UGreen NASync DXP2800 Review and First Impressions

TL;DR - For anyone who doesn’t want to go through the full post, here’s the short version. I bought the UGreen NASync DXP2800 (2 bay) from Amazon for £249 and paired it with two Seagate Ironwolf 8TB HDDs, around £180 each.

The unit comes with an Intel N100 CPU, 8GB of RAM (upgradeable to 16GB, but there’s only one RAM slot), and a 2.5Gb/s LAN port. It has a solid build, was easy to set up, and I actually like the UI. Sure, it lacks a lot of features compared to Synology or QNAP, but since I’m mainly using it for file storage, I’m happy with the purchase.

But Why UGreen NAS?

The short answer is, this is the best bang for the buck. For £249, I’m getting a 2-bay NAS with an N100 CPU, 8GB of RAM, a 2.5Gb/s LAN port, and two NVMe slots.

I’ve been wanting to buy a NAS for over four years now. I know it sounds a bit crazy, right? Even though I always liked the idea of having one, I just didn’t have an immediate need until recently. Back then, the Synology DS920+ looked like the right choice. But by the time I seriously started considering it, the model was already two years old. I thought I’d wait a bit longer for a refresh.

I also looked at QNAP, but after going down the rabbit hole of reviews, forums, and Reddit threads, Synology seemed like the better option overall. Then came the DS923+, and honestly, it felt like a letdown. No iGPU, still only 1Gb/s LAN, and not much of an upgrade otherwise. Synology, really? So I skipped that one too. By 2023, I just couldn’t be bothered anymore. Spending around £550 for 4GB of RAM and a single 1Gb/s port didn’t feel like a smart move.

Synology released their 2025 models just a few weeks ago, and both the 925+ and 1525+ now come with ECC RAM and 2.5Gb/s LAN ports. But the big talking point was that they only support Synology’s own branded HDDs. Synology did say they plan to approve third-party drives in the future, but still, I don’t know what to make of it. They’re definitely more expensive, and they’re not even readily available on Amazon. My concern is, what happens if they increase the price, stocks run out, and one of my drives fails? I’ve never liked vendor lock-ins.

I also looked into the QNAP TS-464, but the UI looked clunky and, to be honest, felt pricey or at least on par with Synology. Overall, the UGreen NAS felt like the best bang for the buck.

UGreen also seems to allow installing third-party OS like TrueNAS or Unraid without voiding the warranty (as far as I know). Of course, if you do run a third-party OS, they won’t support you unless it’s a hardware issue. But that’s fair enough. It means I’ve got the flexibility to run whatever I want on this box in the future.

Initial Setup

The setup was very straightforward. I slotted in the HDDs, connected the LAN cable and power, and turned it on. Since I only had two drives, I went with RAID 1. I didn’t set up NVMe cache right away, but I’ll probably add a couple of NVMe drives later on.

Setting up shared folders and permissions was simple too. I just enabled SMB services, created a shared folder, and assigned the necessary permissions.

One thing I was particularly interested in was setting up Time Machine backups for macOS, and that was just as easy. All I had to do was enable the Bonjour service, create a dedicated user, and set up a shared folder.

It also comes with Docker and Virtual Machine support, but I haven’t tried Virtual Machines yet. I’ll update this post once I get a chance to test them out. Overall, I’m happy with the purchase and pleased with what it offers for the price.

Running Pi-hole in Docker on UGreen NAS

I decided to go with the obvious choice - running Pi-hole on the UGreen NAS using Docker. I used the latest version at the time, which was 6 (2025.06.1). First, you’ll need to install the Docker app on the NAS. Just head over to the App Center and you can download it from there.

Once Docker is installed, it automatically creates a folder called docker in the file system. For the Pi-hole setup, I created a new folder named pihole inside it, and then a subfolder called etc-pihole to store the data.

To deploy, open the Docker app on the UGreen NAS, go to Projects > Create, paste in this compose file, and hit deploy. That’s all there is to it. Here’s the Docker Compose file I used.

services:
  pihole3:
    container_name: pihole3
    image: pihole/pihole:2025.06.1
    ports:
      - "53:53/tcp"
      - "53:53/udp"
      - "8080:80/tcp"
      - "8443:443/tcp"
    environment:
      TZ: 'Europe/London'
      FTLCONF_webserver_api_password: 'SECRET_PASSWORD'
    volumes:
      - '/volume1/docker/pihole/etc-pihole:/etc/pihole'
    restart: unless-stopped

I also had to go in and change this setting to 'Permit all origins', but please make sure you understand what this means before applying it. In my case, I only use Pi-hole internally within my local network, so it’s safe to do. If you're exposing it to the Internet, I wouldn't recommend this setting at all.

Security and Trust Concerns

Of course, I also want to touch on security concerns. Synology and QNAP are well-established names in the NAS space, and UGreen is definitely the new kid on the block. So the question is, do we trust them? Personally, I do, but with some precautions. I don’t expose the NAS to the Internet, and I wouldn’t recommend doing that with any self-hosted service.

In my homelab, I have a Palo Alto firewall in place. I use Layer 7 inspection to monitor traffic, so if anything unusual shows up, I’ll definitely update the post. For now, everything looks clean.