About the Pickup Dock N3Plus
The N3 Plus is a single-bay home consumer NAS product, positioned as an entry-level NAS, with a price of less than 400 yuan depending on the version, which should be the lowest priced finished NAS on the market. In terms of functions, it also has most of the functions of NAS home scenarios, such as data backup, AI photo album, remote access, Docker container, video wall management, etc., and it is also easy to use and easy to use, which is very suitable for NAS beginner users who have a small budget but need private cloud storage and also like tossing.
The overall configuration of the Pickup Dock N3 Plus is as follows:
- 处理器:采用的是瑞芯微 RK3566(Cortex-A55 四核,主频 1.8GHz),集成 Mali-G52 GPU 和 1TOPS NPU,支持 AI 加速。
- Memory & Storage: Standard version with 2GB/4GB DDR4 memory + 32GB eMMC flash memory; There is also a Starlight version with 2GB/4GB DDR4 RAM + 128GB eMMC flash memory. The Starlight Edition can earn income through the bandwidth at home (equivalent to PCDN), and if the network conditions at home are better, you can directly enter.
- Network and interface: The N3 Plus is equipped with a Gigabit Ethernet port, and the standard version also has a dual-band WiFi version, with a theoretical rate of up to 867 Mbps. Other expansion ports include an HDMI 2.0, a USB 3.0, and an SD card slot.
- Hard Disk Support: Compatible with both 3.5/2.5-inch mechanical or solid-state SATA hard drives, up to 20TB
Unpacking the product
The packaging is quite simple, and you can see the three colors of the series on the front: white, black, and mint mist blue. At the same time, the side is also marked with the product concept of "recording the most beautiful you in the name of picking up light".
There are relevant parameters of the product and manufacturer information on the back. At the same time, I can also see that the version I got is: 4+32G standard/WiFi version, the color scheme is mint fog blue.
Open the package and you can see that the internal protection measures are quite in place, although it is positioned as an entry NAS, the packaging is not ambiguous, and the product is wrapped in foam all around.
Let's look at the accessories part first, and the ones given are: labeling, power adapter, warp & screw package, manual, and network cable.
The specification of the power adapter is 12V2.5A, and the full-load power does not exceed 30W, which shows how low the power consumption of this pickup dock N3Plus is~.
Then look at the host body, you can see that its overall design is still very small, and holding it in your hand is like holding a dictionary book; This mint mist blue color scheme of mine is also very good-looking, giving people a fresh and elegant feeling; Its shell is made of skin-friendly materials with oil-injected technology, and although the essence is still plastic, the feel and texture are not bad.
The product adopts a buckle + screw fixing design, this is the internal diagram after opening, because it is a single disk, so the structure looks quite simple, and the plastic basket with the motherboard is the bracket of the hard disk, which is fixed by screws.
This position can be seen that it uses a dual-antenna design.
You can also see that there is also an active cooling fan connected to the motherboard.
This is the appearance of removing the hard drive bracket to fix the hard disk, and the hard disk is fixed on it with the two hard disk screws in the screw package.
After removing the hard drive mounting bracket, we can also see that it is connected to the Realtek 6222D-UUC Wi-Fi module on the motherboard.
According to the query data, this Wi-Fi module complies with the IEEE 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac 2x2 MIMO standard, and can theoretically reach a transmission rate of 867 Mbps. It should be noted that it also integrates Bluetooth 5.0 in hardware, but the light pickup dock has not yet been used, and I hope that the whole interesting function will come out in the later stage~
After fixing the hard drive, continue to fix the hard drive bracket. By the way, it is actually very inconvenient to exchange the hard disk design of the N3Plus under the light pick-up dock, and I hope that the future products can continue to be optimized.
After installing the hard disk and closing the shell, you can see that the lower right corner of the front is its main power switch and 4 LED indicators, which can observe the working conditions of the hard disk, WiFi, system, and power supply at any time.
Behind it is a large area of heat dissipation holes.
Its I/O jack is concentrated at the top, from left to right: HDMI2.0 interface, USB3.0 interface, SD card slot, Gigabit LAN port, and Type-C power port. NAS at this price,HDMI interface and SD card slot are also arranged,To be honest, it's really rare~。
Because of its small size and good appearance, it is much more convenient to place, for example, I put it directly in front of my computer desk, and it is not inconsistent with the small host.
User experience
System Experience:
Can you think of it~, the light pickup dock N3Plus for hundreds of dollars, not only provides us with the system and functions that the finished NAS should have, but also provides a client including mobile phone APP, PC computer, and even Android TV, which really surprised me.
