UGREEN NASync DXP4800 Pro Review

Introduction

The UGREEN NASync DXP4800 Pro is the Chinese brand’s flagship four-bay network-attached storage (NAS) device. It’s kitted out with an Intel Core i3-1315u processor, 8GB of RAM, and a 10-gigabit wired Ethernet connection – 10 times faster than the gigabit port you’re likely to have on your internet router. If you think that sounds like a big specification for a humble network device, you’d be right – this is one of the most powerful NAS enclosures we’ve tested.

This NAS’ generous specifications continue when it comes to storage. It’ll accept four SATA hard disks or solid state disks (SSDs) in the main bays, and there are two further slots for NVMe SSDs. In total it supports up to 144 terabytes (TB), which is more space than you’ll ever need – unless you’re a Hollywood film studio.

You might need a Hollywood budget to buy the UGREEN NASync DXP4800 Pro – at the time of my review, it was priced north of £600. That’s a big outlay when you can buy the UGREEN NASync DH4300 Plus for around half the price, so what do you get for your money?

Design and features

• Excellent build quality and design
• Superb specifications
• Simple software, but not many apps

Unpack the UGREEN NASync DXP4800 Pro and you certainly won’t be disappointed. UGREEN may be a relative upstart in the NAS market, but its products seem brilliantly made. The DXP4800 Pro has a sturdy metal enclosure, cooled by a single large fan at the rear. This sucks, rather than blows, and has a washable filter across it, helping prevent the chassis from filling up with dust over time.

This is a brilliant NAS to set up. Fitting conventional 3.5” disks is tool-less; you simply click open the drive caddy, drop them in, click the caddy closed and refit it in the bay. You’ll need to turn the enclosure over and remove a couple of screws to get at the M.2 slots for NVMe SSDs – UGREEN supplies the two thermal pads you see in this image.

You’ll notice there are also two RAM slots, one of which is populated with the factory-fitted 8GB module. You can upgrade to a huge 96GB if you need to, although good luck if you’re buying at today’s RAM prices.

This NAS offers a great range of connectors. The 10 gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) port I mentioned is backed up by a second 2.5GbE socket, offering a bit more throughput if network speed is everything, and a backup interface should the main port fail. While many current PCs come with 2.5GbE ports, most home users are likely to be relying on a 1GbE router – you’ll need faster network hardware to really get the best of this NAS’ performance.

Helpfully, the UGREEN NASync DXP4800 Pro has USB-C and USB-A ports easily accessible from the front, both of which support USB 3.2 Gen 2 transfer speeds of up to 10 gigabits per second (Gb/s). Next to them there’s an SD card slot ideal for quick camera or drone backups.

At the rear you’ll find three further USB-A ports: two of these are plain old USB 2, while the third offers up to 5Gb/s transfers – more than good enough for most USB drives. The final connector is an HDMI port supporting up to 4K displays – that’s a useful addition, but if you’re building a multimedia or surveillance station you should probably look for a device with at least a couple of video outputs.

UGREEN’s UGOS Pro operating system feels incredibly slick. Once you’ve installed disks, you simply turn the NAS on, connect to it from a browser, and set up a few basics such as the device’s network name – used when you access it from Windows.

UGOS Pro does a fair job of explaining the various RAID array types available. If you’re fitting two NVMe SSDs and four physical hard disks, I’d recommend configuring the SSDs in a RAID 1 array, which mirrors your data and ensures it survives if one disk fails. Configuring the hard disks in a RAID 5 array works similarly, but if you want to minimise the risk of data loss, consider RAID 6 instead. This can survive two disks failing – at the cost of ‘wasting’ more storage space on data protection.

With your disk arrays built, you can start creating shared folders and getting on with the business of using the NAS. I should mention a couple of oddities, however. First, this NAS has SMB sharing (used by Windows) disabled by default – you’ll need to enable it to find your storage in the local network. The other is that there are three performance levels available via Hardware & Power in Control Panel – they make a surprising difference, as I’ll demonstrate shortly.

I’ve grown to love the simplicity of UGOS Pro, having tested it recently across a few of UGREEN’s NAS devices. However, by default it’s only really interested in serving files – there are very few apps available, which is how you’d expect to add extra features to NAS enclosures from competitors such as Synology or QNAP.

This NAS does have comfortably the best smartphone app I’ve used, though; it offers almost all the functionality of the web interface in a shrunken, mobile-friendly format. There’s almost nothing you can’t view, manage or configure. Helpfully, it’s also simple to set up remote access, letting you back up to your NAS or manage it from anywhere you can get a data connection.

Advanced users will be delighted to know that Docker is available, unlocking a vast number of servers and services covering just about anything you might want to do. However, if you’re interested in standard applications like the Plex media server, but you don’t want to spend time learning how to deploy in Docker, you might want to consider an alternative like the Synology DS225+.

Performance

• Huge performance
• Quiet
• Impressively robust and flexible

If you’re after a fast NAS, this is it. I configured the UGREEN NASync DXP4800 Plus with four WD Red Plus disks in a RAID 5 array, and two NVMe SSDs in a separate RAID 1 volume. Although I connected to it via a 10GbE QNAP switch, my PC’s 5GbE port meant that network transfers would be capped at this lower speed. Still, in theory, 5GbE Ethernet supports approximately 600MB per second (MB/s), which should be fast enough for almost any scenario.

I began by running ATTO Disk Benchmark, which copies data to and from a device in ever-increasing chunk sizes. Smaller chunks are slower to read and write, with speeds steadily increasing with file size.

In this screenshot, you can see the UGREEN NASync DXP4800 Pro writing and reading at around 8MB/s on tiny 512-byte file operations, and quickly gathering pace as the data size increases. Throughout, read speeds are significantly quicker than writes, until about 128KB, at which point the NAS was able to hit the limits of its 5GbE network connection.

While very fast, this isn’t quite the best performance I’ve seen. The same was true for the NAS’ score of 541 on the PCMark10 Data Drive benchmark, and its 76MB/s average performance on our Windows file copy test.

As I’d expect, performance was a bit stronger when copying data to and from the SSDs, particularly with Windows copies, which now averaged nearly 81MB/s. Again these are quick, but not class-leading results.

At this point I decided to test whether changing the power setting from Balanced to Performance mode would make much difference. Repeating the ATTO benchmark on the SSDs revealed that it certainly did.

In the screenshot above you can see that the NAS was so much faster that now it almost hit the limits of my network connection on 64KB file operations, rather than 128KB. It also scored a thumping 773 in PCMark10 Data Drive – the highest mark I’ve seen.

Perhaps most impressively, the UGREEN NASync DXP4800 Pro finished writing our Windows file copy at more than 138MB/s, and read it at more than 122MB/s. Again, that’s the fastest I’ve measured, and remarkable given the file set comprises a handful of large archives, along with thousands of small and medium files.

I experimented with running some Docker containers, configuring the Ollama AI environment to run some local processing. While nothing like as fast as a PC with a dedicated graphics chip, this NAS could happily run some basic models while continuing to serve files. Everything remained stable, and although there was some heat, the cooling fans were more than equal to it, and not too noisy either.

Should you buy it?

FAQs