UGREEN NASync DXP4800 GT Review: powerful 4-bay NAS with AMD Ryzen and dual 10GbE ports

TweakTown Rating: 88%

Our Verdict

With excellent network performance even on hardware below its 10GbE limits and easy installation, there's a lot to like about the UGREEN NASync DXP4800 GT.

Pros

• Very easy to set up
• Attractive design (for a NAS)
• Excellent throughput speeds
• Lots of integrated ports for easy sharing and video presentation
• Easy guided setup

Cons

• Filling it with drives is going to empty your wallet rapidly
• UGREEN app discovery can be temperamental
• Native app support could be wider
• You really need 10GbE Ethernet throughout to maximize its potential

Should you buy it?

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Introduction & Specification Details and Close-up

There are many reasons why having your own network-attached storage system set up at home might work for you, whether that's just for simple local file discovery, or because you're working from home but need to share larger files to a wider group of co-workers, or more simply because you want to share all those (ahem) large Linux distributions around your home... for reasons.

Look, I won't judge around that, but the reality in the NAS space is that there's a wide array of NAS devices to suit most needs and price points. The last UGREEN NAS to hit my desk was the affordable but notably limited UGREEN NASync DH2300, nicely suited for very basic home use.

The UGREEN NASync DXP4800 GT is a significantly more expensive NAS, especially once you factor in the cost of adding enough storage and possibly updated networking equipment to make full use of it. It does justify that price, however, with exemplary performance and plenty of headroom to grow as your needs expand.

Specifications & Close Up

Design

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The UGREEN NASync DXP4800 GT's unboxing is only really notable due to the use of void tape - the kind you'd typically find around the screws on a laptop to indicate you were about to kill its warranty - on the exterior packaging itself. Its presence is unusual here, though I guess it would at least point to whether what you were getting was original from the factory.

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Out of the box, the UGREEN NASync DXP4800 GT slightly surprised me with its design.

Realistically, any four-bay NAS is always going to end up looking like a row of books in a very small bookcase, and that's true here too, but UGREEN's design team has at least tried a little to give the UGREEN NASync DXP4800 GT a slightly premium touch, with gold accents and prominent drive bay numbers to make it a little more appealing.

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That in no way changed where I was going to locate it, largely out of view and as much out of audible range as possible, because having four mechanical drives whirring can get on the annoying side if you're placing them on a desk next to you. Still, compared to most blandly designed NAS boxes, the UGREEN NASync DXP4800 GT at least tries to look nice.

From the front you can access all four standard drive bays as well as USB-C, USB-A and an SD card reader slot. That's a nice inclusion for creative professionals as it opens up workflows for moving images quickly from storage cards to your NAS storage without having to fiddle around at the back of the unit.

At the rear you'll find a single HDMI port, a USB-A 3.2 port and a pair of USB 2.0 ports for connecting up slower devices such as printers that might not need quite as rapid data rates. The UGREEN NASync DXP4800 GT also features dual 10GbE network ports for optimal transfer speeds.

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As standard, the UGREEN NASync DXP4800 GT ships sans any drives at all, though it does utilize an embedded 64GB eMMC drive for storing and updating its own operating system on board. It's entirely feasible that some sellers may bundle it with drives, though with the exploding prices of storage right now, you may find few that are all that keen on doing so.

Speaking of exploding, the UGREEN NASync DXP4800 GT is rather more keen than most to ensure that you use its included power supply, and only its included power supply.

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I don't think I've ever seen quite so stark a warning in a product manual before, and while this did make it slightly trickier to use - UGREEN supplied me with a unit with a chunky UK power plug on the end - I complied. Nobody wants an exploding NAS... do they?

Getting back on track, filling out the UGREEN NASync DXP4800 GT with drives is not likely to be an inexpensive proposition, though this is a NAS pitched at the more prosumer end of the market that might be more willing to bear those kinds of costs.

Installation

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The UGREEN NASync DXP4800 GT does make it very easy to install drives, with each drive bay using a simple slide-out tray mechanism for dropping in 3.5-inch drives. If you're using smaller 2.5-inch drives, screws are provided for affixing each drive in place, though this wasn't the way I tested out the UGREEN NASync DXP4800 GT.

