UGREEN NASync DXP6800 Pro review: Move over Synology, there's a new king in town

UGREEN are new to the NAS game, offering a full range of their NASync series at the beginning of 2024 at CES. Despite this they seem to have made quite a splash with home lab and small business users, securing $6.6 million in funding on KickStarter from over 13,000 backers. A year on, and with backers having already received their products, the results are in and we were invited to take a look at the 6-bay DXP6800 Pro model.

Disclaimer: UGREEN provided the review sample without any editorial input or pre-approval.

Here are the most important specifications:

As you can see from the specs, this is a seriously powerful NAS. It contains the now three-and-a-half-year-old Intel i5-1235U which was introduced in Q1 of 2022 with support for AV1 decode, DisplayPort 1.4a, HDMI 2.1, Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.2, LPDDR5 (5200), DDR5 and DDR4, and a max TDP of 55W.

Yes, this contains a CPU usually found in laptops or Mini PCs, and so with this, it also fits squarely in the HTPC segment. However it should be noted that the DXP6800 Pro does not offer Wi-Fi connectivity.

Below is a table of all the "U" series CPUs in that generation, the "U" stands for Ultra-Low Power, prioritizing energy efficiency and extended battery life, which absolutely applies to a NAS. Ours is in bold for reference.

One of the things I always mentioned in previous NAS reviews, is how disappointing it was to discover just 4GB RAM in models, even the new Synology DS925+ only has 4GB of memory which leaves buyers immediately scrambling to replace the RAM at additional cost. While 8GB in the DXP6800 Pro is nice, you may find yourself wanting to expand up to the allowed 64GB of DDR5 4800 MT/s depending on your use case.

There's also an elusive Plus model?

Before we dive in, UGREEN only offers one SKU for the 6-bay variant on its official website, but oddly enough there is a slightly cheaper DXP6800 Plus variant on Amazon. The Plus variant swaps out the Thunderbolt 4 ports for dual Type-C USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gb/s) ports, and instead of dual 10 GbE it has one 2.5 GbE and a single 10 GbE, it is also powered by the lesser Intel Core i3-1215U CPU. All this adds up to a savings of (at the time of writing) $229 over the Pro variant.

On the official website you can find other models in two-, four, and eight-bay as well as an "all flash" four-bay SSD variant.

First impressions

The DXP6800 Pro arrived in a large outer brown cardboard box, and upon opening it, the UGREEN box looks pretty cool with nice decals on the sides showing off the product. The DXP6800 Pro itself is protected by a foam cushioning with a compartment for the accessories box.

In the box

• NASync DXP6800 Pro device
• Power cable
• 2 x LAN cable (CAT 7)
• Quick guide [full online product documentation]
• Warranty card
• 2x SSD Silicone Pad
• Screws (for 2.5-inch SSD)
• 2 x HDD Tray key
• Screwdriver
• Stickers

UGREEN also sent along six WD Red Plus 4TB NAS HDDs to use in the DXP6800 Pro for the purpose of this review, so that is what I went with.

Design

The exterior is a matte dark gray with black trim around the front and drive bays, but in real life it looks much darker, almost black, it's also not a fingerprint magnet. The shape of the DXP6800 Pro follows a traditional NAS design, so no surprises here. The rounded edges look pretty cool as well, overall it's a very nice looking device; the cherry on top is that it does not slap a sticker on the front with model number, it is embedded with slightly raised gold lettering on the front.

On the front, you have your six bays, which are all numbered. Then below that and from left to right, you have the power button, which lights up when powered on, seven LEDs, with the first indicating LAN activity, the others (when white) show disk activity, (when orange) indicates a disk error, then there's a slot for an SD card, two Type-C Thunderbolt 4 ports, along with a Type A USB 3.2 Gen 2 port.

Around the back there's a magnetic Dust Mesh Filter (yes I did remove the cardboard sleeve before powering on). Then at the bottom from left to right you have the PCIe slot, a HDMI port, two Type A USB 2.0 ports, two 10 GbE Ethernet ports, a reset pinhole, power connector, PSU fan and (nice to see) a Kensington Slot, because it is a data storage device, you should be able to secure it if you want.

On the left and right of the DXP6800 Pro it is completely smooth with just a UGREEN logo embedded into the plastic casing at the bottom rear of each side.

On the bottom, the four rubber feet are screwed on and give a height of around 0.8mm, and although there are no grills for heat dissipation on the bottom, the "door" of the M.2 SSDs and memory does get quite warm, so it makes sense to have this height there in order to expel some of that heat.

Upon removing a couple of screws for the bottom "door" you can access the memory and M.2 slots. The DXP6800 Pro comes preinstalled with 8GB of DDR5 (4800 MT/s) memory, although it supports up to 64 GB kits.

Teardown

No NAS review would be complete without some sort of teardown, and usually it is required to manage some of the internal bays and memory anyway.

Yes, the DXP6800 Pro requires some light teardown in order to add a PCIe NIC, or GPU. I would have liked this to be a bit more modular, but how often are we going to be messing around with PCIe cards? I can live with it.

