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

Packaging and Bundle

Ugreen shipped the NASync DXP4800 Plus inside an outer shipping carton made of regular brown corrugated cardboard.


Inside the shipping box you'll find the retail packaging which has photos and descriptions of the product on it.


Opening the retail box, we find everything held in place by some foam inserts and the NAS itself is wrapped in plastic. Next to the NAS is a box of accessories.


The accessory box contains the power adapter, network cables, a small screwdriver, screws, two thermal pads for optional M.2 SSDs and two "keys" for locking the drives in place. The keys are not actually keyed and would only prevent the drives from being accidentally removed, but then again, the keys normally included with NAS appliances aren't going to prevent someone from removing the drives forcefully anyhow. As such, this is a passable solution, and you could use something like a flat head screwdriver to remove the drives in case you lose the keys, without causing damage to the drive caddies.


Ugreen also kindly supplied us with four WD Red Plus 3.5" drives to test the NASync DXP4800 Plus with and these came packaged separately.

The Exterior

Ugreen has gone for a very clean look overall for its range of NASync appliances and the DXP4800 Plus looks the part of a professional piece of kit. Each of the four drive bays are numbered, which can be handy if the drives have to be removed for some reason, as you're guaranteed to put them back in the right order. You can also see the drive caddy locks here.

At the bottom part of the front of the unit you'll find the power button with a built-in power LED, a set of LEDs that indicate network and drive activity—these can be disabled in software—as well as a full size SD 3.0 card slot, a USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) Type-C and a USB Type-A port.


We have to give Ugreen a big thumbs up on the included dust filter—which is magnetic to boot—which is something we'd like to see on every NAS out there, as it prevents a fair amount of dust from entering the device through the 140 mm fan. As expected, we find most of the ports around the back of the NASync DXP4800 Plus and this is where things get a little bit interesting. Unlike most of the NASync DXP4800 Plus competitors, Ugreen decided to go with not just a 2.5 Gbps Ethernet port, but also a 10 Gbps port. On top of this, there's a 4K capable HDMI port—although Ugreen doesn't specify if this is 4K30p or 4K60p—a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A port and two USB 2.0 ports, a recessed reset button and a 19 volt DC input.


At the bottom of the NAS is a hatch that hides a compartment home to a pair of SO-DIMM memory slots, as well as two M.2 2280 connectors.

The Internals

We decided against doing a full teardown of the NASync DXP4800 Plus, partially due to everything that needs to be user accessible is, via the hatch in the bottom of the device, but also due to Ugreen being quite open regarding the specs of the hardware used. With that said, we're going to take a closer look at what's hiding inside the chassis, starting with the hatch.


Under the hatch is a pair of DDR5 SO-DIMM slots, of which one is occupied by an 8 GB Samsung DDR5-4800 module. This makes it easy to upgrade to 16 GB if needed and a total of 64 GB of RAM is supported by the DXP4800 Plus. The two M.2 connectors support NVMe SSDs, although Ugreen doesn't specify if the slots support PCIe 3.0 or PCIe 4.0. Note that only 2280 drives are supported, unless some form of mechanical adapter is used to extend the length of the drives.

Rather unusually, this compartment also hides a 3-pin UART header as well as a 4-pin header labelled JMCU1. We should also note that the lid to the memory and M.2 SSD compartment acts as the heatsink for the M.2 drives and this is where the included thermal pads come in play, as they should be attached to the SSDs before the lid is put back on. The lid is spring-loaded in one corner, which makes it pop out as soon as you remove the screw nearest to the mechanism.

The CPU powering the NASync DXP4800 Plus is the Pentium Gold 8505, a mobile 12th gen Intel CPU which falls in the Alder Lake family of chips. What makes this CPU stand out from the crowd is its single performance core which is paired with four efficiency cores for a total of six threads. The maximum clock speed of the performance core is 4.4 GHz with the efficiency cores topping out at 3.3 GHz. The Pentium Gold 8505 has a base power of 15 W and a maximum turbo power of 55 W. This means that the NASync DXP4800 Plus won't be the most energy efficient NAS out there, but the specs suggest that it should have a good tradeoff between power and performance.

The specs of the Pentium Gold 8505 also suggests that the HDMI port should support HDMI 2.1, but this depends on Ugreen's implementation. As this CPU has a basic GPU with support for Intel Quick Sync Video, we will hopefully see accelerated video transcoding from software with support for it. Finally, there's support for Thunderbolt 4, but Ugreen hasn't implemented it on this model. It appears that Ugreen has reserved Thunderbolt 4 support for its higher-end models, which makes sense from a SKU differentiation factor, but it's disappointing nonetheless considering it's natively supported by the CPU.

The 10 Gbps Ethernet controller is a Marvell/Aquantia AQtion AQC113, whereas the 2.5 Gbps chip is an Intel I226-V (rev 08).


As already mentioned, there's support for up to four SATA drives of which all are connected via an ASMedia ASM1164 4-port SATA controller. Ugreen officially supports SATA drives up to 22 TB across the board of its new NAS devices, as well as up to 4 TB NVMe drives.