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Ugreen NASync DH2300: 30-second review
From being a brand that only sold NAS in China a few years back, Ugreen has risen to compete with the likes of QNAP, Asustor, and TerraMaster.
Today, I’m looking at the NASync DH2300, an entry-level design intended for home and SMB use, where the purchaser is focused on securing backup data from local computers or the Cloud.
What this isn’t is an X86 processor NAS meant for VT or five different functions. It’s an ARM-powered NAS with a maximum of two 3.5-inch drives for storage, limiting it to RAID 0 or 1 configurations. And, with a single gigabit Ethernet port, there are performance limitations that more sophisticated products, like its DH4300 Plus brother, can avoid.
The obvious question might be why you would choose this over something better, and the simple answer is price. Currently selling directly from Ugreen for only £152.99 in the UK, €188,99 in Europe, and $188.99 in the USA on an Early bird discount that ends soon.
For the build quality and features of this design, that’s cheap, especially if you have two unused hard drives handy. Those buying drives for this unit could use up to 30TB mechanisms for either 60TB of RAID 0 storage or 30TB of RAID 1 with redundancy against either drive failing.
It’s also possible to attach external storage via USB if you want another backup or extra capacity.
Overall, for a minimal outlay, this is an excellent solution that delivers decent performance for those who want centralised backups and Cloud connectivity for a small group. And, purely on value, it’s sure to be added to our best NAS device selection.
Ugreen NASync DH2300: Price and availability
- How much does it cost? From $210/£170/€210
- When is it out? Available globally now
- Where can you get it? Direct from Ugreen or through an online retailer
Available directly from Ugreen or from many online retailers, the NASync DH2300 has an MSRP of $209.99 in the US, £169.99 in the UK, and € 209.99 in Europe. But as part of a launch promotion, it can be sourced from Ugreen for $188.99, £152.99, or € 188.99, depending on your region. Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk typically matches these costs.
That’s a remarkably competitive price for a 2-bay NAS with 4GB of RAM, since other similarly specified NAS like the QNAP TS-216G-US are more like $239.
And, those who like Synology will pay $285 for the DS223, a design without HDMI and only a four-core SoC.
Asustor does compete on price with the Drivestor 2 Lite AS1102TL, a 2-bay with only 1TB of RAM (not expandable) and a four-core SoC for $175.
The only alternative that might be worth the extra cost is the TerraMaster F2-425, which has an Intel X86-compliant processor that supports Virtual Machines.
What the DH2300 delivers is a punchy, small system that’s cheap to deploy and relatively easy to manage for a modest cost.
Ugreen NASync DH2300: Specs
|
Item |
Spec |
|---|---|
|
CPU: |
Rockchip RK3576 (8 cores, 8 Threads) |
|
GPU: |
Mali-G52 MC3 GPU |
|
RAM: |
4GB LPDDR4X (not expandable) |
|
Internal Storage: |
32GB for UGOS Pro |
|
SATA Storage: |
2-bays (3.5 or 2.5 inch mechanisms) |
|
M.2 Storage: |
N/A |
|
Ports: |
2x USB3.2 Gen1 USB-A (5Gbps) |
| Row 7 – Cell 0 |
1x USB3.2 Gen1 USB-C (5Gbps) |
| Row 8 – Cell 0 |
1x HDMI 2.0b |
|
Networking: |
1x RJ45 1GbE LAN |
|
OS: |
UGOS Pro |
|
Maximum Capacity: |
2x 30TB SATA (120TB) |
|
RAID Modes: |
JBOD/Basic/RAID 0/RAID 1/RAID 5/RAID 6/RAID 10 |
|
PSU: |
12V 4.2A 50.4W |
|
Dimensions: |
151 x 98 x 213.7 mm (LxWxH) |
|
Weight: |
350g |
Ugreen NASync DH2300: Design
- Top-loader
- Easy access
- Simple and silent
In many respects, the DH2300 is like a DH4300 Plus (read my review here), but approximately half as wide.
The vertical mounting of drives reworks a concept I first saw in the WD MyBook Duo, making the storage relatively easy to install and remove.
It would be nice if Ugreen had some trays that didn’t require screws for 3.5-inch drives, like TerraMaster, but mounting drives isn’t something most people will do often.
