Result and general impression …
We are actually very pleasantly surprised by what Ugreen has achieved in its first attempt on the NAS market. The hardware of the Ugreen DXP480T Plus is without doubt superb for a NAS and the build quality is also excellent. Despite the pre-production model and beta software, there were no failures or problems during our tests. The system is already running very stably.
On the software side, things look a little different. Although the basic functions of a NAS are available here, it is clear that there is still room for improvement in some areas. The range of additional services and software components is also still quite limited. But as interest in the devices is very high (as of May 2024, all pre-order models at Ugreen are sold out), additional software will certainly be available in the near future, both from Ugreen itself and from third-party providers.
What could be disadvantageous for some users is the limitation to a maximum of 4 x 4TB SSDs and thus a maximum capacity of 16TB in a rather insecure RAID-0. If you use a more fail-safe RAID-5 or RAID-6, the capacity is reduced to 12TB or only 8TB.
Theoretically, expansion is possible via the two Thunderbolt 4 connections and we were also able to successfully operate both external USB 3.1 and Thunderbolt SSD enclosures on the NAS Unfortunately, these could not be integrated into the internal volume management at the time of testing, but were only supported as external drives. In addition, the hard drives must be formatted in order to be recognized. This makes a RAID-0 solution with 16TB of internal storage and, for example, an external 20TB hard disk as a backup conceivable in order to maximize capacity. But even this is basically just a question of the software and improvements can and will certainly be made here in the future.
Who is such a system suitable for? NVMe SSDs are not exactly cheap, especially in larger capacities, and very few users are permanently dependent on such high transfer rates. If you primarily use your NAS for backups and video streaming in your home network, for example, you are usually better off with an HDD NAS and possibly SSDs for caching.
It makes sense to use the Ugreen DXP480T Plus in video production, for example, where several users need to access the video material at the same time. This is where the NAS with its 10Gbit/s network connection and fast SSDs really comes into its own!
The device is also well suited as a home or small business server on which various applications are hosted as Docker containers or VMs. A fast CPU with 10 cores and up to 64 GB RAM are the features with which the NAS can score points.
Thanks to the possible power supply via USB-C PD, mobile use via a power station is also possible without any problems and the HDMI connection with 8K support allows future extensions via the announced Ugreen video app for direct use on the projector.
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Read on in the hardware test area with several hardware reviews …