UGREEN's New Entry-Level NAS Devices Can Replace Your Google Photos Subscription

After successfully breaking into the home server market with its NASync devices in 2024, UGREEN is now offering its first ARM-powered NAS boxes—the NASync DH2300 and NASync DH4300. These products offer extreme power efficiency but won't work with x86 server applications, so they'll mainly appeal to casual users who just want an easy-to-use photos or files server.

The two-bay NASync DH2300 is powered by an 8-core Rockchip RK3576 processor (2.2 GHz), plus 4GB of LPDDR4X RAM and a 32GB system drive. It's also got a Gigabit Ethernet port, HDMI output, a USB-C port, plus a pair of USB 3.2 Type-A ports for external drives or other accessories. UGREEN opted for an unusual top-down "lidded" design, presumably to reduce the NAS' footprint or to make drive installation easier. You can store up to 60TB of data in the DH2300 with a pair of 30TB drives, but you'll probably end up mirroring your drives to prevent data loss, so the maximum usable storage for most customers will end up being 30TB.

Upgrading to the larger NASync DH4300 gets you four drive bays, plus a slightly more powerful 8-core Rockchip RK3588C processor (2.4 GHz), 8GB of LPDDR4X memory, and a zippy 2 Gigabit Ethernet port. Naturally, this four-bay unit supports a wider array of RAID configurations than the DH2300, specifically RAID 5, 6, and 10 along with the standard RAID 0 and 1. It can also hold a maximum 120TB with four 30TB HDDs. But all of the other features are identical to the DH2300.

I should note that UGREEN is utilizing non-upgradable RAM in both of these machines—I suspect that this will create a slight bottleneck when utilizing AI photo-organization features in the UGOS photos application if you opt for the weaker NASync DH2300. I'm also disappointed that UGREEN omitted the SD card slot in both of these machines. Every other NASync device features an SD card slot for automatic photo or video backups, which is a serious asset to photographers who use a DSLR or mirrorless camera. If you're a photographer or videographer, I strongly suggest that you opt for an x86 NASync device for this reason alone.

And, to reiterate, both of these devices are preloaded with UGREEN's UGOS operating system (which is Debian-based). UGOS is fairly easy to use, at least in my experience, and it's matured nicely over the last few years. UGREEN also has a really nice app for automatic photo and file backups, file sharing, etc.

Just a final warning on the ARM architecture—this is not the platform for installing an alternative OS (you can probably do it but I don't think it's worth the trouble on ARM at all), and importantly, ARM isn't ideal for some applications (and is completely incompatible with others). If you're interested in homelabbing , Plex , virtual machines, and so on, you should get an x86 NAS like the UGREEN NASync DXP2800 . The DH2300 and DH4300 are good options for file or photo storage, but they're fairly restricted otherwise.

The NASync DH2300 and NASync DH4300 are available today for $210 and $430, respectively. Note that HDDs are sold separately.

Source: UGREEN