ALMOST Perfect Creator NAS – UGREEN DXP4800 Plus Review

If you are a content creator, or an editor for one, this is almost the perfect storage device for you. Screw portable hard drives that lose your data, or that you lose outright. This thing brings redundancy – and therefore security – while being fast enough to edit straight from, and it doesn’t exactly break the bank. This is the UGREEN DXP4800 Plus, and it’s so damn close to being perfect. Let’s take a look at this thing and I’ll explain what’s good, and bad, about it. 

Let’s start with a tour and the specs. This is a four bay NAS, with each drive bay nicely labelled right on the front. It’s not too much larger than the four drives themselves would be stacked vertically, with only an inch or so lift for the motherboard and maybe two inches extra on the back for the built in fan and magnetic dust filter. On the front you’ve got the power button and status LEDs, along with a USB C 10 gig port, USB A 10 gig port, and an SD card reader. As for the rear IO, that offers 10 gig ethernet, 2.5 gig ethernet, two USB 2.0 ports, one 5 gig USB 3 port, and an HDMI port, plus DC in. The external power supply is rated for up to 150W, which is really worst-case scenario, actual energy usage is a whole lot lower. There is also a secret compartment on the bottom, which frankly it what takes this thing to the next level. Under here is not only two upgradable RAM slots, but two M.2 Gen 4×4 slots! Yeah, this has two SSD slots, alongside the four HDD bays. Sweet!

Installing drives in the sleds is ridiculously easy, UGREEN provided me with two 4TB Seagate Iron Wolf NAS drives, and they literally just clip in. Press the tab on the bottom and pull the sled apart, drop the drive in (with the ports facing out the back of the sled), and squeeze the sled back together. That’s it. Slide the sled back in and hey presto you’ve got a drive installed. You have four bays, but at minimum you’ll want to install two drives for redundancy. All four is best as you can run in RAID 5 mode which uses only one of the four drives for redundancy. As for the SSD slots, those just slot in with a single screw in the back. UGREEN does include some ludicrously thick (actually slightly too thick) thermal pads to keep the drives relatively cool under use, then stick the panel back on.

The first chink in the armour though is that RAM – the included stick is just 8GB of DDR5 SODIMM memory – which just isn’t enough, especially with those SSD slots. While this thing doesn’t run ZFS which is an absolute RAM hog, if you want to use this for anything other than just a network storage drive – things like Plex, NextCloud, Home Assistant or PiHole – this is going to struggle. While this is very easy to upgrade – at any time no less – it is frustrating that they don’t just charge a few quid more and at least give us 16GB. The NAS supports 64GB total, or two 32GB DIMMs, which is plenty. At least the CPU isn’t quite the basement spec N100 you find in every other NAS, this is an Intel Pentium Gold 8505, a 5 core (1P 4E) 12th gen chip. It’s a 15W base, or 55W peak, chip with a usable iGPU which means you can use this as a media centre too, and plenty of PCIe lanes – clearly UGREEN have opted to give you 8 of the 20 available lanes for SSDs, but some have gone to the networking too which I’m fine with. It’s also worth noting that the NAS itself has 128GB of built in storage for the OS.

Speaking of the OS, let’s have a look at it. As usual it’s a web UI, with a fully hand-held setup procedure. It’s pretty easy, guiding you through creating your volume and your first shared folder, although it’s worth noting a couple of things. First, the SMB service isn’t enabled by default – that’s what lets you connect to the NAS from your PC, so you need to enable that. You’ll also want to leave the NAS alone once you create the volume as it has to synchronise the array which depending on how big your drives are can take hours or days. You can attach the SSD(s) as a cache immediately though, but if you want a proper read/write cache you’ll need both drives installed for some reason. If you only install one drive like I have, it’s read-only. 

The UI should be pretty familiar to anyone who’s used a pre-built NAS before. It’s basically emulating a virtual desktop, with movable windows for files, settings and apps. There is an app store, although it is shockingly light on apps – there are just 27 apps here – compared to the hundreds you’ll find in, say, the QNAP or Asustor app stores, or the thousands on UNRAID. There is a sort of reason for that though, as one of the supposed selling points of this NAS is that one of the apps you can install is Docker. For those that don’t know, Docker is basically the backbone of the entire internet, and all of those other ‘app stores’. Docker basically lets you run each program – think Plex, JellyFin or Home Assistant – in its own little virtual machine, but less heavy than an actual full VM. Docker’s image repository basically acts as its own app store, with basically every program you can think of being available (although it’s mostly skewed to web development tools, like Jenkins, MySQL and nginx). UGREEN’s Docker app does make searching for images pretty easy, although the actual container creation is pretty rough. You need a lot of technical knowledge to make this work, and the crossover between someone who buys a pre-built NAS and someone who is comfortable with creating Docker containers from scratch isn’t what I’d call a single-circle Venn diagram. Most NAS providers spruce this bit up at least a bit – some, like QNAP or Asustor, put a bit of effort into making this a one-click process, while others like UNRAID more clearly label or pre-fill what this sort of stuff is meant to be or do so you at least have some idea. Like, what does the “PS1” environment variable do in this transmission container? UNRAID would at least tell me. That does mean that while technically capable of running anything you want, you’ll need to know how to run the Docker containers – and maintain them – which isn’t something I’d expect many would want to do.

For me the biggest selling point of this thing is the networking. Offering both 10 and 2.5G ethernet makes this a content creator’s dream. I edit from my ‘overkill’ UNRAID NAS over 10G ethernet, and use a single SSD as a (recent) read/write cache. It works flawlessly and means once I ingest my footage, it’s all safe on my NAS (and backed up to a second NAS offsite mind you), and this can do just that. Considering this is currently just £509 (maybe add a few quid extra for more RAM when you order one), that’s an absolute steal for this much power and connectivity. Like, a 10G PCIe card is at minimum £60, but a decent one is £100-200, so to have just that built in is already incredible. Four bays, plus two SSDs, gives you plenty of storage and reliability, and if you really want to you can install TrueNAS instead by plugging in a display and a keyboard, then hitting CTRL+F12 to enter the BIOS on boot, disable the watchdog, then install any OS you want. I love a machine you can truly own.

While there is plenty more to this, for me I’m already kinda sold. Between the hardware being pretty top notch for the price, the “UGOS” being pretty decent if a little lacking still, and the ability to use any OS you want (sans UGREEN support anyway), this seems like a great shout. This feels like a great balance of price and performance – sure, you will want to order at least a second 8GB DDR5 SODIMM module along with the NAS and some drives, but to have 10G networking, SSDs for caching, and a well built and powerful NAS, all for £500? I can’t really argue with that.