It is also super convenient to use, plug in the power and network cable for the first time, download the APP on the mobile phone, and scan the code directly according to the wizard to quickly register the administrator account and bind the device.
Let's take a look at the mobile APP side first, the overall interface is fresh and the layout is simple. All the function settings are clear at a glance, and the control is also very convenient, if you don't understand, it also provides more detailed tutorials and online customer service, which is very intimate.
Then there is the PC side, which also looks very refreshing, and the entire system functions are all at a glance here, including commonly used file management, photo albums, movies and television, downloads, Docker applications, etc. The UI interface may not have the beauty of the current new force NAS, but fortunately, the layout is more reasonable, it can be easy to use, and you can directly select what function you want.
There are not many network protocols supported, but the most commonly used SMB and WEBDAV are available. I CAN MOUNT OTHER NAS IN MY LAN VIA SMB, OR MOUNT THE LOCAL HARD DRIVE OUT VIA WEBDAV ON THE INTERNET.
As for the integrity of the system function, I have experienced it for several days, and I personally think it is pretty good, basically a relatively mature NAS system, including system information, user settings, and system operation status, etc., which can be queried at any time on the APP side or the PC side.
User Assignment & File Management:
Like traditional NAS, the N3Plus can also be logged in by multiple users. The difference is that the new user is not assigned by the administrator, but can be joined directly by scanning the QR code, just like when the device is bound, but I have not yet seen the more detailed permission division and management with the traditional professional NAS.
At the same time, the system also takes privacy into account, and each user is assigned an independent personal space, as well as a public space shared by all employees. Considering that users may have higher requirements for security and privacy, we can also set up private space and encrypted space, in the encrypted space, all files have been encrypted, and the source files can only be viewed after decryption, otherwise they cannot be opened and viewed at any time.
In the personal space, we can think of it as a folder of the local computer, and it is very convenient to upload and download files directly on the computer by dragging and dropping them back and forth, which is even stronger than many traditional professional NAS, because many professional NAS only support drag and drop, and downloading to the local can only be manual, the only complaint is that you can't press and hold the mouse to select more.
At the same time, we can also perform basic downloading, uploading, moving, encrypting, compressing and sharing of single or multiple files, which is as easy to use as we operate a computer.
Since it can compress files directly, it is also easy to decompress files naturally.
Of course, you can also open images, text documents, and some basic PDF or Word documents directly like a local folder. In other words, these functions of the Pickup Dock N3Plus also give it the attributes of a team office.
Back up and share:
Backup is arguably the most basic feature of a NAS. The Pickup Dock N3Plus makes it easy to create a backup of your computer's files. We can make a one-way incremental backup of any folder on the computer, that is to say, as long as there is a new content in the files on our computer, it will synchronize the new files to the hard disk of the Docking N3Plus, even if our local computer files are deleted by mistake, they can also be retrieved in the hard disk of the Optical Docking N3Plus.
It also supports backup between disks. Although the Pickup Dock N3Plus is a single-disk design, we can connect an external USB flash drive or a portable hard disk or the like, and set a backup frequency and execution time, so that it can automatically hot spare the important data in our hard drive.
Of course, what I personally prefer is its directory real-time syncing. It does not need to specify the time and frequency, and can synchronize and back up new files to a specified directory in real time. What's more, this designated directory can be an external USB flash drive or portable hard disk, or other NAS devices mounted by our SMB.
If you still want more secure data, it is also interconnected with Baidu network disk to achieve mutual download and backup. In other words, I was really surprised that the N3Plus could easily achieve the industry's most secure 3-2-1 data backup principle.
As for it, its sharing function also gives 3 different sharing methods, which are suitable for different sharing scenarios for internal and external sharing.
We can share any file directly in our personal space.
External sharing can be the same as network disk sharing, set the number of days of sharing and the extraction code, and then view it through the shared link.
Album backup experience:
Pickup dockN3Plus supports automatic incremental backup of mobile phone albums,In addition to albums,Including mobile phone screenshots,WeChat chat pictures, etc. can choose to automatically upload backup,And the latest version also supports Live GIF backup。
The backed-up album can be viewed, downloaded, or previewed directly in the "Pick Up Album". At present, it has relatively few arrangement, and there is no such thing as face recognition, scene recognition, and other finishing methods and AI functions that everyone is concerned about, but it is said that it has been developed internally and will be arranged for all users within the year.
However, we can simply sort and organize by manually adding albums.