Once screwed to the plastic trays, these can be lowered into the DH2300, and they engage with a satisfying click. The lid is held in place with magnets, should you want to swap a drive.
The front of the NAS has four LEDs that represent power, LAN and the two drives, and these flash on the last three indicators to show activity. Also on the front is a single USB-C 3.2 Gen 1 port, and on the rear are two more USB-A ports of the same spec. One Gen 2 port might have been nice, but Gen 1 is sufficient for many applications, including connecting external storage.
The one controversial port on this machine is the LAN port, because for whatever reason, instead of the 2.5GbE port that went on the DH4300 Plus, it’s only a 1GbE LAN port. With this NAS costing only about 60% as much as its four-bay big brother, the 2.5GbE LAN ports and two extra bays add a significant price increase.
However, as I’ll discuss later, it is possible to avoid this choice without spending another $200 on the other model.
One feature often missing from entry-level NAS is an HDMI port, and this NAS has one that supports 4K video at 60Hz. This means the DH2300 could easily be configured as a single-screen display system for a marketing promotion, since the media-playing app can output to the HDMI port.
There is a fine irony that TerraMaster, which also includes HDMI ports but lacks any apps to use them, is further embarrassed by Ugreen, which has had the functionality to use the video output from relatively early in UGOS development.
Along with the NAS, in the box is a 50.4W PSU, screws for the drives, a screwdriver, and a CAT6 Ethernet cable. If you already have some drives, getting this machine operational should only take a few minutes. It’s possible to complete the install with only a single drive, and add the second drive later, assuming you don’t want to use RAID 0 or 1.
I’d best describe the DH2300 as a minimalist NAS approach, but, as I’ll discuss later, it’s surprisingly agile and can handle a wide range of applications.
The build quality is good, as I expected from Ugreen, and even though it’s mostly plastic, it has the air of a machine with many years of use ahead of it, and it comes with a 2-year warranty.
In comparing it to some of the alternative two-bay ARM-powered NAS, the product that it is most likely to be considered against is the Synology DS223J, a machine that costs a few dollars less.
The best aspect of the Synology DS223J is the Synology DSM operating system and that brand’s application ecosystem. However, it has a less powerful SoC, only 1GB of RAM, and only two USB ports. And, installing the drive involves disassembling the machine.
It’s also approaching three years old, and there is no indication from Synology that they’ll replace it, since they’ve given up on the cheaper end of the NAS market.
The DH2300 is undeniably a more modern design that can run more apps simultaneously and has several features missing from the DS223J, including a GPU for hardware video transcoding.
With fewer hard drives to cool, the vertical-tube cooling system on the DH2300 works well, and the system remains generally quiet even under duress. Air is pulled in from the underside and sides, travels over the mainboard and then up past the drives before being vented through a grill on the back of the lid. In my testing, the system barely reached about 35 °C, and that was after it had been on for 10 hours or more.
At this price and spec, it’s hard to criticise the DH2300, with the possible exception of the 1GbE LAN port. I can’t see that leaving that out and using a 1GbE port would save much money, so it looks like Ugreen wanted to encourage people to get the DH4300 Plus instead.
I’d have liked tool-less drive trays, but Ugreen doesn’t offer those on even the expensive DXP series.
Ugreen NASync DH2300: Features
- Rockchip RK3576
- 5 PCIe Lanes
- Zero upgrades
The first major surprise I encountered with the DH2300 is that it doesn’t use the same SoC as the DH4300 Plus, which I’d assumed it would.
That NAS uses the Rockchip RK3588, an ARM 8-core SoC that runs at 2.4GHz. But the DH2300 uses a similar, but not identical, Rockchip RK3576.
The RK3576 has slower Cortex-A72 and Cortex-A53 cores, while the RK3588 has Cortex-A76 and Cortex-A55 cores. There is no L3 cache on the RK3576, and it also has a narrower 32-bit memory bus and a less powerful Mali-G52 MC3 GPU.
That said, as I’ll discuss more in the performance section, this is more than enough computing power for file serving, and Synology sold plenty of dual-bay NAS with single- or dual-core ARM processors.
Both SoCs have an NPU rated at 6 TOPS, but the RK3588’s external bandwidth makes it superior for general processing. The lower-specification chip in the DH2300 has the advantage of higher power efficiency, which might affect the annual running costs if you keep this NAS active 24/7.
