Unable to Create Hard Links on Samba Share

I am trying to create backup snapshots to my Samba shared drive. The idea is rather than overwriting the backup every time, I would like to create incrementing backup with hard links using rsync as described here. With the example below, after an initial sync to the "original" backup folder, I want to create a second backup of "~/source" in the "test" folder using the following command:

rsync -av --progress --link-dest=/mnt/NAS/test/original/ $HOME/source/ /mnt/NAS/backup/test

I have tested it successful in my home folders and managed to confirm that the second folder is inded made up of hard link rather than a copy of the files themselves:

sending incremental file list
created directory /home/anthony/backup/test

sent 199 bytes  received 12 bytes  422.00 bytes/sec
total size is 372,377,648  speedup is 1,764,822.98

new files created: 0
hard link created: 4

356M    ~/backup/original
4.0K    ~/backup/test

However, when I do the same operation on the NAS drive via samba using the same script, rsync does a full copy of the files (see size of of the "test" folder and number of files Vs hard links:

sending incremental file list
created directory /mnt/NAS/test/test
./
20220415.docx
New File.txt
New Microsoft Excel Worksheet.xlsx
Movie.avi

sent 218 bytes  received 72 bytes  6.11 bytes/sec
total size is 372,377,648  speedup is 1,284,060.86

new files created: 4
hard link created: 0

357M    /mnt/NAS/backup/original
357M    /mnt/NAS/backup/test

I am led to believe that this is due to the fact that Samba is replicating Windows filesystems which don't understand hard links but just in case, am I doing anything wrong or is there a way around it?