UGOS Pro Continued

In addition to the various settings in the control panel, the UGOS Pro NAS OS has three more points of interest when it comes to configuring and managing your NAS, and we'll cover those below.

The Storage Manager

First up we have the storage manager and as the name implies, this is where you configure, manage and monitor your drives and storage pools. This is also where external USB drives are managed and access to external USB devices can also be disabled if wanted. The overall features and user interface is pretty easy to get to grips with and most settings that help prevent data errors and warn on drive failures are enabled by default. The storage manager is also where you can add an SSD cache and the cache implementation is based on Linux dm-cache. As we only had one spare SSD lying around, we were unable to test the write cache, but we can confirm that the read cache worked as intended, but it does require that the same data is copied multiple times from the NAS to a client to offer any tangible benefit. All the test results you'll find later in the review that are using caching are based on the fifth time of having copied the same data from the NAS to the client PC. There are clear benefits of an SSD cache as long as you copy the same data to multiple clients.


While on the subject of storage, UGOS Pro handles external drives easily and painlessly, even when formatted in exFAT as seen by the screenshot below. UGOS Pro supports most common file systems, with the exception of HFS+ and APFS on external drives, which means that if you're an Apple user with a lot of external drives with data you want to copy over to your Ugreen NAS, then you're going to have to do it via your Mac, rather than attaching the drives directly to the NAS. Note that only MBR or GPT partitions are supported. Currently, external drives are somewhat limited in that you can't share them over the network. However, you can copy data to and from them using the built-in file manager in UGOS Pro. This means that it's fairly straightforward to back up external drives on your NASync, but also to move files off, for example older backups. There are currently no options for formatting external drives either, something that Ugreen's competitors do offer.

The App Center

This brings us to the app center and this is where we have to state the obvious, Ugreen is way behind its competitors when it comes to support for native software. However, it's not all bad, as one of the first features the company has added is support for Docker. Ugreen has provided a wide range of easy to install Docker images as well, ranging from media servers such as Plex and Emby, as well entire Linux distributions like Ubuntu and of course various databases and software development environments. That said, we're not sure the NASync DXP4800 Plus would be the best model in the lineup to run multiple virtual machines on, but it should still be capable of running most of what's on offer as long as the user is aware of the limitations of the hardware.

The default set of apps that come pre-installed includes things like the storage manager, but once again, this is par for course when it comes to how NAS appliances are done by the competition. However, things like DLNA support and backup solutions have to be installed by the user if they want to take advantages of them. The DLNA server is pretty basic, as you'd expect and if you plan on using your NAS as a media server, we'd suggest to installed one of the VM options. Hopefully we'll see Ugreen develop some more native options as well, but by the sound of it, Ugreen will rely on Docker images for most third party software. This will be more resource heavy than a native app, but it also means less work for Ugreen which is also reflected in the price of their devices. That said, the user interface for installing Docker images is pretty straight forward compared to using something much more advanced like Portainer, which can be hard for inexperienced users to use. The containers can also be updated from the container page in the UI, rather than having to go elsewhere in the UI to update the Docker image. One thing of note to be aware of here is that UGOS Pro assigns vastly different ports than the default Docker ports, this is pretty obvious from the UI, but not how it's done on other NAS platforms.

The Task Manager

Finally, we have the task manager, where you get a good overview of the performance of the NAS. Pretty much everything can be monitored here, although the OS drive is, oddly enough, missing. This also means that the user has no actual control over the OS drive, but this is once again nothing strange for these types of product. You can also monitor the running services here and even end or restart some tasks if they're misbehaving for some reason. It's even possible to kill Docker processes here, which can come in handy.


Other default apps include Universal Search that helps you find files on the NAS, the Log Center which stores the various logs produced by UGOS Pro, be that for software updates, errors or something else. Then there's the Support app, which contains a built-in user manual, as well as tools to generate diagnostics information for Ugreen's support if needed, including remote access and a debugging mode. Finally, we have the File Manager which, as the name implies, allows you to manage the files on your NAS, and it works pretty much like a file manager in any other desktop OS, albeit a fairly basic one. This is also where you create shared folders in the UGOS Pro OS, which differ quite a lot from many other NAS operating systems where this often is done somewhere in the settings.


As already pointed out, a couple of software updates were released while working on the review and as you can see above, not everything is working as intended, the release notes always showed up in German, despite the OS language being set to English. However, this was more of a minor annoyance than a real issue, but it shows that UGOS Pro is still in its early days. On a positive note, this shows that Ugreen is actively working on improving UGOS Pro, and hopefully it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Overall UGOS Pro is a competent if not yet a fully featured NAS OS and Ugreen has some work to do before they can fully compete with the more established NAS brand. On the other hand, this might not be Ugreen's goal and instead the company could end up focusing on somewhat simpler software features and offer more competitively priced hardware that is still good enough for most of its target customers. If you're a power user or a business, you would most likely want support for iSCSI, which is currently missing, and we've not been informed if this is something that will be added in the future or not.