One of our favourite affordable NAS devices just hit a great price at Amazon
A great beginner NAS
The Ugreen NASync DXP2800 is one of our favourite NAS server boxes for beginners thanks to its ease of use and affordability. I put one through its paces recently for an upcoming piece and came away very impressed.
If you're looking for a great entry point into the world of network-attached storage for media serving, data backups and more, this is a genuinely great investment for the money.
In the UK, the Ugreen NAS is down to £266 from its £310 list price, which is a solid saving. However, a stronger reduction on this NAS is to be had in the US at $297, which makes it an entire cent cheaper than it was for Prime Day!
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Ugreen NASync DXP2800 NAS (2 bay, 2.5-gig Ethernet, UGOS operating system)Now £265.99 (was £309.99) / $296.98 (was $349.99) |
A problem with network attached storage is that it can be a very technical thing, with lots of jargon and such, and they can be a bit of a pig to set up. However, that isn't the case with the DXP2800 as drive installation is toolless, plus setup can be done via the Ugreen NAS app straight from your smartphone with guidance on things such as different RAID configurations and what it all means.
The actual unit itself is quite compact as a 2-bay NAS, and feels sturdy with a metal chassis. You get a nice array of ports, with the front having a USB-C and high-speed USB-A 3.2, while the reverse houses a 2.5-gig LAN port for wired networking, another USB-A 3.2, two USB-A 2.0 ports and an HDMI out. It comes with reasonable power for the type of workloads you're likely to undertake with a quad-core Intel N100 chip that's common in more affordable NASe and mini PCs as well as 8GB of DDR5 RAM that's upgradeable. Alongside the two hard drive bays, there is room for NVMe drives for caching purposes for speedier data access.
A web dashboard is still useful for more advanced things, such as setting up a Plex server using the UGOS interface, which is in essence a custom verison of Debian 12 Linux that also has a similar look and feel to macOS if you're used to that. It's easy to use without much technical knowhow, and provides useful tutorials on initial opening that take you through what each app does. You can use things such as Docker to get containers such as Plex or Jellyfin working for media servers, plus a fair bit more, too.
£266/$297 feels like a great price for this Ugreen NAS, and if you've been wanting to try your hand at server stuff but don't want to be overwhelmed, it is genuinely a good option with this discount in mind from Amazon.