Power

The power consumption of the Intel Pentium Gold 8505 CPU isn't what we'd call frugal, but at the same time it's by no means excessively power hungry during regular use. At a normal power draw of around 50 Watts for the entire NASync DXP4800 Plus, we're still looking at less than the maximum turbo power of 55 Watts for the CPU. That's with four drives in RAID 5 and data being moved over the 10 Gbps interface. The highest power peak we saw during test was 76 Watts for a couple of seconds, with a more average power draw for the NAS when fully utilized at around 67 Watts.

Idle power could be better, especially as Intel claims a base power of 15 Watts. The WD Red Plus drives used for testing has an active power draw of 4.7 Watts, an idle power draw of 3.1 Watts and a standby power draw of 0.3 Watts. UGOS Pro automatically puts the drives to sleep after 20 minutes of inactivity—the sleep setting can be set from 10 minutes to 3 hours—and with the idle power consumption numbers measured after the NAS had been idle for more than 30 minutes, we expected less than 26 Watts. With the NAS in use, but the drives coasting after a read or write operation, the power draw averaged at around 38 Watts.

As there are no user controls for the CPU power mode, it's also impossible to force the CPU into a lower power mode, and outside the hard drive sleep mode, there are currently no other types of power control options. In fairness to Ugreen, this seems to be pretty typical for the industry as a whole which is quite surprising, as you'd hope there was some kind of basic user control for the power settings.

Noise

The large 140 mm fan is made by Shenzhen Fan-Cooling Electronic Technology Co. Ltd and the model name is FD14025SM1, but the company doesn't list any specs of the SKU in question on its site. With a 140 mm fan, the NASync DXP4800 Plus doesn't make much noise during normal operation. The fan normally spins at around 500-600 rpm at the standard fan setting. However, at times, it can hit 1,600-1,700 rpm and things get really noisy when this happens. Up to around 900 rpm, the is largely inaudible in a room with other computer equipment, but at anything beyond that, it starts to get noisy. With the fan at full tilt, which appears to be 1,739 rpm according to Ugreen's Android app—the web UI and Windows app appears to currently be lacking a fan speed readout option—the average noise is in excess of 60 dB(A). During more normal operation, the noise stays under 50 dB(A), averaging somewhere around 46.5 dB(A) if peaks and drops are adjusted for, although intensive write operations can exceed 50 dB(A). At idle, the NASync DXP4800 Plus can barely be heard at around 33.5 dB(A). All noise measurements were done with the microphone placed just above the fan. Overall there can be some noise related issues, but hopefully Ugreen will be able to address these, since there is a reason for them as you'll see below. Changing to the silent mode didn't seem to offer any noticeable difference in terms of noise and there's no real explanation as to what the difference between the three fan profiles are, which makes it hard to know what the difference is meant to be.

Temperature

The graph above is from the UGOS Pro task manager and as you can see, the CPU temperature is hitting 100 degrees C, which it does quite easily and far too often. We'd chalk this up to this being a pre-production unit, but this is something Ugreen has to fix in the production units. The issue is that it sometimes happens at random, as the CPU utilization can be as low as 15-20 percent and no data is actively written or read. In the screenshot above, the system was fairly heavily loaded, but as you can see, the CPU utilization was still only at 42 percent, yet the CPU was hitting 100 degrees C. After doing some investigation it appears that the task manager is underreporting the CPU utilization when compared to the top command in Linux, which is showing a much higher CPU utilization. The key culprit appears to be FFmpeg, which instantly starts to index and create thumbnails of any video content that is uploaded to the NAS. There's a similar application that does the same for photos. Neither of these two bits of software show their real CPU utilization to the OS as far as we've been able to determine. We've informed Ugreen about this issue and hopefully there will be some user control implemented in terms of how thumbnails are being created. Based on teardown pictures we've seen, the CPU heatsink might also be part of the issue here, as it has a fairly small fan and doesn't appear to use any kind of heat pipes to aid with the cooling.