Being derivative ARM chips, neither of these can use X86 features, such as running Virtual Machines, though they support Docker containers.
The specific snag with doing this with the DH2300 is that it only has 4GB of RAM, which is not enough to run many containers, and it has limited processing power to execute them. That probably makes this NAS unsuitable for Docker container development, even if it isn’t impossible.
The PCIe lane allocation is identical to the RK3588: five PCIe lanes, four PCIe 3.0 and one PCIe 2.1, which is typically used for a Wireless M.2 card.
There is no wireless on this device, so the available bandwidth is split among the three USB ports and the 1GbE Ethernet port. For those outputs, it has sufficient, as with the same amount, the DH4300 Plus managed to support a 2.5GbE LAN.
Perhaps Ugreen wants to hold that feature back for a DH2300 Pro model, or give the DXP2800 a reason to exist.
Where this hardware, and the DH series generally, is mildly disappointing is that there are no memory upgrades available, as the memory is board-mounted. This was also true on the DH4300 Plus, but that did have 8GB pre-installed. For those curious, this SoC can address up to 32GB of RAM, should Ugreen be inclined to make other models that are better suited to Docker development. Given that Ugreen offers a wide selection of DXP-series NAS that support up to 96GB of RAM and NVMe drives, that seems unlikely.
The DH2300 was made to deliver a basic solution for backup, media serving, and other tasks, and it does that well with the hardware it has on hand. It’s not meant to be a system you can evolve, with the possible exception of larger hard drives.
For the price, this has more memory and power than most entry-level NAS provide.
Ugreen NASync DH2300: Software
- UGOS Pro
- Limited applications
- No to TrueNAS
Compared to QNAP and TerraMaster platforms, the Ugreen UGOS offering isn’t as mature, feature-rich, and the number of first-party applications is low.
That said, it has the ones that most buyers of this machine will want, and that might just be enough.
Imagine you have a regional office with a couple of staff and you want a centralised backup for their computers that you can sync with bigger servers overnight. The DH2300 is fine for that, and getting it up and running will only take a short while.
It’s also perfect for media playback; you can install Jellifin or the Ugreen Theatre app to provide an interface for movies and TV, and the Photo and Music apps are great as well.
It’s also easily connectable to Cloud services, enabling a local copy of anything online, which might be critical in an outage.
But this OS now offers features I’ve been waiting for TerraMaster to deliver for at least 5 years, specifically the ability to use the HDMI port for something more interesting than just seeing Linux boot.
Using the Ugreen NAS mobile app, you can select a video file and tell the system to output it from the HDMI port, with a maximum resolution of 4K at 60Hz. This feature is still in Beta, but I found it worked exceptionally well. The only snags I ran into were HDR content displayed on a screen that didn’t support that mode, resulting in washed-out colours.
Hopefully, Ugreen can fix that issue, because it’s something many other NAS brands don’t offer and users will love.
If you have a specific need, it might be worth checking which apps the DH2300 supports before spending. But it caters well for media distribution, backups, and personal Cloud services. And, compared to the DXP NASync hardware, it’s less suitable for developers.
Ugreen NASync DH2300: Performance
- 1GbE bottleneck
- 2.5GbE options
- Using SSDs
Those buying a dual-drive NAS are confronted with one constraint that’s very difficult to circumvent: the performance of physical hard drives. With two drives, and using RAID 0 for the best performance, the maximum speed you can realistically achieve with physical hard drives is about 300MB/s, with each drive contributing roughly 150MB/s.
If you use JBOD or RAID 1 (mirror), then that performance wall is 150MB/s. A few drives with hybrid caching might be able to push that towards 200MB/s, but these aren’t generally meant for NAS use.
With those limitations in mind, the best fit for distributing this file system is a 2.5GbE LAN port, which is why it’s so disappointing that, unlike the DH4300 Plus, the DH2300 only has a 1GbE LAN port.
However, at my request, Ugreen sent me a CM648, also known as a Ugreen USB-A to RJ45 2.5GbE Ethernet adapter. I tried this on the DH4300 Plus, to find out if it supported channel bonding or link aggregation, which it didn’t, even if the adapter worked fine.
