A Powerful, Well Built NAS for Any HomeLab.
Why Every Home Should Have a NAS
A NAS (Network Attached Storage) is one of those things you don’t realise you need—until you have one. It simplifies your digital life dramatically by providing local file storage that all your devices can access without having to constantly plug in and unplug USB drives.
When I recently visited a friend, I noticed they were storing files on a device tucked in the corner. They didn’t even know it was called a NAS—it just worked. After setting it up on their phone too, they could access everything without touching their laptop. And today, NAS devices are far more than just storage—they’re small, capable computers.
The UGREEN DXP4800 Plus is a not just great for storing files. It has decent hardware specs, meaning it could be used to host a Plex media server, run Virtual Machines (VMs), or even act as the brain of your smart home with Home Assistant. Or act as all of these things!
Buying vs Building a NAS
If you’re considering a NAS, you have two options:
- Build your own using an old PC or a mini PC.
- Buy a purpose-built device, like the UGREEN DXP4800 Plus.
I’ve gone the DIY route myself, running a fairly janky TrueNAS setup. And while building your own NAS can be fun, it’s a full-blown project. You’ll need to research, assemble, configure, and troubleshoot—and often deal with compromises like high power usage or external USB drives.
In contrast, buying a NAS like this one is just easier. And honestly, for many people, it’s the smarter choice.
First Impressions & Design
This NAS looks the part. The case is clean, professional, made of metal and doesn’t attract fingerprints.
The front has the 4 removable hard drive bays. If you use 3.5″ drives then it’s an easy tool-less installation whereby the hard drive just clicks into place. If you want to install 2.5″ drives then you do need to screw the hard drive to the removable enclosure.
On the back you can see the UGREEN branded dust cover which is magnetic for nice and easy cleaning.
NVMe, RAM & Storage Expansion
Alongside four 3.5″ drive bays, the DXP4800 Plus has three NVMe slots—two for storage and one used for the operating system. This opens up serious performance options. (Although the OS drive is difficult to get to)
It comes with 8GB of DDR5 RAM, which is enough for basic use, but if you want to run virtual machines or handle heavy file transfers, you’ll want to upgrade. The NAS supports up to 64GB via two RAM slots and that’s what I’ve done to make the most of this NAS. You can see the 2 NVMe slots to the right of the RAM slots.
Performance & File Transfer Speeds
Without caching, file transfers with spinning drives in my testing was around 300MB/s in a RAID 10 configuration, which is about what I’d expect.
If you install 1 NVMe drive then you can use this as a read cache for your hard drive storage pool. If you install 2 NVMe drives then you can create a read-write cache.
Once I enabled an NVMe read cache, I hit full 10Gbps speeds. I couldn’t test write caching due to lack of a second NVMe drive, but creating an NVMe storage pool still gave me ~700MB/s write speeds; I need to review my 10Gb setup to see if there is a constraint in my setup somewhere. In the future I’ll definitely get a 2nd NVMe drive and see if I get the full 10Gb write speeds.
Ports, Power & Build Quality
The I/O selection is generous:
- Front: USB-A (10Gbps), USB-C (10Gbps), microSD card reader
- Back: 5Gbps USB-A, two USB 2.0 ports, HDMI, 2.5GbE, and 10GbE
Inside, it’s powered by an Intel Pentium Gold 8505 with one hyper-threaded performance core and four efficiency cores, running up to 4.4GHz, which makes it snappy even under load.
In my tests, the NAS added about 40W to my home lab’s power draw. But if you’re not using it constantly, spinning down drives or scheduling power on/off times could save energy. Wake-on-LAN is also supported.
Software Setup & User Interface
UGREEN’s OS—UGOS—was very straightforward to set up. From user and group creation to shared folders, everything felt intuitive.
The interface is modern and extremely responsive opening the various apps in UGOS. I mainly use the web interface, but there’s also a mobile app that worked great for media playback and has most other options that you can find in the web interface.
Storage & RAID Options
When setting up storage pools, I appreciated how user-friendly the RAID explanations were. No cryptic terminology—just clear options.
I opted for RAID 10 for a blend of performance and redundancy, though there are plenty of other options: JBOD, RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5 and RAID 6 are also available.
The system supports SMB multichannel (disabled by default, so be sure to enable it) and link aggregation. If you don’t have a 10GbE switch, combining the two network interfaces can still get you up to 5Gb.
Snapshots, Syncing, and Backups
Inside the App Center, you’ll find everything you need for data protection and syncing:
- Snapshots: Restore points that protect against accidental deletion or ransomware. When you restore a snapshot, it creates another one to prevent overwriting new data. Cloning of snapshots is my recommendation for recovering your data though.
- Sync & Backup: Back up your NAS data to another device, a secondary storage pool, or the cloud (Google Drive or OneDrive supported).
- SMB Folder Linking: Easily transfer data from other machines by linking network on other machines or another NAS. Handy for initial copying of data.
If you install the optional desktop app, your files can be kept in sync automatically with your NAS.
AI Photos App
The built-in Photos app has some surprising features:
- Basic object and person detection
- Ability to map images to GPS locations if metadata is present
- Support for training a custom model, though I haven’t tested this yet
Home Assistant & Virtual Machines
You can also install Docker containers and full virtual machines, with support for USB passthrough. I tried both Docker and VM versions of Home Assistant:
- Docker version: Installed in 5 minutes via App Center. Works well, but doesn’t support the Home Assistant add-on store and was about a month behind on version.
- VM version (HAOS): Installed manually. Required switching the network bridge to a Linux bridge for proper device discovery. After that, it worked perfectly, and USB devices like my Sonoff dongle passed through just fine. Check out the video for more details on how to do this!
Final Thoughts: Is It Staying in My Home Lab?
Absolutely. The UGREEN DXP4800 Plus has earned its place.
What I haven’t fully decided yet is its role. UGOS is capable enough that I may just leave it as-is. But part of me is tempted to install Proxmox, add it to my existing cluster, and virtualize TrueNAS for ultimate flexibility.
If you’re in the market for a NAS then this one is worth serious consideration.
Be sure to check out my video and leave a comment. Thanks, until next time!