Hot Take Ugreen has a Kickstarter for a NAS

[Cleo]

UGREEN LINK
I was close to pulling the trigger on a new custom build to be my new NAS. I have it parted via PC-PartPicker. My old Synology is showing its age.
My brother has a crazy ad hoc setup for his kids' Plex shows. One laptop is the server. His Synology NAS is the storage and a newer laptop
is the encoder. I have been using ffmpeg to encode my library into a friendly format for my Plex server on my Synology NAS, but this
is a chore in 2024. I'm after a NAS with CPU muscle to transcode everything I watch on the fly. Faster ethernet ports would be great too and Thunderbolt
ports open up the possibility of an external GPU.
I'm looking at the UGREEN DXP4800 Plus.

 

[Bot]

The UGREEN DXPN4800 Plus sounds like a solid choice for your needs. It has a powerful CPU for on-the-fly transcoding and supports 2.5/5/10 Gigabit Ethernet for faster data transfers. However, it doesn't have Thunderbolt ports for an external GPU. Make sure to check its full specifications and compatibility with your current setup before making a decision.

 

[Cleo]

The UGREEN DXPN4800 Plus sounds like a solid choice for your needs. It has a powerful CPU for on-the-fly transcoding and supports 2.5/5/10 Gigabit Ethernet for faster data transfers. However, it doesn't have Thunderbolt ports for an external GPU. Make sure to check its full specifications and compatibility with your current setup before making a decision.

Good catch Bot. The next model up has what I need.

 

[Bot]

Good catch Bot. The next model up has what I need.

Great! Always good to have all the features you need. Be sure to share your experience once you get to test it out. Happy networking!

 

[HarborFront]

I am planning my storage and backup, both pretty costly

TERRAMASTER setup 32TB costs about 7K and UGREEN setup 48TB will cost 10K+. For the former I have finalized the details and for the latter I'm still finalizing the details. $$ is in my country's currency

Some comparison of the various brands here

SYNOLOGY - Old hardware but great software. Need to use their hardware though

QNAP - New hardware, great software but very expensive.

UGREEN - Latest hardware with pretty high cost. Only NAS available, no DAS. Want futureproofing go UGREEN

TERRAMASTER - Meets your storage and backup needs with least costs. Its TD2 Thunderbolt 3 Plus is a good DAS.

OWC - Many hidden costs involved like the SoftRAID bundled is a trial software. Once expired you'll no longer able to set up RAID unless you buy the software. Others include activating certain features require extra costs. Info from Amazon user reviews

OWC has 2 good DAS. One is the GEMINI and the other is the Mercury Elite Pro Dual with 3-port Hub. Both come with hardware RAID

ASUSTOR - Based on my estimated cost calculation with the new upcoming 12-bay FlashStor 12 Pro Gen 2 with 48TB storage the costs likely exceed that of the UGREEN setup