And, on the DH2300, it worked perfectly, even if the network panels on this NAS don’t support configuring a fail-over or linking it with the existing LAN port. As the CM648 uses a USB-A port, you could add two of these, and it might be possible to add a third using an adapter with a USB-C port.
For those interested in using one of these, the adapter costs less than $25 on Amazon, which seems like a bargain.
To put this in perspective, I installed two 4TB Seagate Iron Wolf drives in a RAID 0 configuration for maximum performance and over the built-in 1GbE that translated into 118MB/s for both reading and writing.
Switching to the CM648, I was able to achieve 296MB/s reads and 286MB/s writes, with no other modifications. That was connecting to a PC with a 2.5GbE LAN adapter, and by my calculations, that’s 250% faster reads and 242% faster writes, with the same drives on the same NAS.
My concern was that, with this hardware configuration, there would be a noticeable increase in CPU load and memory usage. But it turns out that the maximum CPU use in a file transfer was only 15%, and the memory was 16%. And that’s no more memory than the NAS used at idle.
Therefore, like the DH4300 Plus, the DH2300 is more than up to the job of saturating a 2.5GbE LAN link, and probably more than one.
My obvious next thought was, would a 5GbE LAN adapter work, because Ugreen also make those? Sadly, I don’t have one to test that theory, but there are issues down that path. Firstly, the USB bandwidth is only 5Gbps, so you might not get the full experience, but also, the drives are still capped at a maximum throughput of around 300MB/s.
However, it would be possible to use a SATA SSD in this NAS, and that would have the performance to saturate a 5GbE LAN port.
Those adapters cost around $35, but that also assumes you have network infrastructure that supports 5GbE networking.
Out of curiosity, I deleted the RAID 0 volume, formatted drive one as a ‘Basic’ drive, then pulled the second drive out and replaced it with a Kingston 1.92TB SATA SSD. I should say that nowhere in the notes does it imply that the DH4300 supports hot swapping, but this all worked like it might.
Once the drive was formatted, a cache could be added using the SATA SSD.
That’s an excellent feature, because if you have one large, say 20TB drive, you can get 2.5GbE (or even 5GbE) performance out of it using a relatively inexpensive SATA SSD to cache reading and writing. Most two-bay NAS don’t support any of this technology, so it’s exciting to find Ugreen delivering it to those on a budget. A 256GB SATA SSD is typically $25, and that’s sufficient to provide caching for a conventional drive.
Testing a single 4TB IronWolf drive with caching provided by a Kingston M600 SATA SSD achieved 296MB/s reads and 191MB/s writes. The reason that we didn’t get the full impact on the writes is that with a single SSD, the system only configures it for read-only mode. That’s the limitation of this solution, but it’s better than having raw single-drive performance.
The real takeaway from all my playing is that even with only two bays, no M.2 slots and a single 1GbE LAN port by default, the DH2300 is packed full of possibilities. If you want a faster LAN, another $25 can get you there by merely plugging in the adapter.
Ugreen NASync DH2300: Final verdict
With the possible exception of the LAN port, which can be fixed, the hardware in this NAS is ideal for home or small-office users. For those dipping their toes into the world of NAS for the first time, it offers an easy-to-follow learning curve, and most users should be up and running within a remarkably short time.
Without an X86-compliant processor, it will never host virtual machines, and with 4GB of RAM, it can only handle a couple of major Docker containers. But that’s missing the point, as this NAS secures and dispenses files, displays video files, and archives media effortlessly. And, once UGOS Pro gets WORM volumes, and it undoubtedly will, it could be the cheapest local backup vault available.
If you want 10GbE, VT, and M.2 SSDs, they are available, but not at this price. This is a terrific NAS that does most of what these things are bought for, without breaking the bank.
Should you buy a Ugreen NASync DH2300?
|
Value |
2-Bays but plenty of NAS for a low price |
4.5 / 5 |
|
Design |
Simple but effective design that is quiet and attractive |
4 / 5 |
|
Features |
No x86-based, but good enough for the key tasks |
4 / 5 |
|
Software |
Not as many apps as others, but all the common tools |
4 /5 |
|
Performance |
Limited with a 1GbE, but excellent with a 2.5GbE adapter |
4 / 5 |
|
Overall |
For the money this is a great starter NAS |
4.5 / 5 |
Buy it if…
Don’t buy it if…
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