Film & TV Experience:
Who would have thought that a NAS at this price would even give us out-of-the-box movie and television functions, we only need a simple setup, it can automatically organize and scrape the movies and TV series in our hard drive to generate a beautiful poster wall.
And the internal details also have film and television introductions, as well as similar film and television recommendations in the hard disk.
It also has a built-in player that allows you to open movies and TV files directly from your hard drive. I tried a 30+GB, bitrate at 26Mb/s 4K Blu-ray Dolby Vision, it can also play smoothly, and the color is normal.
The built-in player also supports some basic settings such as transcoding, setting audio tracks, subtitles, etc.
TV series can also directly select the episodes you want to watch in the details, which is more convenient.
If there are a few hard disks that fail to scrape due to non-standard naming, it doesn't matter, we only need to modify the correct film and television drama name in the "Film and Television Information Error Correction", and manually select the correct poster.
Docker Experience:
Advantage: A surprise +1 product function, I play Docker a lot, and I can experience Docker container service on a product at this price to be honest, it's the first time for me. The most intimate thing is that, considering novice players, it has built-in Qinglong panel, Alist network disk, QB download, CD, which are the most common and NAS deployed Docker container applications.
It's better to say Alist network disk, we click on it directly: "one-click deployment".
After a while, the system has been successfully deployed for us in less than a minute. We click directly on "Access" in the page.
You can directly open the web page of the Alist network disk, and ask you, is this experience better than that of thousands of traditional NAS?
Of course, we can also deploy other Docker containers according to our needs. Considering the network reasons, the Pickup Dock N3Plus also provides various solutions, such as changing the image source, customizing the image download, and picking up the dock agent. In particular, the Pickup Dock Agent directly stores hundreds of mirror sources on its own server, and we need to enter the image name to quickly download the required images to the local area under the normal network.
What's even more surprising is that it even supports virtual machines~. But what! This is a Docker-based Ubuntu system that supports ssh login. Although the reason for performance may not be a big deal, it is better than nothing, and it is good after all, right~.
Intranet penetration:
You read that right, this is a rare plus one at that price! For a few hundred dollars, you can enjoy the unlimited speed and unlimited bandwidth of the pick-up dock, and this function alone can make users without public IP worth the ticket price! I also tested the traffic to download the movies and television in the hard disk here, and the speed directly reached 4M/s, which directly ran up to the upper limit of my home's bandwidth.
At the same time, it also launched a very convenient pick-up pass-through service for Docker's external network access, but the free traffic of this service is 1GB per month. Because it is only for Docker services, 1GB can already meet the needs of the vast majority of ordinary users, so you don't have to worry about this.
However, if you have a public network like me, I recommend that you toss DDNS (dynamic domain name resolution). Highlights: Why is it recommended? Because the light dock provides us with a domain name for free, this experience value is not full~!
Final summary
At the end of the article, let's briefly talk about the two places that you may complain about the most:
- Processor: Because the Rockchip RK3566 processor used is an ARM architecture, many friends may worry that its performance is too weak, but in fact, this worry is unnecessary. Because for the current functions of the pickup dockN3Plus, this processor is completely sufficient, even if it is for Docker containers, the compatibility can reach more than 90%, and the Docker of common personal home scenarios is almost fully supported. The main thing is that the ARM architecture has the unique advantage of low power consumption.
- Slots: N3Plus can't expand RAID arrays because of single slots, so people feel unreliable and are worried about data security. First of all, it is certain that everyone's worry is still very necessary, and it must be a disk, and the data will be all gone. But what I've been emphasizing in all my NAS articles is that RAID doesn't keep your data safe, backup is king! Luckily, the N3Plus has a USB port and an SD card slot that allows you to automatically sync hot backup in real time, or manually back up to other storage devices using the SMB/WebDav network protocol.
On the whole, for the light pick-up dockN3Plus, it is certainly not as good as the "Mrs. Niu" of thousands of traditional NAS or new power NAS in terms of configuration and performance, but it can definitely be regarded as a "little sweet" at the level of 100 yuan.
After all, the lowest price is less than 400 yuan, and its functions are rich, easy to operate, and the power consumption is low enough. If you have an idle hard drive at home, you can use it right away, and the hard drive money will be saved, which can be said to be an ideal choice for those who have a limited budget but want to experience the functions of NAS.
Okay, the above is the content to share with you today, I am Stark-C, who loves to share, if today's content is helpful to you, please remember to collect, by the way, pay attention, and we'll see you next time! Thank you~