Introduction

It's not often a new company enters the competitive market of Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices, and although several DIY type NAS devices have launched over the past few years, the established players have held on to the pre-built market without any real competition. However, now a new player has entered the pre-built NAS market, and it's not exactly a company that you'd expect to join the fray. Ugreen is most well known for its GaN USB chargers, cables and docking stations. That said, the company has branched out over the past few years and has already offered a few NAS products on the Chinese market, meaning Ugreen already has some experience in producing NAS appliances. The company is now releasing these internationally and will offer a family of no less than six different NAS devices at launch. Ugreen is covering the entire consumer and SMB market with their new NAS range, from an entry level two bay model to an eight bay model with dual 10 Gbps ports and Thunderbolt 4 support, as well as a flash only NVMe SSD model.

Today we'll be taking a look at a mid-range model that is known as the DXP4800 Plus. It should appeal to both prosumers and business users based on the specifications. It's quite an interesting piece of kit, not least due to the selection of components that Ugreen has chosen. For starters, it has an Intel Pentium Gold 8505 CPU which sports a single Alder Lake P-core with Hyper-Threading, as well as four Gracemont E-cores. This gives it a performance advantage over the various Celeron based chips in similarly priced models from the competition, yet is still competitively priced. The downside is a higher power usage, but more on that later in the review.

Other features include 8 GB of DDR5 RAM as standard, as well as a 2.5 Gbps and a 10 Gbps Ethernet port. The latter is not something you normally find on NAS appliances in this price range, as we're talking 10GBASE-T here and not an SFP+ port. Another very interesting point to note is that the OS is installed on a 128 GB SSD, something we haven't seen from any of the established NAS manufacturers to date in this price segment. The OS is usually kept on a USB DOM and then installed onto the hard drives during the first boot. Some models have started to use eMMC and that is also true for Ugreen's two entry level models. The DXP4800 Plus is a four bay NAS as mentioned, but it also has space for a pair of NVMe drives that can be used for caching which we'll go into more details about later in the review.

Specifications