The world of NAS devices has grown with the launch of Ugreen's own lineup. A bit of a random launch for the company typically known for its smartphone accessories and peripherals, you would be forgiven for being surprised. However, I've been impressed by Ugreen's first-ever NAS offering with the caveat that the software currently needs a lot of work.

In other words, buying the Ugreen NAS at this point in time is a commitment to the company's promises that it will improve the software, which it already has done leaps and bounds over the last few months. If you're like me and don't buy products based on promises of future updates (and we seriously don't recommend buying products based on those promises), then we suggest waiting to see what Ugreen has in store.

I received this NAS over a month ago, and the software experience back then was particularly poor. It's certainly improved, but there's so much with this NAS that needs to get better that, right now, make it a subpar option when compared to others on the market today. It certainly has potential, with fantastic hardware and improving software by the day.

About this review: I received the Ugreen DXP4800 Plus NAS with 16TB of HDDs from Ugreen for review on the 27th of February, 2024. The company had no input into the contents of this review.

Ugreen DXP4800 Plus: Pricing and availability

The Ugreen DXP4800 Plus is on sale through Kickstarter currently, but it's only available in the United States and in Germany. It retails for $600 MSRP, though it's currently on sale on Kickstarter for up to 40% off of the MSRP.

Design

Small but mighty

The Ugreen DXP4800 Plus is pretty standard in its design for a NAS. It's small and won't take up much space, and it packs a host of ports on the front and the back. Our unit is a single box with four drive bays and it's relatively silent most of the time. That's thanks to the hardware inside, which can actually be passively cooled a lot of the time without needing to spin up the fans.

On the front is a power button, SD card slot, USB port, and LEDs indicating hard drive activity. On the back are three USB ports, a HDMI port, and two Ethernet ports. The HDMI port isn't a typical one though, and it's only for outputting video files over HDMI rather than the NAS interface. It's great if you want to keep your NAS by your TV at all times, but otherwise, don't expect to be able to control this NAS directly.

Digging around with SSH, I found that this particular Ugreen NAS also comes with a 128GB NVME SSD preinstalled with a model number of YSO128GTLCW-E3C-2. I haven't been able to find any public devices with this model number, suggesting that this is a somewhat custom implementation.

Analyzing the PCI buses, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Ugreen has gone all out on the hardware that matters most here. Here is a list of the PCI buses that I identified on my system.

Out of the above, the ones that most stand out to me are the SATA controller and the non-volatile memory controller. This particular Phison memory controller supports PCIe Gen 3 with four lanes, and the SATA controller supports four SATA Gen 3 ports. It's a great memory controller for a device like this, particularly when using something like this in RAID means that you'll be pulling simultaneously datastreams in parallel. With the Intel Pentium 8505 supporting QuickSync too, you'll get full hardware transcoding with support for HEVC and AV1.

Overall, I don't have any complaints about the design here or the parts that are used. It's functional, there are enough ports, and it's pretty quiet thanks to the Pentium chip inside and the cooling profile that you get out of the box. The hardware chosen under the hood is powerful and exactly what you'd want from a NAS, and the Ethernet ports even combine to allow for a total bandwidth of 12.5GbE, with one port offering 10GbE and the other offering 2.5GbE.

Software

Quirky and very much a work in progress

The Ugreen DXP6800 NAS packs the company's UOS, a custom operating system that you interface with wirelessly on the same local network. UGOS is a Debian-based distro that uses the apt package manager to manage applications. You won't ever have to interface with this NAS over SSH if you don't want to, but for reasons we'll get into later, it's very likely that you'll need to use the terminal at least a little bit when it comes to running some applications.

The Ugreen NAS software is fine, but definitely far behind what's on offer with other NAS devices. It's a bit messy, feels a bit unstructured, and the setup process is needlessly painful. What I will say is that Ugreen has been iterating quickly on UGOS, as the state the software is in now is already miles better than it was when I first began testing this NAS over a month ago. For context, there wasn't even Docker support back then, significantly hampering the abilities of this NAS right out of the box.

There are small things throughout UGOS that bother me though, most notably relating to how content refreshes on the screen while applications are in use. For example, if you have a Docker container downloading, the only way to refresh the download percentage is to switch to another tab within the application and switch back. The same goes for other programs too, such as logs from Docker containers or download progress bars in Ugreen's Download application. That application, by the way, is a fork of Transmission.

UGOS applications are packaged as UPK files, and these come with HTML files for rendering the application's UI elements in the browser. Applications have to be built specifically for this, meaning that software developers (or community developers, in the case of open-source software) will need to build programs specifically for Ugreen's operating system. That's why Docker support is so important, as it removes the need for developers to focus specifically on Ugreen's hardware.

The Docker application, for what it's worth, is quite well put together. Ugreen stresses that it's in beta currently, but it's the most streamlined aspect of the entire software package that I've experienced. It's still far from perfect, but after wrangling with Jellyfin and a problem that took me an hour to identify, I was able to get it working and scanning shared folders across applications. The problem seems to come from Ugreen's Docker application, as it doesn't give the necessary permissions to containers to read and write to the folders that it mounts for their usage.

As an example, let's say I create a Jellyfin container that has access to a shared folder called Jellyfin/Movies, and I mount it to /movies locally inside of the container. The container, in root mode, can read, write, and execute from inside of that mount point, but the regular Jellyfin user (which is responsible for actually executing the Jellyfin application) inside the container cannot. The same happened when I attempted to install the Transmission container too, suggesting that there is an issue with how containers are being given access to files and folders on the NAS. The way to fix it was to execute a terminal inside of the Docker container and run the following command:

 chmod -R 777 /movies 

This is fully permissive, meaning everything has full read, write, and execute permissions from within that folder. It's not recommended to set this, but was a quick and easy way around the problems that I was facing. After that, I was able to link up Transmission and Jellyfin perfectly. I've reported this problem to Ugreen, and it'll hopefully be fixed in the future!

Should you buy the Ugreen DXP4800 Plus NAS?

You should buy the Ugreen DXP4800 Plus if:

• You want to try something new in the NAS world
• You want powerful hardware for cheaper
• You're a developer who can benefit from upgradeable RAM

You shouldn't buy the Ugreen DXP4800 Plus if:

• You're worried about software support
• You want an "it-just-works" experience

The Ugreen DXP4800 Plus is a shockingly good NAS for the price, but the entire thing is hampered by the software experience. It has improved leaps and bounds over the last month, enough that I'm confident in saying that it will be better in the future. However, you shouldn't buy products based on promises of improvements in the future, and that's exactly why I'd suggest waiting to see what updates Ugreen comes out with.

I personally love this NAS, despite the problems I've had making me want to tear my hair out at first. However, I only love it because I'm adept enough with Linux and Docker to figure out the problems I faced throughout the testing period. For the average person who just wants a NAS to work, it's hard to recommend it at this point in time. Even the applications available in the app center are lacking significantly, with the entire NAS being carried by its native Docker support. Without Docker, it's a lot harder of a product to love.

If you're on the fence, I'd suggest waiting it out. The hardware here is great with a lot of potential, and it's the software that needs work. You can even install your own OS on this NAS technically, though it's unclear how much Ugreen actually supports you doing that currently. The only benefit of picking it up now is that it's cheaper through Kickstarter, but otherwise, I'd wait it out.