TRUTH OVER HYPE

UGREEN DXP4800 Plus 4-Bay NAS

Monster Review tested this computers & mobile product and rated it Great.

This review is going to be a bit of a wild ride. I was an early Kickstarter backer for the UGREEN DXP4800 Plus, snagging it for just over $400—an absolute steal for the hardware specs. Every tech YouTuber out there was showering it with glowing praise (which was before I realized UGREEN had backed a massive paid sponsorship campaign). Still, when it arrived, I was hyped. I threw in my drives, set up a RAID 5 array, and started using it as my primary storage server for raw YouTube footage. Then, the inevitable happened: a hard drive died. I didn't panic—that’s literally why we run RAID! I popped in a fresh replacement drive, went to rebuild the array, and... total breakdown. The volume unmounted itself and flat-out refused to remount. Every official guide insisted there should be a manual "Mount" button in the storage manager, but it simply wasn't there. I opened a ticket with UGREEN support. Not only did responses take 24 hours at a time, but they immediately started blaming me for the failure, claiming I changed some obscure setting. I fired back with screenshots proving I hadn't touched anything. But honestly, even if I had, a modern NAS UI shouldn't crumble and lock you out of your data because of a setting toggle! After weeks of back-and-forth customer service hell, I pulled the drives, threw them into a 4-bay USB enclosure, and used Disk Drill to rebuild the array manually. I got most of my data back, but it was an unorganized nightmare. The recovery process dumped over 50,000 files into a single directory, mixing tiny 1KB metadata files in with full video clips. Searching through it caused Windows Explorer to lock up completely. After spending five hours to find one clip, I gave up on Windows and wrote a custom PowerShell script to scan the folder and extract only files larger than 1GB to a secondary drive. It wasn't pretty, but it saved my footage. As for the DXP4800 Plus itself? I almost threw the entire unit in the dumpster. Instead, I wiped UGREEN's awful factory OS off the DOM unit and flashed TrueNAS—an OS I've been running on custom server builds for years. Fast forward two years: this hardware running TrueNAS has been absolute rock solid. I'm currently self-hosting Nextcloud, Anything LLM, Hermes, OpenClaw, Nextcloud Talk, RomM, Jellyfin, NGINX, and Pi-hole without a hitch. I even suffered another drive failure recently, and TrueNAS rebuilt the pool seamlessly like a real NAS is supposed to do. Sure, custom OS installs on proprietary hardware come with quirks—like the front panel LEDs going wild—but the community solved that with a quick GitHub script. I even used Hermes to write a custom automation script: now whenever I insert an SD card into the front slot, it automatically ingests and sorts my camera footage to the exact network share I want. The hardware engine inside the DXP4800 Plus is fantastic; you just have to kill their software to unleash it.