UGREEN NASync DXP4800 Plus – Six Months In, Here’s My Honest Take
I’d been circling the NAS market for years without pulling the trigger. Synology felt overpriced and increasingly locked-down with its “certified drives” nonsense, QNAP’s interface intimidated me, and external drives were quietly becoming a liability. Then UGREEN — a company I mostly knew for chargers and cables — dropped the NASync line, and the DXP4800 Plus looked almost too good on paper: a 5-core Intel Pentium Gold 8505, 8GB of DDR5, two M.2 NVMe slots, an SD card reader on the front, and — the kicker — a built-in 10GbE port, all for around $699 (I caught it on sale for less). Comparable Synology boxes either don’t have 10GbE at all or charge you dearly for it.
Unboxing and build
First impressions were genuinely good. The chassis is mostly aluminium with plastic front and rear panels, and it doesn’t look like the beige IT appliance NAS boxes used to be — it sits on my desk shelf without embarrassing me. UGREEN even ships two CAT7 cables with gold-plated ends, a little screwdriver, SSD screws, and a magnetic dust filter for the rear fan. Small touches, but they signal a company that cares about presentation.
The four drive trays are tool-less for 3.5″ drives — you pop the side rails off, drop the drive in, and the clamp holds it. The trays themselves feel a bit plasticky and flimsy in the hand, which is my only real build-quality gripe, but they’ve held up fine and hot-swapping is painless. Underneath there’s a hatch for the two M.2 slots and RAM, and yes, the RAM is upgradeable — I bumped mine later without drama.
The one design choice that still puzzles me is the external power brick. From a company famous for power adapters, shipping a generic-looking external PSU feels off-brand. Not a dealbreaker, just odd.
Setup
Honestly, this was the easiest NAS setup I’ve done. Drives in, cables connected, power button, browse to the find.ugreen address, create an admin account, build a storage pool. I had four 8TB WD Red Plus drives in RAID 5 and shares mapped on my Mac and PC within maybe fifteen minutes. If you’ve been scared off NAS by horror stories about configuration, this is not that.
Performance
This is where the DXP4800 Plus earns its keep. Over my 2.5GbE connection, sequential transfers max out the link constantly — backing up a day’s shoot went from “start it and walk away” to “done before I’ve made coffee.” When I later moved to the 10GbE port through a faster switch, large file transfers were genuinely stunning for a box in this price bracket; UGREEN’s claim of roughly 1GB per second is achievable with the right drives and network.
I run Plex in Docker with hardware transcoding, and the 8505’s iGPU chews through it without the CPU breaking a sweat. Docker support (engine 26.x) opens the door to Jellyfin, Home Assistant, retro gaming servers, whatever you like. Editing video directly off the NAS is realistic if you put projects on M.2 volumes and use the 10GbE port — for heavy multi-cam 4K I still work locally, but for everything else the NAS doesn’t bottleneck me.
Power draw is reasonable: roughly 50W under normal load with four drives, mid-60s when fully hammered, and drives spin down after 20 minutes idle by default.
Noise and quirks
At idle it’s near-silent — around 33 dB(A), basically inaudible across the room. Under sustained writes it climbs to the mid-to-high 40s, and if the fan ever hits full speed it gets properly loud, past 60 dB(A). The three fan profiles in the settings are vaguely documented and “silent mode” didn’t audibly change anything for me. It lives in my office and I only notice it during RAID scrubs.
Two quirks worth flagging. First, deep hibernation: a few times after days of inactivity, the NAS went into a sleep so deep I couldn’t wake it over the network and had to tap the power button. Second, early on I chased an intermittent network speed drop that a firmware update eventually resolved — UGOS updates have been frequent, which is reassuring but also tells you the software is still maturing.
UGOS Pro
The operating system is the real question mark with UGREEN, and my verdict is: better than I expected, but not Synology DSM. The interface is clean, responsive, and clearly DSM-inspired. Security defaults are sensible — SMB/AFP and remote services are off until you enable them. UGREENlink makes remote access dead simple without touching your router. The AI photo album actually works: face recognition, object search, “beach photos” style semantic queries. For phone backups and family photos it’s genuinely useful, though I still do serious cataloguing in Lightroom.
What’s missing is the deep third-party app ecosystem the veterans have. There’s no mature first-party surveillance suite, cloud-sync integrations are thinner, and anything exotic means rolling up your sleeves with Docker. The good news: UGREEN doesn’t lock the hardware down. You can disable the watchdog in BIOS and install TrueNAS or Unraid like it’s a regular PC, and plenty of owners do exactly that. Drive compatibility is wide open too — any WD, Seagate, or Toshiba drive works, no certified-drive tax.
Verdict
After six months as my primary storage and media server, I’d buy the DXP4800 Plus again without hesitation. The hardware is flatly the best value in the 4-bay class right now — nothing else gives you 10GbE, DDR5, NVMe slots, and a capable iGPU at this price. The software is the trade-off: UGOS Pro covers the essentials well and improves monthly, but power users will either lean on Docker or replace the OS entirely. You can get this NAS from UGreen store.
Buy it if: you’re a photographer, videographer, or home-lab tinkerer who wants fast, flexible, honestly priced storage and doesn’t mind a young software ecosystem.
Skip it if: you need a mature surveillance suite, extensive first-party apps, or a fully hands-off appliance — Synology’s DSM still wins on polish, and you’ll pay for it.
Rating: 4.5/5 — outstanding hardware, very good and improving software, minor quirks.
