however. After Windows completed installation and Intel video drivers were updated, however, I was able to re-attach to the TVs and they scaled properly.6) During benchmarks the fan is pretty loud. The machine also beeps, loudly, on start up which is a bit annoying.7) Drive activity lights are annoying af and I don't see any way to turn them off. I might disassemble and see if I can detach the drive activity LEDsI picked mine up during lightning sale, with 5% promo code and a second 10% promo code, $60 in Bing rewards converted to Amazon GC, and another $30 in Prime Visa rewards. 6% cash back brought my final cost to just under $200 after tax. Definitely worth it at that price. I would not pay $399 but would probably pick up a second unit for <$285. The form factor is excellent and if I can adjust the thermal & fan settings and disconnect the annoying LED I think it would be a great living room HTPC or a multipurpose NAS & light Docker/LXC/virtualization host.

The price was the main selling point. As my forst NAS system it was not difficult to setup at all. I loaded it with 8 tb and configured it for 2 partition and 6 storage. It's also works for its intended use of a storage server and mild streaming service.

This is a follow up review. After several days of attempting to get this NAS to function I gave up and sent it back to Amazon. Here are the issues I would alert future user to:1) It comes with a 30 day eval license. The unit is essentially inert until you load the license. Evidently you need to buy a license for operation beyond the 30 days. I never even got that far since to use the 30 day license you also need to create a so called “UNRAID” account. I tried a number of times, but the web portal would tell me either I entered the wrong password or that the account I was trying to create already existed. At this point in the process, I discovered if you want to talk to their tech support you have to buy a consulting contract. The consequence here is that I was never able to license this UNRAID application so the device never could function as a NAS.2) Another problem I was having was that the power ON button did not work reliably. To get the unit to power up it seemed to need some combination of repeatedly pressing/releasing the power button while simultaneously disconnecting and reconnecting the power cord. This is probably a case where the reset logic input to the units CPU isn’t working.3) There is no PDF version of the user manual for this device. The manual is online, but it’s presented in lots of little segments. It would seem this was done so that you can’t just copy the whole thing into Word, then save it locally.4) I suppose I would be writing a different review if this thing would have powered up smoothly, and I could have gotten the UNRAID license to install. Maybe the $249 annual consulting contract from the URAID company would have solved those problems. As is I spent $399 on the LincStation and $360 on NVMe sticks and just didn’t want to send any more money down this rat hole. As I write this review, the LincStation is on its way back to Amazon.5) Let me finish on a high note, mechanically the LincStation looks well made, all precision aluminum and plastic castings. Well thought out cooling and secure mounting for its NVMe sticks and its two SSD drives. It’s a nice compact fan free nice looking package.

As someone else wrote “its close, but not there” I was expecting it to be the size of a tv dvd player, and is quite smaller than that.It needs a bigger brother, maybe for 3.5” drives.This one needs to be at least 3 sata drives though, and it needs to accept larger 2.5” spinning sata drives, I bought some 4tbs and nope.I’m not unhappy, but I want just a little more from this same design. You’re on the right track. I hope you keep working on this design.I kind of want to put three in a cluster, I have nvmes I need to install in things like this.