**Introducing the ugreen NAS: A Revolutionary Storage Solution**

In recent months, there has been a growing trend towards cloud storage and online data management. However, many users are starting to question the security and control that comes with storing their files in the cloud. This is where the ugreen NAS comes in, a revolutionary new product designed to give users full control over their own data.

One of the standout features of the ugreen NAS is its advanced AI-powered technology. The device has been working behind the scenes to identify faces and group images together based on names, making it easy to navigate large collections of photos. This feature is particularly useful for family albums and events, where multiple images of the same person or event need to be managed. The ugreen NAS also boasts a range of other AI-powered tools, including blurry photo recognition, similar or duplicate image recognition, and content filtering.

But what really sets the ugreen NAS apart is its focus on user control and data security. Unlike many cloud storage services, which rely on subscription models and online connectivity to function, the ugreen NAS allows users to store their files locally on a dedicated network appliance. This means that all of the AI processing happens locally on the device itself, without any images being uploaded to the internet. This is a major concern for users who value their private data and want to ensure that it remains secure.

For those who are new to NAS storage, the ugreen product may seem daunting at first. However, with its user-friendly interface and simple setup process, it's easy to get started. The device comes pre-loaded with a range of features and tools, including pet recognition and text recognition, which can be accessed via a mobile app or web browser. Pet lovers will be particularly pleased to see that the ugreen NAS includes a feature that can recognize 32 different cat and dog breeds.

In terms of performance, the ugreen NAS is a solid performer, with fast data transfer rates and ample storage capacity. The device comes in a range of sizes, from small desktop units to larger server-style models, making it easy to find one that suits your specific needs. The build quality is also top-notch, with a sturdy metal casing and high-quality drive bays.

**A Promising Entry into the NAS Market**

The ugreen NAS represents an exciting new development in the world of network-attached storage (NAS). By focusing on user control and data security, the device is poised to make a big impact in the market. With its advanced AI-powered features and user-friendly interface, it's easy to see why this product has already generated so much buzz.

While the ugreen NAS is still a relatively new product, with ongoing software updates and feature expansions planned for the future, it's clear that this company is serious about delivering a top-notch storage solution. As such, I would highly recommend considering this device if you're in the market for a reliable and secure NAS solution. Whether you're a seasoned tech expert or just starting out, the ugreen NAS is definitely worth a look.

**Conclusion**

In conclusion, the ugreen NAS represents a major step forward in the world of network-attached storage. With its advanced AI-powered features, user-friendly interface, and focus on data security, this device has something to offer users who are tired of relying on cloud storage services. By giving you full control over your own data and allowing you to store it locally on a dedicated NAS appliance, the ugreen product is set to make a big impact in the market.

**What Do You Think?**

So what do you think about using NAS versus storing your files in the cloud? Have you had any experiences with network-attached storage solutions that have left you wanting more? Or perhaps you have concerns about data security and privacy when it comes to cloud storage. Whatever your thoughts, I'd love to hear them! Please leave a comment below with your opinions and questions, and I'll do my best to answer them in future episodes.