1. Turn the NAS over so the bottom is facing upward;
2. Remove the bottom panel (covering the M.2 SSDs and memory);
3. Remove the screws in the middle of the rubber feet;
4. On the back panel, remove the six rubber covers and screws;
5. After removing the back panel, unscrew two internal fixing screws (left and right);
6. Slide the unit out of the outer casing;
7. Remove the PCIe rear slot cover.

The three images up above represent managing the PCIe card, the third image shows the location of the CMOS battery.

Left side (fan cable + PSU)	Top + front metal frame	128G UGOS flash SSD

In the same instance you can also manage the UGOS flash drive if you want, but that takes a little extra work. As you can see with the middle image, there is a front metal frame that covers part of the flash drive (and more importantly, the screw). This means you must remove two screws on each side in order to carefully pull up the metal frame to expose the flash drive's screw which then allows you to remove, replace, backup the SSD or whatever. Not an incredibly helpful design to manage the bootloader, but it is what it is.

UGREEN also helpfully provides two massive thermal pads for the SSD slots, which as you can see above, I used with the two drives I installed.

Getting Started

Now that we have managed the internals, and installed our SSDs, next up are the drive bays.

The HDD sleds are completely tooless for traditional HDDs, one side of the sled can be pulled out a bit, then you place the HDD in at a slight angle to align the plastic pins into the screw holes of the HDD, press down, and then press the right side in until you hear it click, and that's it. Pressing down on the button on the bottom of the sled releases the side which can then be pulled out to release the HDD from the sled.

If you opt for an all-SSD (2.5-inch) setup for your bays, then UGREEN has you covered there too, because there are 24 screws included in the box so you can screw them into the bays from the bottom.

Fans are intake

Here you can view the inside of the DXP6800 Pro with it's double 120mm fans. From looking online, and having a bit of a feel (but also looking at the direction of the fan blades) this actually pulls in air over the HDDs in an intake configuration rather than as an exhaust.

Setup

BIOS

The DXP6800 Pro includes an Aptio BIOS from American Megatrends [1], and you can setup pretty much everything here including the boot order. To access the UGREEN NAS BIOS, you need a keyboard and an HDMI monitor connected to the device, then on powering on rapidly press the CTRL + F12 key combination during the boot-up process. This will interrupt the normal boot and display a menu, allowing you to enter the BIOS setup. The menu displays booting to UGOS, any USB sticks you have attached to it, and Enter Setup (the BIOS).

Initial Setup

Aside from the web address https://find.ugnas.com which you can use to find your UGREEN NAS in any browser, there's also an app for that you can use for Windows, Mac, Apple TVOS, Android and iOS which we'll get into a bit later.

The above two images are from the Windows app that upon opening scans for any UGREEN NAS devices on the network, and then either lets you login to an already initialized system, or set one up.

I did the setup process through Chrome, it is pretty straight forward and through a wizard, which you can view in full below:

Gallery: Initial setup

As you may have seen from the teardown, the DXP6800 Pro includes a 128 GB Flash drive, which is where UGOS lives.

Gallery: Storage setup

Above are the steps I took to create two Storage Pools, one for the HDDs and another for a single 2TB NVMe where I planned to install apps, and finally a 256GB SSD Cache assigned to the HDD Storage Pool.

No Hybrid RAID

Nope, UGOS does not have any sort of SHR (Synology Hybrid RAID) or TRAID (TerraMaster RAID) which allows mix and match of different disk types without losing the capacity of the largest disks.

Although it is possible to expand the Storage Pool (using RAID1, or 5) this can only be achieved once all of the smallest disks are replaced by the larger size. You can check out UGREENs RAID calculator here and have a play around experimenting with your own use case scenario.

Gallery: Post setup

The UGOS dashboard is actually quite nice and innovative, aside from the OOBE desktop tips there is also a little helper on the bottom right that reminds you to complete the first basic setup steps of the now initialized NAS. Those are:

1. Create a volume for using Storage;
2. Create a folder;
3. Create UGREENlink remote access.

UGREENlink remote access is similar to Synology QuickConnect, in fact it works exactly the same, enabling a hostname for the .local LAN but also a unique device ID to connect to over the web, with a full https certificate provided by UGREEN. Once all the steps are completed, they get checked off and the assistant disappears.

Since my LAN is already on 10GbE I decided to connect both ports on the DXP6800 Pro and then try bonding, which worked well. You can't really go wrong with the network wizard where everything is explained clearly, and more importantly in proper English.

So, you know how you normally connect to a NAS through the browser? That's how I've been doing it for the past few years anyway, UGREEN has their own Windows app that displays the connection in a remote desktop session window. From a quick online search it is also not a PWA (a web page thrown inside an app wrapper) it is a fully dedicated Windows app.

Usage

Next up I did some network performance tests, which you can view below.

A CrystalDiskMark test on a mapped network drive from within Windows 11 24H2 PC (image above) connected over a 10 GbE hub were well within acceptable ranges, but also appear to be showing off the SSD Cache doing its thing, considering I mapped the HDD volume.

I also ran NAS Performance tester, which tests the link speed performance. As you can see it pretty much maxes out my 10 GbE connection.

