Design and workmanship
UGREEN has opted for a vertical design, foregoing the classic wide front panel with visible hard drive bays. The four HDDs are inserted from the top and disappear under a magnetic cover. This makes the DH4300 Plus pleasantly compact for a 4-bay NAS, requiring minimal floor space at 155 × 155 × 215,7 millimeters. The build quality is also excellent. The matte finish gives a clean look, the ventilation works well, and even after six months of continuous operation, there were no issues.
The rear ports include a 2,5 Gigabit LAN port, USB-A, and HDMI with up to 4K output. The front panel features the power button, drive LEDs, and a USB-C port. Instead of being tool-less, the 2.5" or 3.5" hard drives are screwed into the drive bays. Screws and a screwdriver are included. For testing, I installed four WD Red Plus drives, each with 4 TB of storage. The maximum supported storage capacity is 128 TB.
Hardware and performance
The NASync DH4300 Plus is powered by a Rockchip RK3588. This ARM chip combines four high-performance Cortex-A76 cores with four energy-efficient Cortex-A55 cores. It also features a Mali-G610 GPU and an NPU with 6 TOPS. UGREEN has also included 8 GB of LPDDR4X RAM and 32 GB of eMMC storage for the operating system.
File sharing, backups, photo management, and minor server tasks don't particularly strain the RK3588. The hardware has enough reserves to ensure the system still feels fast even when running more than one SMB share. However, UGREEN has set limits on expandability. The RAM is soldered in, there are no internal M.2 slots, and a second network port is also missing.
The setup itself is straightforward. The NAS is detected on the network via the UGREEN app or web interface, and then the storage pool, RAID, and users can be configured step by step. Basic, JBOD, and RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, and 10 are supported, meaning UGREEN covers the classic configurations.
With four 4 TB hard drives in RAID 5, I achieved average read speeds of around 280 MB/s and write speeds of around 245 MB/s. As expected, the speed drops with many small files, and an SSD cache could have been beneficial here. Power consumption with four HDDs is around 8 watts at idle and about 25 watts during intensive write operations.
The NAS is also quiet in terms of noise. The fan is hardly the problem; the usual access noises of the HDDs are more audible.
UGOS Pro
The interface resembles a classic desktop and clearly displays storage, network, system utilization, and the status of the built-in drives. In terms of functionality, UGREEN doesn't quite match Synology DSM or QNAP QTS. However, backups, synchronization, Time Machine, media management, remote access, and smartphone backup are all included. Docker is also integrated, although the ARM64 platform requires compatible containers, and the 8 GB of RAM offers limited headroom.
What I particularly liked was the local photo management without any cloud services. Images are analyzed directly on the NAS for people, subjects, and locations. The facial recognition worked well with my collection and even recognized some people who weren't looking directly at the camera. Search terms like "dog," "car," or "mountains" also yielded usable results.
Those planning to use the NAS as a media server can decode H.264, H.265, VP9, and AV1 up to 8K at 60 frames per second using hardware decoding. It also features HDMI 2.1, allowing it to be connected directly to a TV or monitor.
Unlike many models in the DXP series, the DH4300 Plus is not designed for alternative operating systems such as Unraid or TrueNAS. Due to the ARM platform, there is no traditional BIOS access, which is why UGREEN explicitly advises against replacing UGOS with another operating system.