**Stay Ahead of the Curve**

If you're interested in learning more about the ugreen NAS range or pre-ordering one for yourself, be sure to check out the links in the description below. At the time of recording, the device is available to pre-order through Kickstarter at a reduced price, making it an attractive option for those looking to take control of their data.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhich would you say is better storing your files in the cloud or having your own network storage of course there are pros and cons to both approaches we like cloud services because they're easy to use and provided you continue paying your subscription fees your data is safe in theory but it's that in theory bit that gives us pause for thought is your data backed up are your photos and videos truly private and we kind of like the additional features that these CL Services often provide things like automatic creation of photo albums based on AI tools like face detection but what if you can have your own private network storage which the whole family or office can use but where you've got complete control over permissions and security and where you can install as much storage as you like without having to move to ever higher Cloud subscription tiers and that's where a network attached storage or Nas appliance comes in and there's a new player in the Market ug green now they asked me if I'd like to take a look at one of their new Nas models and this is the na sync dxp 4800 plus it's one of the 4 Bay models in their new Range which also includes two six and 8 bay models and there's even an all flash option which looks really interesting the specs and features vary across the range as you'd probably expect so we'll just pop up a comparison on the screen that you can pause if you want to have a look at that and when I first looked at the specs there were three things that caught my attention first of all the connectivity because there's a 10 gbit ethernet port and a 2 and 1/2 gbit port and I really like that a 2 and a half gbit Port will give a single user full speed access or go up to 10 gbit to add more concurrency or more simultaneous users and secondly we've got a five core Intel Pentium processor inside which is offering a bit more performance than you normally get with these types of devices and that's great for speeding up those AI image tools the third thing that caught my eye is the price because the MSRP for this particular model is $700 and that's already competitive but if you use the link in the description for this video you can currently get up to 35% off the price so This na async dxp 4800 pluses Four 3 and 1/2 in Drive bays and two nvme Drive bays and that means that you can have a maximum storage capacity of up to 96 terabytes which should be enough it also comes spe with 8 GB of ddr5 memory but you can expand that all the way up to 64 gigs and that's great if you plan to run some virtual machines on the asz ug green are also promising some interesting software features so there's an integrated AI smart assistant which can recognize and classify images without having an internet connection you'll also be able to search pictures with text keywords and there's smart photo albums that intelligently identify and classify faces places animals and more and naturally there's an app to help you get the most from the device which is going to be important because one of the key selling points of this Nas is that it can be an alternative to cloud storage where you're in complete control of your data so if privacy is important to you and you want to keep your images and files on a storage system that you control but you don't want to give up on all of those sort of cool AI features maybe this is a solution and it seems that you don't necessarily have to compromise on security either apart from the obvious benefit of having your data on your own trusted local device there's a security manager in the app which helps to protect your data and you can even perform scheduled virus scans so there seems like a good spec here lots on offer a good price and perhaps even some bold claims I've bought quite a few different ug green products over the years mainly USBC dongles hubs and adapters and some cables and I've always been pleased with the quality but network attached storage is a new product area for the brand and they are entering a fairly competitive market space so I'm kind of curious to see what they've been able to achieve in their first Nas outing is it worth considering this unit over more established brands well I'm going to give this a good test and I'll show you the whole process from the unboxing to the drive installation and the setup and of course we'll try out some of those features and do some performance tests so just a couple of things to note I did the initial setup here in the studio but the tests were running my home office where I have a 10 gbit Network set up and I'm using both Mac and PC for the desktop tests and iPhone for the mobile tests and I think it's only fair to state that this is a pre-production unit running pre-production software and I did come across a few minor bugs mostly with the UI but the systems already had one update which fixed most of those things so ug green are clearly working to refine and improve the software prior to launch let's start with the unboxing experience which was really good and I got to say I like the packaging the specs are printed on the side of the box which I'll run through in a moment and we've got some of the key features highlighted and I'm pleased to see support for Docker and virtual machine hosting after all a Naas Appliance is a server and can be used for more than just storing data so developers will love having the ability to spin up Docker containers and movie Buffs will appreciate having a DLNA compliant Network media server again as I said this is a pre-production unit so um Docker support was added in the latest update and I have given that a quick test I spun up an engine X container which may mean something to the devs out there uh ug green told me though that virtual machine support is coming in the next update uh which a time of recording is due in a week or two so haven't had chance to test that yet but it should be ready by the time these units ship these kind of additional functions I think it's fair to say you just don't get those with cloud storage so that's one of the really attractive features of Nas devices so in inside we've got a box labeled accessories and then the nas unit itself and first impressions are really good I like the design and it feels reassuringly well made and the drive bays are really easy to slide out and back in and they've got a a basic safety lock I really like this magnetic dust filter that just snaps straight over the fan on the back of the NZ uh really easy to remove and clean up the dust I noticed also this metal door that's secured with two screws and I love taking things apart so now naturally I immediately grabbed a screwdriver and under the door we've got the two nvme slots with the fixing screws provided and there are two sodum slots for Ram at the moment there's a single 8 GB module installed but that's a really easy