LincStation N1

[Lolight]

LincPlus have announced a new 6-bay SSD NAS system that will come with Unraid pre-installed.

 

https://www.lincplustech.com/products/lincstation-network-attached-storage-pre-order

 

Robbie at NASCompares has been provided some info directly from LincPlus.

They claim that it's powered by Unraid Standard (??) Version.

They state: "The NAS will include a license and customers do not need to buy another license."

 

@SpencerJ

 

Are you aware of the development?

Has the product and its configuration been tested and/or approved for full compatibility with Unraid?

Is the license legit? Did they mis-label the license version?

 

 

[SpencerJ]

10 hours ago, Lolight said:

Are you aware of the development?

Has the product and its configuration been tested and/or approved for full compatibility with Unraid?

Is the license legit? Did they mis-label the license version?

Yes- I’m aware. 
It’s in the process of being tested. 
It will be a legitimate Basic license as long as testing goes smoothly. 

[Lolight]

On 8/31/2023 at 2:33 PM, SpencerJ said:

It’s in the process of being tested. 
It will be a legitimate Basic license as long as testing goes smoothly. 

Do you have any news on testing?

It's been a while...

Thank you.

[Lolight]

A review:

 

 

[SpencerJ]

On 10/15/2023 at 8:07 PM, Lolight said:

Do you have any news on testing?

It's been a while...

Thank you.

 

Hey there,

It's sounding like they will be opening up pre-orders soon via indiegogo and depending on how that goes, production should ramp in early to mid next year.

 

 

[SpencerJ]

On 10/18/2023 at 11:35 AM, SpencerJ said:

 

Hey there,

It's sounding like they will be opening up pre-orders soon via indiegogo and depending on how that goes, production should ramp in early to mid next year.

 

 

Campaign is live 

https://t.co/sqY3pN69s5

[Lolight]

The latest review:

 

 

[Kilrah]

9 hours ago, SpencerJ said:

Campaign is live 

https://t.co/sqY3pN69s5

Kinda deceptive marketing there IMO. As we all know here what they advertise as features can totally be set up but the way it's presented is "does it out of the box" while people here who help others set these things up on the daily will know it's far from that.

 

Since this is obviously oriented towards more of the average person it should at least have notes that say those depend on the user installing and setting up popular apps like Nextcloud, Jellyfin,...  and not a built-in/one click solution.

[diste66]

There is also the claim of 20TB of usable space with the use of 4TB drives, which I believe might imply all disks in a single array with 1 parity disk. 

I do see a lot of conflicting opinions on whether it's a good idea to mix SATA and NVMEs like that or if it's advisable to put SSDs in an array at all. 

Would be good to know what the recommended configuration for this is. 

• A single array with all SSDs like they seem to suggest? 
• An array with 2.5" SATA HDDs and a ZFS pool with the 4 NVME slots? 
• Other? 

[JonathanM]

7 hours ago, diste66 said:

Would be good to know what the recommended configuration for this is. 

There isn't a "one size fits all" or even a "one size fits most" answer, because of all the different use cases.

 

At the moment with 6.12.4 still requiring an array disk, I would tend to recommend putting an extra USB memory stick as disk1 in the array, and defining various pools with the rest of the media, keeping like with like, so one or more pools with the NVME devices, and one or more pools with the SATA SSD's.

 

The main parity array is much better suited to spinning rust, so an all solid state media machine is kind of a special animal, requiring different care and feeding than most here on the forums are familiar with.

[bidmead]

@JonathanM, this question seems to me to be crucial. If I understand the problem correctly, there's an essential mismatch between the (great) idea of a parity checking hard drive (or drive pair) that is responsible for looking after changes of data on an array of drives and the way an SSD drive works.

 

While spinning rust can without too much contortion be thought of as capable of (re)writing single parity bits one at a time, the same process on an SSD is much more of a palaver. The picture I'm getting is of a future all-SSD NAS that uses only unassigned drives pooled using conventional Linux storage techniques (which are, of course, RAID-based).*

 

All the other good UnRAID stuff (readily installable docker apps and so on maintained by a vibrant community) should continue to thrive. But what happens to the name "UnRAID"?

 

-- 

Chris 

 

* LATER: Foolish error on my part. These pools are categorised as  "user-defined pools", not "unassigned drives".

Edited February 23 by bidmead
Foolish error, as noted.

[JonathanM]

36 minutes ago, bidmead said:

The picture I'm getting is of a future all-SSD NAS that uses only unassigned drives pooled using conventional Linux storage techniques (which are, of course, RAID-based).

 

All the other good UnRAID stuff (readily installable docker apps and so on maintained by a vibrant community) should continue to thrive. But what happens to the name "UnRAID"?

Why should the name Unraid be an issue? BTW, unassigned devices is only recommended as a way to attach temporary media, permanent storage should be put into various pools, which can use XFS for single device pools, and BTRFS or ZFS for multi-device pools, all of which can participate in the user share system, where unassigned devices can't.

