LincPlus LincStation E1 review: A clever little 4-bay NAS appliance at an incredibly low price

Chinese manufacturer LincPlus started life producing budget-priced and aesthetically pleasing laptops and tablets. But moved its focus onto the NAS market a couple of years ago. Its first product in 2024 was the LincStation N1, which boldly claimed to be the world's first six-bay all SSD appliance, followed by the N2 the following year, which employed the same compact chassis and delivered a big performance boost.

In this review, we take an early look at the LincStation E1 – a table-top NAS which teams up two LFF/SFF SATA hot-plug drive bays with a pair of M.2 NVMe SSD slots. Recently launched on the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform, its biggest claim to fame is its very low price, with the first 200 units going at a super-early-bird price of €129, followed by an early-bird price of €149 and then a regular price of €219, which pans out to around £190.

Unlike the N1 and N2, which both employ Lime Technology's Unraid software, the E1 introduces LincPlus' very own LincOS operating system. Unraid is undoubtedly a powerful OS with plenty of features, but it isn't the easiest to configure, and LincOS aims to deliver a more user-friendly experience.

LincPlus LincStation E1 review: Design and hardware features

The E1 employs a solidly constructed plastic chassis with the two telescopic tool-free hot-swap drive carriers accessed by removing the magnetic upper cover. In the base, you'll find a non-magnetic cover with the two M.2 NVMe slots behind it and a single fan sitting directly on top of them.

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It's all change in the CPU department as LincPlus moves away from Intel, with the E1 receiving a quad-core 2GHz Rockchip RK3568 SoC sporting an ARM Mali G52 GPU and a 1TOPs NPU. Memory is the DDR4 variety with the 4GB soldered on the motherboard and not upgradeable.

The early pre-launch model we received has a 2.5GbE network port, which had been dropped down to Gigabit on production models that retain the integrated dual-band Wi-Fi support. There's more; you have a USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 USB port at the front and two more USB-A 2.0 ports at the rear with the HDMI 2.1 port alongside receiving 4K 60Hz video from the SoC's GPU.

LincPlus LincStation E1 review: Swift deployment

For testing, we fitted two 4TB Seagate IronWolf NAS HDDs, added a couple of Kingston M.2 NVMe SSDs, and made sure the NVMe bay cover had been pushed forward until it was locked in place. As our pre-release unit had a 2.5GbE port, we hooked the appliance up to a basic 1/10GbE Netgear switch so we could test over Gigabit.

Multiple deployment options are available, as you can attach an HD monitor, keyboard, and mouse to the appliance and use the desktop user interface. The easiest method is to install the LincStation Windows, iOS, or Android client apps, which run a wizard for registering the appliance and setting an admin account.

To create storage spaces, you select the Profile/My Device/Storage Management option from the client and choose your drives with RAID0, 1, 10, 5, and 6 arrays supported. We created separate RAID1 mirrored storage spaces for the HDDs and NVMe SSDs. The appliance doesn't support SSD caching in the traditional sense, but you can use NVMe SSDs as a fast repository for file sharing and downloads.

LincPlus LincStation E1 review: LincOS features

LincOS is easy to use, and we found that all features can be accessed directly from the client apps, which open with quick access links to personal storage spaces and a collection of apps for file sharing, multimedia services, remote downloads, and more. The client Profile menu offers a desktop mode, which presents the same graphical interface as a locally attached monitor.

The admin user can load a basic web UI from the client with access to personal spaces for viewing, creating, and sharing folders, monitoring upload tasks, loading a recycle bin, creating encrypted spaces, and managing share spaces. New users are created from the client, and they can log in from their choice of client and use the web UI for accessing their personal space, task monitoring, and a recycle bin.

The Backup Disk tool secures PC and mobile data to the appliance, where you choose local folders, an appliance storage space, the file types to be backed up, and whether to use WiFi only or any network. The Sync Disk tool keeps selected folders on the local device and NAS in step, and in both cases, the processes are automated with an option to run jobs on demand as well.

The Secure Space feature allows users to create hardware-encrypted, password-protected areas in storage spaces for private data. Folders in this space cannot be shared, and the client provides an option for admins to back up encryption passwords for all user accounts for disaster recovery purposes.

Multimedia services are extensive as LincOS has music and video centre apps, a smart album for photos, and Photo Frame for creating slideshows. The smart album's local AI-powered photo image and facial recognition work well, while the smart library AI document centre provides full text search facilities for all file content.

LincPlus LincStation E1 review: Gigabit performance

With a share on the appliance's HDD RAID1 storage space mapped to a Dell PowerEdge Windows Server 2025 host on our 10GbE LAN, Iometer recorded sequential read and write rates of 110MB/sec and 99MB/sec. Real-world numbers were good with 25GB file copies between the NAS and server delivering average read and write rates both of 98MB/sec, while our 22.4GB backup test folder with 10,500 small files was secured using drag and drop at 52MB/sec.

Moving to a share on the RAID1 NVMe SSD mirror saw minor performance improvements with Iometer recording sequential read and write rates of 110MB/sec and 93MB/sec. Read and write speeds for our large file copies stepped up slightly to 100MB/sec and 99MB/sec, while our backup test mustered 54MB/sec.

LincPlus LincStation E1 review: Is it worth it?

The KickStarter campaign ends at the start of June and with a projected regular price of around £190, the LincStation E1 is probably the lowest-cost 4-bay NAS on the market. It's a shame LincPlus dropped the 2.5GbE port but its Gigabit performance should satisfy the target market of home and small business users.

A standout feature is the new LincOS software as even though it's still in development, it already offers a good range of storage features with the smart LincStation clients making light work of configuration and management. LincPlus advised us that the next LincOS update will add an improved web GUI, a new task manager, drag and drop support for the cloud drive module, a redesigned music module and the LincClaw AI assistant.

LincPlus LincStation E1 specifications