Ugreen is usually associated with power accessories, so releasing a series of NAS systems to a market that a few key players traditionally dominate is a bold move. It’s still the early days for the software side of things, but the DXP4800 Plus demonstrates they have a solid hardware platform from which to build. With containerized software from Docker, hardware acceleration for Plex, and even HDMI output to make this into a quick media center, it’s already a surprisingly adaptable NAS that should suit a lot of people’s needs. And although the software doesn’t quite match up to what some competitors offer, the combination of powerful hardware and good-enough-for-now software makes this a compelling option.
One small note:this is a Kickstarter campaign. However, the hardware is complete, and Ugreen is a reliable brand, so there’s no reason to think it won’t be delivered on time. At an RRP of $700, you’re able to potentially save 35% by pre-ordering.
Ugreen NASync DXP4800 Plus
While the software is still early-stage, the hardware is impressive and upgradeable, and the basics are all there—including Docker and hardware-accelerated Plex support. The DXP4800 Plus also offers HDMI output, letting it do double-duty as a simple hybrid media center.
Design and Specifications: It’s Definitely a NAS
There’s not a lot of wiggle room when it comes to the design aesthetic of a Networked Attached Storage system. You’ve got ports around the back, maybe some at the front, some flashy activity LEDs, and a set of drive caddies. Otherwise, it’s gonna be a black or grey box. In this case, Ugreen opted for gunmetal grey.
But there is one little flourish that defines the Ugreen NASync: those numbered drive bays. It’s not like you need to label something when there are only four of them, so they’re almost entirely superfluous (unless, like my wife, you think telling someone that it’s the “second cupboard along” means counting from the right, not the left, because reasons). But the stencil font is carefully selected and looks more like something you’d find adorning the hangar doors of a giant robot anime than a piece of consumer tech.
The port selection also implores you to not hide the DXP4800 Plus away in the attic gathering dust. On the front, it features a USB-A 3.2, USB-C port, and even an SD card slot. On the software side, this should allow you to quickly backup photos after a day of shooting. A quick-copy button would have been nice though, to avoid having to open up the NAS interface to initiate a copy.
Around the rear, there’s another surprise: an HDMI port, capable of 8K output (that wasn’t a typo, though obviously 8K is redundant for most people). This turns the DXP4800 Plus into a hybrid media center. This isn’t unheard of in the world of NAS systems, but it’s not that common, either—probably because most people want a NAS to be a NAS, and not to be a NAS + Media Center. More often than not, hybrid machines of all kinds are mediocre at both tasks and excelling at neither. In this case, if you want a quick way to play media stored on your NAS without the need for additional dongles or having to stream over your internal network, it’s surprisingly capable. For now you’ll need to select the file to play using the smartphone app.
Also on the rear, as is increasingly common outside of Synology devices, are multi-gigabit Ethernet ports; in this case, a generous 10GbE, and 2.5GbE. Of course, you’ll need a suitable multi-gigabit networking infrastructure to take advantage of this. Realistically you won’t see as big of a benefit as you’d hope, because the spinning platter drives will be the system bottleneck, but it’ll give you a small edge.
Included in the box are two Cat.7 gold-plated Ethernet cables. As long as you have a supported system and multi-gigabit Ethernet switch, you can be up and running with high-speed networking in no time.
As for internal hardware, the review model I have is a DXP4800 Plus, which features a 5-core Pentium Gold 8505, and a base 8GB of RAM upgradeable to 64GB. The smaller models and basic DXP4800 feature an N100. The 5-core chip is an interesting choice that offers more PCIe 4.0 lanes, and better Intel UHD graphics, making it an ideal choice for the prosumer who wants better graphical performance. The higher-end models feature an even more capable Intel Core i5, as well as dual 10GbE interfaces and Thunderbolt 4 ports.
Installation and Setup: Toolless
Screws and a screwdriver are included in the package, but for standard 3.5" drives, the installation requires no tools whatsoever. A simple push-button latch lets you add all four drives within minutes. This is perhaps the easiest NAS install I’ve seen yet—even simpler than the tool-less side clasps that Synology uses.
It gets more complicated if you use other drive sizes, swap out the RAM, or add M2 drives, but the standard setup is easy. For those wtih inquisitive little fingers running around, the drives can be locked using the supplied keys.
UGOS Pro OS: Promising, but Early Days
The DXP4800 Plus is a powerful NAS that can do a lot: the hardware is well specced, and performance should be fantastic. But in my years of reviewing various NASes, I’ve got a secret to tell you: it’s all about the software.
I use aSynology DS1821+ NASas my daily storage, not because it has the most powerful hardware, best performance, or even because it’s cheap (it certainly isn’t)—but because the software is superb. you’re able to have all the hardware features in the world, but it’s all pointless if the software doesn’t intuitively let you use it.
