Initial Setup

Ugreen has developed an in-house OS based on Debian 12, which is the most current release of Debian. Ugreen has named its NAS OS UGOS Pro, and it's based on a somewhat outdated Linux kernel. This is not unusual when it comes to pre-built NAS appliances, but this is also an opportunity for Ugreen to show that they stick with current software for their hardware. Often code is backported to work with the older kernels used on many of these types of devices and that can cause new issues that then have to be fixed by the manufacturers. With that said, Ugreen hasn't launched its series of NASync appliances as yet, so we'll give them the benefit of the doubt, and hopefully we'll see regular updates for their new range of products.


The review unit we were sent wasn't without issues during the initial setup, but this appeared to be related to the fact that it didn't have a full operating system installed. Fortunately Ugreen provides multiple ways of accessing their NASync products, as both the Windows app and the web based interface has issues initially, but via the Android app we were able to update the operating system to the latest version and this enabled the NASync DXP4800 Plus to work as intended. To be clear, this was due to Ugreen shipping out an early review unit to TPU and the retail units shouldn't suffer from this issue. None of the updates delivered any noticeable performance improvements and all benchmark results were from tests performed after the most recent update was installed.


We decided to use Ugreen's Windows app to perform the initial setup, as it will search the local network for NASync devices automatically. This is handy for the initial setup, as there's no need to log in to your router or use some third party app to try and figure out which IP address the NAS was assigned to on the local network. This is somewhat par for course these days as well, but it's nice to see that Ugreen has all the expected features in place.


Once logged in, you're greeted by a welcome screen, followed by a setup wizard that takes you through setting up the admin account, setting up and connecting to the optional Ugreen cloud service for easy remote access and finally selecting the kind of updates you want the UGOS Pro OS to automatically install for you.


This took us straight to the desktop of the UGOS Pro OS and as you can see, initially there weren't any icons on the desktop, which meant that we couldn't continue the setup until after we'd installed the software update via the Android app. The next thing you're asked to do is to decide if you want to use a secure connection to your NAS. However, it appears that Ugreen's current certificate isn't seen as secure by web browsers, which means it's best not to apply this setting for now.

Configuring the Storage Pool and Storage Space

Once the setup wizard was finished, the control panel popped up and as you can see, there was a little glitch here with the initial software version. However, this was fixed in a software update a few days in to the review. As soon as we closed the control panel, a pop-up reminded us that we needed to create a storage pool and storage space so we could start using the NASync DXP4800 Plus.


As expected, we found ourselves in another wizard that helped create the storage pool and a RAID-5 setup was suggested as the best option which we accepted. The RAID creation time is fairly quick, but the drive sync time is in the region of 12–24 hours, so expect the NAS to be busy for quite a while before the drives can be fully utilized. There is a setting to prioritize syncing over usage, which should shorten the time it takes to sync the drives. Ugreen supports all standard RAID configurations up to RAID-6 on the NASync DXP4800 and up, including RAID-10, JBOD and what the company calls Basic, which is just individually accessible drives. The entry level dual-bay DXP2800 is limited to RAID-0/1.


The next step was to pick which file system to use and this is where it's pretty obvious that Ugreen is a new player in the NAS market, as only two options were offered, the classic ext4 file system or Btrfs which has gained a lot of popularity over the past few years. We picked Btrfs and went on to complete the setup.


The final step was to format the drives and this requires you to enter the admin password. After the formatting was successfully completed the NASync DXP4800 Plus took around 24 hours to sync the RAID, which seemed like an excessive amount of time for an empty RAID partition. That said, the NAS was responsive and usable during this time, albeit write operations were quite slow.