Ugreen NASync DXP6800 Pro review: An affordable NAS alternative to Qnap and Synology

The business NAS market has coalesced around a small number of manufacturers for far too long and Ugreen aims to shake their tree. Best known for its range of classy PC accessories, power chargers, docking stations, and cables, Ugreen comes in with a bang by launching six desktop NAS appliances.

The NASync family has a solution for every occasion and ranges from the entry-level two-bay DXP2800 up to the eight-bay DXP8800 Plus and DXP480T Flash-based model. In this hands-on review we take a close look at the six-bay DXP6800 Pro, tell you what's good and what's not, and test its 10GbE performance.

Ugreen turned to Kickstarter to fund the NASync products, offering up to 35% discounts to tempt early backers and reaching its project goal in five minutes. They are only currently available in Germany and the US but the project campaign ends in early May with estimated global availability in June.

Ugreen NASync DXP6800 Pro review: Build quality and hardware features

The DXP6800 Pro is extremely well built and for an anticipated MSRP of around £810, offers an incredible hardware specification. You have a Gen12 Intel Core i5-1235U mobile CPU in the driving seat which offers eight efficient plus two multi-thread performance cores and a top Turbo frequency of 4.4GHz. 

The appliance comes with one 8GB stick of fast 4,800MT/s DDR5 memory which can be upgraded to 64GB. Externally, it's a veritable port-fest as you have dual 10GbE multi-Gigabit, 40GbE Thunderbolt 4, USB 3.2, and USB 2 along with an SD Card reader while output from the CPU's integrated Iris Xe Graphics chip is piped through to an HDMI 2.0 port.

HDDs slip easily into the telescopic tool-free carriers and two M.2 NVMe SSD slots are located behind a spring-loaded cover in the base. Cooling is handled efficiently by two rear 9cms diameter fans behind a magnetic dust cover and we found the appliance to be remarkably quiet.

The appliance has a spare PCIe slot but it's a pig to access. We had to remove the four feet, pick out six rubber plugs on the back panel and remove the screws underneath, carefully pull off the panel, extract four more internal screws securing the shell to the inner chassis, and gently slide it off. 

Ugreen NASync DXP6800 Pro review: UGOS features and apps

Great build quality does not necessarily make a great NAS as the operating system (OS) is equally important and it's fair to say Ugreen's UGOS will need a lot more development if it's going to challenge the establishment. All NAS storage essentials are there but IP SANs are not supported and we only had a choice of sixteen apps.

Deployment is a cinch as we loaded four 4TB Western Digital Red Pro HDDs, used Ugreen's web portal to discover and initialize the appliance, and called up the Storage Manager app to create a RAID5 storage pool. We also popped a couple of 480GB Kingston NVMe SSDs in the base and confirmed that they can be used as a performance-enhancing cache or a high-speed storage pool.

The Storage Manager provides plenty of information about storage devices and NAS shares are easily created from the File Manager app. Note that encryption cannot be applied to storage pools, volumes or shares and even though the BTRFS file system is supported, manual and scheduled snapshots are not currently available either.

There's work to be done with the Backup & Sync app too, as sync jobs can only be run between local and remote NASync appliances with Rsync support not yet available. Conversely, the Backup & Restore portion of this app only supports Rsync and not NASync appliances as sources and destinations.

On a brighter note, the Security Manager app provides real-time and scheduled anti-malware protection with quarantining. The Docker app adds virtualization services for running lightweight containers which can be downloaded from the app's image database.

Ugreen NASync DXP6800 Pro review: 10GbE NAS performance

For performance testing, we hooked the NAS up to the lab's 10GbE network and called up a Dell PowerEdge R650xs rack server loaded with Windows Server 2022 for host duties. NAS speeds are good with a mapped share returning Iometer sequential read and write rates of 8.9Gbits/sec and 6Gbits/sec while random operations returned 8.9Gbits/sec and 0.6Gbits/sec

The read rates could have been higher but UGOS only allows a maximum 1500-byte MTU (maximum transfer unit) and doesn't yet support 9000-byte Jumbo frames. For our real-world tests, copies of a 25GB test file between the appliance and server averaged 2.3Gbit/sec and 2.2Gbits/sec while backing up a 22.4GB folder with 10,500 small files averaged 1.2Gbits/sec.

Adding a mirrored read/write NVMe SSD cache to the volume saw a significant speed boost. Iometer read rates didn't budge but sequential and random writes improved by 20.5% and a whopping 328%. Our large file copy also saw read and write rate improvements of 46.5% and 60.7% while our backup test received a 39% increase in speed.

Having spent so long working out how to access the PCIe slot we decided to see if it actually worked. The effort was worthwhile as we fitted a Broadcom dual-port 10GbE adapter and it was accepted by UGOS without any problems. 

Ugreen NASync DXP6800 Pro review: Is it worth it?

If you want a NAS with dual integrated Thunderbolt 4 ports, the DXP6800 Pro is an absolute bargain as Qnap's 6-bay Core i5-12400 powered TVS-h674T costs nearly three times as much. Other appealing features are its classy build quality, the Gen12 Core i5 CPU, DDR5 memory, and dual 10GbE ports. 

This hardware package lays a very solid foundation but the UGOS software is clearly a work in progress and has a long journey ahead of it before it can match the features offered by Qnap and Synology. Ugreen assured us that more apps such as a hypervisor, a cloud drive tool, and video center are on the way soon while storage features, including snapshots and IP SAN support, will continue to be added - the Ugreen Kickstarter project has raised nearly £5M so there's no reason for it to delay.

Ugreen NASync DXP6800 Pro specifications