At a glance

Expert's Rating

Pros

• Affordable NAS for home users





• Money saving vs cloud storage





• Fast 2.5Gb Ethernet connection (DH4300 Plus)





• Low power Consumption





• Quiet fan

Cons

• USB only 5Gbps





• Would love some home-friendly colors

Our Verdict

More affordable than renting cloud space yet powerful enough for home or even small-office use, the Ugreen NASync DH series is the perfect starter NAS for a personal cloud and home network media server. It is one of the most exciting NAS packages of the year.

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Best Prices Today: Ugreen NASync DH2300

Retailer

Price

$167.99

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Price

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Whether it’s the kids’ videos, mum’s holiday photos or dad’s music collection, a family can quickly accumulate large amounts of data. Then there are the backups of all the devices found in a modern home. A Network Attached Storage (NAS) system is usually a better solution than directly connected hard drives or even SSDs because it’s a lot cheaper than renting expensive cloud storage and tidier and more convenient than hosting a stack of external hard drives.

NAS was once primarily the preserve of professionals, but is now increasingly finding its way into private households. This is partly due to the simpler set-up but also to falling prices—as seen in two of the Ugreen DH series of NAS drives: the DH2300 and DH4300 Plus.

From the entry-level $209 two-bay NASync DH2300 to more capacious $429 four-bay NASync DH4300 Plus the NASync DH series offers an extremely attractive price-performance ratio. With just two drives, the DH2300 is designed for home users with lower storage requirements. The somewhat slower processor, only 4GB RAM and 1Gb Ethernet are compromises. This should be bearable for the main home-user target group and it’s also sufficient as a backup server.

Before we describe our practical experiences, however, let’s first take a look at the technical data.

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</button><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">At the top we see the front of the DH4300 Plus, above the picture of the back ports.</figcaption></figure>

Thomas Bergbold

Reduced technology

In order to realise this price, Ugreen has made significant technical cuts compared to its higher-spec DXP range: read our Ugreen NASync DXP range review. This starts with the processor: the DH4300 Plus, for example, uses the 2GHz Rockchip RK3588C, an ARM-based eight-core processor. The 8GB of RAM is permanently installed and cannot be expanded. The DH2300 has the less-powerful RK3576 and has just 4G of RAM, but it’s still sufficient for the target home and small office market.

Two bays are available on the DH2300 for 2.5″ or 3.5″ SATA hard drives (HDDs) or solid-state drives (SSDs). Drives with up to 30TB per slot are suitable—so a maximum total capacity of 60TB. For many this should be more than enough for a private collection, but if not look to the four-bay DH4300 Plus that will offer up to 120TB. And if that’s not enough, each model has two USB-A ports and a USB-C port for external drives—but only with a speed of up to 5Gbps. There are no slots for M.2 SSDs as you’ll find in the more pro-level NASync DXP series.

The internal drives can be connected in a RAID for robust backup security. JBOD/Basic, RAID 0, 1, 5, 6 and 10 are supported.

The connection to the network is made via either standard 1Gb Ethernet (DH2300) or a faster 2.5Gb port (DH4300 Plus), and the HDMI 4K/60Hz output typical for Ugreen NAS is also included. This is