Ugreen have obfuscated the underlying OS by customizing it heavily and giving it the moniker UGOS Pro, but diving into a SSH session (enabled by default, I’ll note, which you might want to disable), we can see that UGOS Pro is based on Debian Bookworm 12.5, which was released in February 2024. That’s a great sign that it’s up to date and should have good compatibility with software, but since installing .deb packages through the main user interface isn’t supported, I wasn’t going to risk bricking the device to test installation from the command line.
You can access UGOS Pro through a web interface, desktop software, or smartphone app; all offer similar features. There’s little reason to use the desktop software unless you absolutely detest opening yet another browser tab. It’s identical, with no latency improvements (because it’s already super fast in a web browser). It is worth installing the smartphone app, however—for now, it’s the only way to select a video file and play it over HDMI—the feature should be coming to desktops, too, at some point.
You’ll find an App “Center,” but it has yet to be populated with anything beyond the basics. you may also manually install packages, but only in a specific custom .upk format that no one offers.
The good news is that Docker is available to install, opening up a world of containerized applications, such as Plex. The configuration is not obvious, however, and I was sent a few pages of instructions on how to set up Plex correctly. Still, it worked perfectly the first time with no permissions issues, and more importantly, the Intel UHD graphics fully support hardware-accelerated decoding. Hopefully, the process can be streamlined by the final release.
The UGOS system software should feel familiar to anyone who’s used a desktop PC before. There are widgets and notifications on the right side, icons on the desktop, and a menu button in the top left. It’s all very self-explanatory and doesn’t break any new ground in interface design. Creating shared folders is easy, as is making a Time Machine-compatible folder for Mac OS backups. The basics are certainly there.
Performance Testing: Brilliant
The most typical setup for a four-drive array is a RAID level 5, which offers one disk protection by distributing the parity bit across all drives. This gives a good balance between performance and safety. Should any single drive fail, the data on it can be rebuilt from the parity data on the remaining disks. Of course, you should always have a backup too: a NAS is not a backup, even with data redundancy.
On the DXP4800 and up, Ugreen offers a variety of RAID modes: RAID0 (striped for performance), RAID1 (mirrored), JBOD, and RAID5. But I’ll note that all these standard RAID implementations require drives of the same size, so you can’t mix and match drives as you can on a Synology Hybrid RAID system. You shouldn’t use anything besides RAID5 if you care about your data and performance. RAID0 might be faster, but it increases the risk of catastrophic data loss—if any drive in the array fails, you lose it all. RAID1 is too safe; you need twice as many drives to store the same amount of data (so in a four-bay system, you’d only have the capacity of two drives). JBOD just combines all the drives into one massive volume; it’s even worse than RAID0. Unless you have good reason to use any of these and know exactly what you’re doing, stick to RAID5 with four drives. In this mode, the “backup” is spread across all drives, giving one disk redundancy and only a small performance hit (but let’s be clear:RAID is not a backup).
To get the best speeds possible, you’ll want to ensure you’re using suitable infrastructure and that your client machine is multi-gig capable. I used the multi-gig capable port of theIvanky FusionDock Max 1, connected to aQNAP 2.5GbE switch.
For an unencrypted shared folder, I averaged 229.3MB/s in BlackMagic Disk Speed Test, with a 196.4MB/s read speed. Although the network interface is capable of much more, this is the performance limit of spinning disks. To get even better speeds, you would need to use the M2 SSD drives and have them set up as storage. That’s a bit unconventional, and more typically, they’d be used to speed up things like virtual machines rather than pure data storage.
I also tried playing H.265 movies through Plex for unsupported clients; my usual Plex server can’t do this, as it only has software decoding. It’s not a huge factor, as you should ideally be serving the raw data file and processing it on the client end, but in reality, that’s not always possible if you want access to your media anywhere. The DXP4800 Plus fully supports hardware decoding for Plex via the Intel UHD chip, and it works brilliantly. After about five to ten seconds of buffering, videos resumed with no choppy playback at whatever resolution and rate conversion I’d chosen, and the server status confirmed it was using hardware to transcode and add subtitles.
Can I call this a perfect Plex server? Combined with the powerful multi-gig network interface, I absolutely can and will.
If you need even better performance for certain Docker images, you can install an M.2 SSD to run them off—and this is where the high-speed Ethernet will really come into play.
Should You Buy The Ugreen DXP4800 Plus NAS?
From a hardware perspective, theUgreen NASync DXP4800 Plusreally impresses, with great connectivity with both 10GbE and 2.5GbE ports, versatility with an HDMI output, upgradeable memory, and M.2 NVMe SSD slots. It’s a solid bit of kit, for sure.
Although it’s still early days for software, and Ugreen doesn’t have nearly the quality or quantity of built-in software apps as competitors do, for most people, Docker and Plex will be all they need. The hardware transcoding works like a dream. While there are still some bugs to work out, the basics are all there, and things will only improve with time. I don’t know if I’m ready to trust mission-critical data to the DXP4800 Plus yet, but I’m getting there.