 

Honestly, I'm not sure what you are asking. The unique single or double parity spinning rust pool type will still be available for those that wish to use it.

[bidmead]

7 hours ago, JonathanM said:

Honestly, I'm not sure what you are asking. The unique single or double parity spinning rust pool type will still be available for those that wish to use it.

Apologies for not being clear. I was suggesting that the parity solution for which spinning rust is well-suited won't be useful for all-solid-state NAS devices, which will instead have to rely on RAID-based storage pool solutions on unassigned devices.

 

The recommendation about unassigned drives you mention seems to me to refer to their use in current conventional HD-based UnRAID configurations.

 

It appears that solid state storage will change that, particularly in future versions of the operating system that make the main (optionally parity-protected) array itself an option.

 

> Why should the name Unraid be an issue?

 

In which case the name "UnRAID" might be thought to be inappropriate.

 

-- 

Chris

Edited February 19 by bidmead
Removed a redundant comma.

[Kilrah]

Most people won't do all solid-state, more storage for the same cost trumps fast access for most cases, the array has a lot of life ahead of it.

 

This particular product aims somewhere else but it'll ikely be a niche. And you _can_ use SSDs in the array if you want, will just be a little less fast than in a ZFS pool.

[bidmead]

Thanks, @Kilrah. But I'd suggest that the "most people" argument here demonstrates its usual weakness. UnRAID itself isn't designed for "most people". And the Linkstation N1  is certainly not designed for spinning rust users.

 

Lime Technologies choosing to tie in with this device appears to signal that it's looking to evolve UnRAID to properly include all-SSD NASes. That's not to say there's any thought of abandoning HDs and the parity-protected array for which HDs are well-suited.

 

But with the N1, Lime is taking on the challenge of SSDs. These storage devices can, as you suggest, be kluged into a conventional UnRAID main array, but they don't bit-flip at all well and engineers wince at the idea.

 

-- 

Chris

[bidmead]

I need to correct myself here. I've returned to Unraid after an absence of a couple of years following a hardware failure, and haven't yet got my head around some of the newer developments.

 

I had assumed that ZFS, XFS and BTRFS pools, not forming part of the main Unraid array, would be categorised as "unassigned devices". I've since learned that this binary categorisation is wrong: there's a third category of "user-defined pools", to which these newer storage formats belong.

 

This makes nonsense of my response to @JonathanM, so my apologies are due. Let me rally my thoughts and see if I can straighten out what I was trying to say, which I think remains valid:

1. The core idea of a parity protected array depends entirely on the ability of a dedicated parity-maintaining device (comprising one or two drives) to track bit switching in close to real time as new data are written to any of the several other drives comprising the array. 
2. Hard drives are well designed to do this, at their own pace. Solid state devices using NAND can emulate this, and probably with impressive speed. However, although the SSD controller can comfortably write a zero bit into a cell that previously stored a one, it has to copy out an entire block of data to a new set of cells if it's required to overwrite a zero with a one.
3. This elaborate choreography leaves wastelands of out-dated data that will need to be TRIMmed by the operating system from time to time. Copying an entire block that subsequently has to be erased by a high voltage before it can be reused, just to accommodate a single bit-flip, accelerates wear and significantly shortens the life of the device. 
4. So while SSDs are valuable for storing chunks of data in normal use, they are not a worthy technology for bit-by-bit parity matching. This suggests that Unraid implemented on an all-solid-state NAS should not employ the traditional parity-checked main array. Instead, its data will optimally be stored in one or more user-defined pools. Very likely these pools will employ RAID configurations.

That's my thinking. In attempting to express it as clearly as possible I notice I've fallen into a tone that sounds authoritative. This is spurious. As I say, I'm still trying to get to grips with all this and there's lots of room for me to be wrong. Please straighten me out as appropriate.

 

-- 

Chris

 

Edited February 23 by bidmead
Had to sort out my ones and zeros in item 2.

[JonathanM]

The parity protected array will be just another pool type soon™, with no requirement to use it. It will still be available for those wishing to use it for all the original benefits it gives for spinning rust, separate file systems per volume, ability to spin down when not accessed, etc. The current requirement of a single volume assigned as disk1 to start the pools will go away.

[bidmead]

Thanks for the steer, @JonathanM. Categorising the parity-protected array as another kind of user-defined pool makes a lot of sense. Meanwhile I'm following your advice (and Spencer's) with a dummy 4GB USB stick standing in for the conventional disk1 array.

 

-- 

Chris

 

[bidmead]

Tested Technology has posted part 1 of its review of Unraid on the LincStation N1. Comments, here or on the Tested Technology Web site, would be very welcome indeed.

 

-- 
Chris

[Karlsbergh]

On 3/8/2024 at 12:24 PM, bidmead said:

Tested Technology has posted part 1 of its review of Unraid on the LincStation N1. Comments, here or on the Tested Technology Web site, would be very welcome indeed.

 

-- 
Chris

How's the fan noise?

 

I'm tempted by this device as a living room unit, which means it has to be quiet.