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On the SSD front, the UGREEN NASync DXP4800 GT features two M.2 slots located on the underside of the unit that can be used for either storage or caching purposes. One slight limitation here is that the UGREEN NASync DXP4800 GT only supports PCIe Gen 3x2 SSDs. If you want to use faster drives, you'll have to look at the even pricier end of the NAS scale than this.

With drives installed, the UGREEN NASync DXP4800 GT can be detected and then configured through UGREEN's UGREEN NAS app for Windows or Mac, or via its web interface, though once again I did have some teething issues with getting either approach to properly identify the UGREEN NASync DXP4800 GT on my network.

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It's likely once you're set up and running that you shouldn't need its functionality all that often, but I do wish it was a little more stable and easily able to detect a connected NAS first time, rather than fifth time or later.

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The app issue stands out because otherwise setup of the UGREEN NASync DXP4800 GT is really very simple indeed, with a nice guided Web UI that takes you through configuring drives, choosing RAID levels and setting permissions for essential NAS tasks. Even if you've never handled a NAS before, you'll find this very simple to do, and - app stability notwithstanding - nicely quick.

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With four front-facing drives - and optionally two more SSDs on board - there's support for a wide array of RAID choices, though the UGREEN NASync DXP4800 GT did nudge me towards RAID 5, allowing for a single drive's redundancy at the cost of a little storage space. If you did want to max out your storage and potential speeds, you could opt for RAID 0, though you're playing with fire there if something does go wrong with any of your drives.

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Like the UGREEN NASync DH2300, the UGREEN NASync DXP4800 GT doesn't seem to enable common file protocols on first install, but at least I was ready for this quirk so I could quickly get the unit up and running and detectable across all of my systems, ready for testing.

Performance

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The UGREEN NASync DXP4800 GT is built around an AMD Ryzen Embedded R2514 processor with 8GB of onboard RAM; this can be upgraded up to 64GB if your budget can stretch to dual 32GB modules. Its dual 10GbE ports can theoretically be aggregated together for even faster network speeds. That wasn't something I could test for this review, but it does point to ways that its utility could be expanded to meet even higher-level needs, though this isn't quite UGREEN's most premium NAS play.

The UGREEN web interface is easy enough to discern, and if all you really do want is a 4-bay big ol' block of storage for whatever purpose, once you've set up suitable discovery you're good to go and might not need much more.

In terms of raw data transfer speeds, the UGREEN NASync DXP4800 GT performed very well, and honestly was more limited by the test rig I was able to apply to it, which features a 2.5GbE Ethernet port and switch for transfers.

That's not an entirely unusual setup right now, and if you did want to make the most out of the UGREEN NASync DXP4800 GT, you'd need to look at 10GbE upgrades across the board. That does give it some headroom for improvement in many systems, but also means that unless you're already 10GbE equipped, you're not really pushing the UGREEN NASync DXP4800 GT to its limits.

Within the constraints of my 2.5GbE system, here's how the UGREEN NASync DXP4800 GT compared:

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Those figures are pleasing, and they do point to performance that could potentially support some live data activities like on-the-fly video editing, though I suspect the more you pushed that with 4K or 8K content, the more lag you would see.

However, it's been a very long time since NAS systems were just about the storage and raw speeds like this; these days it's reasonable to expect that any NAS, especially those that start tipping upwards in price terms, will be able to run a range of applications natively on their own hardware.

Here, UGREEN covers the basics, but, like the cheaper DH2300, it does rather lag behind its competition in terms of wider application support, resting mostly on the fact that it's Docker compatible for adding application support that way.

This does introduce some potential performance issues, because you'll typically find native app support is better for faster throughput than via Docker, and of course that does also introduce a layer of complexity friction to the whole setup experience.

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Which isn't to say that you couldn't get an interesting and for some purposes quite useful NAS out of UGREEN's native apps; these give you a choice of apps covering backup, browsing, simple home theatre and surveillance functions to name but a few.

For those who like (cough) sharing public domain or personally created movies around, Jellyfin is natively supported, but at the time of writing Plex is not.

Final Thoughts

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The UGREEN NASync DXP4800 GT is a keenly priced unit within the 4-bay NAS space, and it's one that has lots of headroom to grow even if, like me, you're not quite up to full 10GbE speeds just yet.

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Its limitations sit more in the software space, and that will somewhat depend on whether or not you need advanced app features or are already comfortable with Docker setup routines to pick up the slack here.