I had been running an old Synology DS215j (first came out in 2014; I picked up used years later). It’s old, it’s slow, it’s limited…much like me with my knees.
Came across Ugreen this summer, and ended up picking up a DXP4800 Plus. The story of obtaining it is long and convoluted, fraught with attempted fraud via Aliexpress sellers (yes, plural). Perhaps for another time. But got one.
The thing is a beast, especially once I added in a couple NVMe drives for caching. More storage, faster storage, and running several apps in Docker. And even a Windows 2000 Pro VM for nostaglia, and because I could. Has run flawlessly.
Development continues to expand apps and capabilities of the Ugreen OS, but it is very similar to Synology without the cost, or the now price-inflated, Synology-branded drives required in many models.
Comparison of specs between the units for kicks:
DS215j: 800MHz Marvell Armada 375 dual-core CPU, 512MB of DDR3 RAM. 2 bays.
DXP4800 Plus (with upgrades): 12th Gen Intel Pentium Gold 8505 CPU (5-core, 6 threads, 3.3GHz with turbo up to 4.4GHz, 8MB cache), 16GB of DDR5 RAM, a 128GB SSD for OS. 4 bays.
Don’t do what I did (attempt to order from Aliexpress to save a few bucks). Unless you use PayPal + American Express, and have local USPS on your side when the tracking sent isn’t your unit (AND hope USPS gets a picture of hte label in their system!), or addressed to you or to your address, and are exceedingly patient. Order from link at Amazon instead.