Pretty lights!

UGOS which is now at v1.7.0.3125, comes with an App Center that has a bunch of handy programs you can install right off the bat such as a Virtual Machine manager, Docker, (Cloud) Backup as well as native driver solutions for Nvidia cards you may build into the system. As you can imagine, any media streaming services you would want to host off the DXP6800 Pro will work great, thanks to the Intel Core i5-1235U CPU and 8GB of DDR5 memory.

From my limited time with the system, you wouldn't think this is barely a year old from the polish it has so obviously gotten from the dev team. I reached out to UGREEN and asked if end users had a lot of say in the development, purely from some of the stuff I saw like the numbered drive bays, a drop down menu in Docker manager for the containers that allow access to the web UI ports, and create shortcuts on the desktop and all these little things you don't find in Synology DSM and they replied with:

We indeed spend a lot of time looking at our users’ inputs to improve UGOS

I also asked if a Surveillance manager was being planned, was told that it is actually on the roadmap "to be able to connect cameras to the NAS device and save the footage." as shown below:

Important future updates in the next 12 months*

• AI Model Management
• LLM-Based ChatBot
• New App: Comic
• File Tags
• New App: Voice Memos
• Korean Language
• New App: Monitoring Center named Surveillance
• Cloud Drives: Addition of Dropbox
• Cloud Drive Mounting in Files
• Personalised Vault to secure your most important files
• Offline video playback in Theater

It's also quiet. I had this sat next to my computer on my work desk for the past week and a half, and I did wonder if the noise I was accustomed to with NAS devices would annoy me, but all I could hear was a soft whirring of the rear fan when the disks were not actively copying or reading data.

But wait, there's more

In case you decide to setup the DXP6800 as a HTPC with a TV or monitor connected, the UGREEN NAS app also lets you cast directly from the phone app to the screen that the NAS is connected to. It is stamped as a Beta right now, but I tried it out and it works perfectly. It is somewhat limited in that you can only cast content that is already on, or exposed to the NAS.

It should be noted that I was also able to cast media content from a different TerraMaster F4-424 Max NAS to the screen, because I had connected a Server Message Block (SMB) network share in UGOS Files app, so this also sort of gets around not being able to link such shares in Plex for a library. In short you must be able to navigate to the content in "Files" through the UGREEN NAS app. Perhaps an update could provide a QR code to be able to cast the phone screen's content.

Conclusion

What it comes down to is the quality of the DXP6800 Pro, it isn't cheap at $1199.99 (MSRP) but it's a great device, recommending it will depend on the individual's use case. If you're just looking for an all-rounder future proofed NAS device to manage virtual machines on, back up your files and take care of your home theater streaming, then this certainly ticks all the boxes. It provides great performance, takes up little space, and is on the whole, very quiet. Six bays should afford most homelab and SMBs enough redundancy too.

Things that stood out for me is the attention to detail this NAS offers, with things like the numbered bays, plentiful connection options on the front, with the standard USB 2.0 on the back where you could connect things that don't require USB 3.0+ like a UPS. I was also really impressed with UGOS, it feels really polished, and as I already mentioned, this was actually the first time I didn't run into any issues with this new to me OS, I didn't need to fire up Google or consult the UGREEN forums in order to complete the setup or get underway with my Docker containers.

There's so much more to unpack with UGOS and the DXP6800 Pro that isn't really in the scope of this review, that's why I will be following up with another guide in order to turn this into a powerful home streamer, so look out for that in the near future.

So, should Synology be worried?

Coming back to this review's title, it is mainly homelab and SMBs that I highly recommend this to, and for those that are now looking to move away from Synology, based on their draconian third party hardware limitations and lockouts. Not to mention the lukewarm reception Synology received online for its 2025 release such as the $799 DS1525+ with its AMD Ryzen V1500B embedded CPU that does not even have an onboard iGPU. It seems like Synology is stuck in the past, only now upgrading to 2.5GbE (from 1 GbE in 2023) while 10GbE is becoming the norm for premium devices. The + used to represent the flagship class series of Synology NAS range that was designed to do it all, but buyers will be left wanting with no PCIe GPU expansion option available to it as well.

I'd be hard pressed to find a more powerful home NAS right now, you would have to start looking in the realms of repurposed PCs to start to match the DXP6800 Pro's performance. The price might be a bit of a turn off for casual users, even if it is currently being offered at 10% off that brings the MSRP down to $1078.99 / £1,218.99 (0% off) / €939.99 (18% off) on Amazon right now. However, looking at the competition, the DXP6800 Pro is just $79 more expensive than the TerraMaster F6-424 Max with comparable hardware, however that lacks dual Thunderbolt 4 ports, with no connectivity options on the front, and does not have a PCIe slot. For me it's a no-brainer, and yes if you ask me, Synology should be worried.

• UGREEN DXP6800 Pro NASync on Amazon for $1078.99 (10% off $1199.99 MSRP)

As an Amazon Associate when you purchase through links on our site, we earn from qualifying purchases.

Follow us onGoogle News Add as a preferredsource on Google Follow@NeowinFeed Post Like Share Share Share RSS Report a problemwith this article