UGREEN NASync DXP4800 Plus review: This highly specced and fast-performing micro-business NAS comes up just a little short

UGREEN might not necessarily spring to mind if you're looking for a NAS enclosure. Better known for its power accessories, the Chinese manufacturer only officially entered the market in 2024, yet it has a growing offer of desktop devices with up to eight bays, covering everything from casual users through to quite demanding small firms. The UGREEN NASync DXP4800 is its flagship four-bay enclosure, and it may be the best specified we've yet seen.

This is undoubtedly a powerful NAS. It's built around an Intel Pentium Gold 8505 processor, and ships with 8GB of RAM onboard – you can upgrade to a 64GB maximum. Alongside four SATA slots, it offers two M.2 slots for NVMe SSDs. As you'd expect, these can be configured as a fast storage pool or used to cache read and write operations on the disks.

That's not bad at all, but this enclosure's real strength comes in connectivity. The headline here is the rear panel's 10GbE Ethernet port, offering clear daylight over even the 5GbE interfaces beginning to appear on other devices in this bracket. There's a second, 2.5GbE port, which you can bond with the main socket for failover protection and even more throughput. Also at the rear, you'll find two USB2 ports, a USB 3.2 Gen 1 (5Gbps), and an HDMI port supporting 4K video.

On the front, the final highlights are USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10Gbps) USB-C and USB A ports and – unusually – an SD card slot. While the latter is a bit niche, all three could be useful for easy backups and upgrades.

On paper, all this makes the NASync DXP4800 Plus suited to power users and small businesses. With four bays, startups could begin with two drives and add space later as needed. And the inclusion of backward-compatible wired 10GbE Ethernet – rather than fiber – supports those starting out with cheaper, slow equipment, providing a solid upgrade path as needs grow.

UGREEN NASync DXP4800 Plus review: Setting up

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It's not just this NAS enclosure's specs that impress. Unpack it, and you'll soon realise it's a nicely designed, well-built bit of kit. The weighty enclosure is metal, and it has a single large cooling fan, rather than two smaller, potentially noisier ones. Pleasing details abound; there's a magnetic metal filter for the fan – you can easily remove it to get rid of any dust. The four drive caddies are lockable and numbered, which helps prevent confusion, and the white status LEDs can display other colors, providing extra information in case of a failure.

As you'd expect, the caddies are tool-free provided you're fitting 3.5" disks. Unusually, there's a clip on the base to extend them widthways: extend, drop the drive in, close the caddy up, and your disk is ready to insert – even less hassle than the standard clip-in rail approach. You'll need to screw in any 2.5" disks, although here the neat design means there's no rail to remove and store when you do so.

You'll need to lay this enclosure on its back to unscrew the cover protecting its M.2 and memory slots – one of those is already occupied with the factory-fitted RAM. Although NVMe speed is unlikely to be the limiting factor on any NAS, it's worth noting that the interface here is PCIe4, rather than the Gen3 more common elsewhere. You get a pair of SSD heat sinks in the box, too.

NAS enclosures aren't often difficult to set up, but UGREEN's UGOS Pro operating system is a joy to use. Give the enclosure a name, set up the admin account, and it's away, quickly configuring the operating system. On restart, the OS guides you through the key tasks of creating a storage pool and shared folder, too.

This drive supports typical four-disk options, including RAID 5, 6, and 10, along with RAID 1 or 0. For this test, we configured four 4TB Synology disks in a 12TB RAID 5 array, and created a 1TB RAID 1 array using two WD Black NVMe SSDs. Unlike some other enclosures, you can't skip synchronisation on a new array; although you can continue to create shared folders and tweak the settings, it's best not to start shifting data around until initialisation is complete, which takes several hours.

Given the painless setup, one oddity is that Windows SMB sharing isn't enabled by default. It's easy to turn it on, just as it's easy to set up features, including load balancing across the two network interfaces. It's also worth noting that this NAS defaults to the EXT4 file format; it also supports Btrfs, though.

UGREEN NASync DXP4800 Plus review: Features and apps

While the hardware is great, and the software makes a strong first impression, it didn't take us long to spot some significant limitations. UGOS Pro is extremely user-friendly, and generally quite capable, but it doesn't have the depth you might expect from, say, Synology Disk Station Manager. This is exacerbated by a comparatively limited App Center, offering only 29 apps at the time of our review.

For business use, the most notable missing apps or features included servers for DHCP, DNS, and a web proxy, but it was a surprise not to see WordPress or Plex, which are almost ubiquitous among smaller NAS products. That said, UGOS Pro does offer both Docker and a proprietary Virtual Machine app, using which users with the patience and know-how can run containerised servers to plug any gaps. There are also UGREEN apps for video and photo management, and DLNA serving.

UGREEN NASync DXP4800 Plus review: Performance

We tested this NAS using a PC with a 5GbE network adaptor, connected via a 10GbE switch. While that meant we couldn't explore its maximum network transfer speeds, it certainly gave us an indication of what power users might experience. It's worth bearing in mind that you'll need fast network hardware to get the most from this enclosure; a 10GbE uplink and 2.5GbE downlinks would particularly help it serve multiple users in a data-intensive small business.

We tested our disk and SSD volumes separately before unmounting the SSD storage pool and reconfiguring the drives as a read/write cache for the disk volume. Using the ATTO disk benchmark gave an overview of direct data performance for various I/O sizes, while we tested real-world performance with a 11.1GB file copy comprising large, medium, and small files – in previous tests, we've found that strong performance on one doesn't necessarily mean a good result on the other.

On ATTO, the UGREEN DXP4800 Plus was one of the fastest NAS enclosures we've yet tested. Whether reading or writing to the disk, SSD, or cached volumes, it managed at least 64 megabytes per second (MB/s) on 4KB operations – a brilliant result. At around 155MB/s its 16KB write speeds weren't quite so exceptional, but at 243MB/s its read performance was astonishing.

As we'd generally expect for 2MB file operations and above, this NAS was throttled by its network bandwidth. It managed a massive 580MB/s or more across the various disk volumes, close to the theoretical maximum bandwidth of 5GbE. Here, it's important to remember that it could probably have gone faster if our test PC had also supported 10GbE.

Sadly, this NAS didn't live up to its potential when it came to Windows file copies. We recorded a fastest write speed of 58.37MB/s, and a read of 75.84: by no means bad, but significantly slower even than some 2.5GbE enclosures we've tested.

We weren't able to load up Plex for our usual transcoding test, but we wouldn't expect this enclosure to struggle with taxing jobs. It's more than highly specified enough to cope with multiple users and concurrent file operations. It's in this multi-access scenario that we'd expect an SSD disk cache to help keep speeds up – it makes little difference in single-user tests.

UGREEN NASync DXP4800 Plus review: Is it worth it?

This is a highly specified and beautifully designed NAS with some very impressive features. It's easy to set up and easy to use, offering lots of storage and performance potential to demanding users. It was also impressively fast on performance benchmarks, if a bit less so in our simple real-world test.

Unfortunately, it's not all good news. UGOS Pro is lacking some of the apps that power users might be looking for, particularly those interested in using the DXP4800 Plus' HDMI port in a media, conference, or surveillance centre application. It's also thin on network services, a potential roadblock if you're looking for one do-it-all box to support your business. That leaves this as a fair choice if you want compact and strongly performing storage for a small business – but only if you won't miss extra features that UGOS Pro currently doesn't offer.

UGREEN NASync DXP4800 Plus specifications