Any experiences with Ugreen NAS? They're a new player in the space, but with very compelling hardware offerings, way ahead of Synology. Been meaning to replace my old Drobo setup for years, and Ugreen seems to finally be hitting the sweet point of specs and pricing that I've been looking for.
I think self-built is the best bang for buck you're going to get and not have any annoying limitations.
There's plenty of motherboards with integrated CPUs (N100 same as cheaper Ugreen ones) for roughly 100. Buy a decent PSU and get an affordable case. For my configuration with a separate AMD CPU I'm looking at right around 400 Euros but I get total control.
And as far as software is concerned, setting up a modern OS like TrueNAS I find about the same difficulty as an integrated one from Ugreen.
The best solution in my opinion is to buy 5y old, used, server motherboards and CPUs (like AMD Epyc 3 right now). They are fairly cheap, it is durable products designed to work 24/7, and it comes with a huge number of PCIe lanes and extensibility. Same with enterprise SSDs for home usage, which is usually very little write. A used enterprise SSDs with a ton of endurance and very little writes is probably the best bang for your bucks. Wouldn't do that with hard drives though.
Yeah, I assume most home users these days are never pushing a NAS beyond 1Gbe, and 99% of people who have faster networks are still probably just doing 2.5Gbe (still just talking about home use). This wouldn’t make that PCIe bandwidth sweat.
I backed the Ugreen NAS on Kickstarter and I'm using it since.
The Hardware is great, it is build like a tank. But the Software is not there after almost a year. No iSCSI support as of yet and snapshots work in some weird way. I can only access snapshots over the WebGUI and I am not able to get a simple list of available snapshots.
Shoutout to openmediavault. Just yesterday I installed it on my DXP8800 and now it works like a charm.
But to install another OS you have to deactivate the watchdog timer in the BIOS, otherwise it resets the NAS every three minutes. Press CRTL + F12 to get into the BIOS and look for something like "watchdog" and disable it.
That's the first time I have heard about them but it looks very interesting and pretty. Synology has become way too expensive for me as I only need a 4-bay NAS and Ugreen is cheaper than the Synology. My only concern would be the software itself, and if they can avoid all the security holes that plagued some brands like Qnap.
Last but not least, they seem to have Docker support which was restricted to more powerful Synology models, and it's a nice bonus for self-hosting nowadays.
Had to replace my old micro server recently and was hard not to buy an ugreen, hardware looks nice, decent n100 CPU, software seems ok but wanted to run Linux myself.
Ended up buying a terrmaster DAS instead and connected it with usb to my NUC.
Also considered a NAS enclosure with an n110 mini itx board, would allow you to upgrade it in the future.