upgrade if you want a bit more memory the nvme slots can be used for storage or for fast caching now if you've got multiple users that need concurrent access to the nas caching is really going to help performance I probably will install a couple of drives in here for a future episode and do a bit more in-depth performance testing with that so this is a good time to remind you to subscribe to the channel and ring the bell so that you can be notified when that content drops inside that accessories box we have an actual printed manual when was the last time you got one of those now if you're new to installing Hardware that's going to be useful it's a really nice touch and there's also a warranty card for the 2-year warranty that ug green are offering with this product we've got a 150 W power brick and a Main's cable and there's also Al two ethernet cables supplied which are compatible with 10 GB ethernet of course there is also a screwdriver and 16 screws in the box but you'll only need those if you're planning to install 2 and 1/2 in drives these Drive sleds can take either a 3 and 1/2 in drive or a 2 and 1/2 in drive so you have the option of going with an all flash storage solution if you used SATA ssds uh which would be fast and quiet and I'll show you in a moment why you don't need the screws for conventional 3 and 1/2 in drives we've also got two keys for the safety locks on the drive Bays now these aren't security Keys it's just a little protection against accidental Drive removal because these aren't hot swappable Drive Bays so let's get on and install some drives and we've got four Seagate Iron Wolf drives each with 4 terabyt of capacity and I expect for a home user this will be probably the most popular and cost effective configuration these drives are less than $100 each or if you do want a little more performance the Iron Wolf pro has a faster spin rate for around $30 to $40 more per drive I'll pop some links in the description for those drives they are specifically designed for Naas use and that is important now as you can see installation is really easy because the drive sleds have got this neat slide out mechanism and there are four pins that hold the drive in place super simple to install and no need for any fiddly screws now of course even though it's a four Drive Bay unit you don't have to put four drives in it you could start with two and add more capacity later and I say two rather than just one because you really want some redundancy in case a drive fails let's just take you through the ports and the external features now starting with the front we've got a power switch with LED and there are five activity LEDs one is for network and one for each of the drive Bays um but I don't see an LED for either of the mvme slots we also have an SD card slot which is UHS type 1 I'd prefer to see a type two slot but that's just a personal preference often if you're offloading your SD cards directly to the nas speed may not be your top priority uh next we've got a USB type c Port which supports USB 3.2 generation 2 at 10 GB per second and that's a nice feature for connecting fast external storage just plug in a drive and it gets recognized within the file manager in the system so you can offload files or back up files whichever you prefer and finally on the front we also have a 5 gbit USB Type A a port on the rear we've got an HDMI port which can output 4K so if you want to use the nas as a media center you can plug it directly into your TV and then use the app on your phone to select movies to play also on the back you get another USB 3.2 generation one type a port and then there are two USB 2.0 type A ports you've got the 2 and 1/2 GB ethernet port and the 10 GB ethernet port and there's also a reset button and the power input so we've got our drives installed it's time to have a look at the operating system which is called ug OS Pro and we'll go through the initial setup and I should say that the OS in this particular model is installed to a 128 gig internal SSD so you're not giving up any of your storage drives for system files and the core apps but additional apps that you install will get installed onto the storage volume so let's plug in the nas and I'm actually connecting to a 1 GB Lan here for the initial setup and I'll switch to that faster Network at home for the performance testing later but once you've powered up the device and connected it to the same network as your computer you should be able to open a browser type in find. ugnazi that doesn't work but it's not a problem because we'll just download the app we can then search the network and there's the Nas and we start the setup process by creating a local administrator account almost immediately we're prompted to redirect insecure web access to a secure connection and we're going to want to do that just bear in mind that this Nas like all other Nas units will use a self-signed secure certificate and your browser doesn't know to trust that certificate so the first time you connect you'll see this warning and that's completely normal the connection however is encrypted and it is secure that's probably a topic for another video another day but back to the nas we can now set up user accounts and groups so it should be pretty easy to manage the permissions on the device and you'll notice too that we can enable the personal folder for each user group Next we need to set up the storage volume itself and I'm not going to do anything complicated here we'll just put the four drives into a single storage pool and then we'll create a single volume using one of the raid modes now I'm not going to go into what all of the different modes mean in this video you'll notice that you green are recommending a selection of raid five and I'm going to go with that so that means that I'll get the capacity of three out of the four drives and the remaining drive is used for parity data what this means is that any one of the four drives can fail and you shouldn't lose any data now before the comment section lights up I will say that raid five has the potential to be problematic with larger volumes due to something called unrecoverable read errors or ures but again that's for another video if your drives like mine are 4 tabt or less raid five should be a safe choice but if you are going for larger drives then you should consider raid six and raid six will mean that you get half of the total capacity of the four drives here but any two of the drives can fail having data redundancy is essential for network storage like this but it is wise to remember that redundancy is not the same thing as a backup so you might want to snapshot critical data to an external drive or even another Nas and ug green have provided various methods for syncing and for backup so there's plenty of flexibility here you could actually replicate the entire storage volume to another server using rsync or you could plug an external Drive-In and do scheduled backups and more options besides that let's go back to our specific setup and our final capacity is 12 terabytes or slightly less once formatted and because we're spanning data across those four drives we're also going to get a performance benefit so the storage volume will be faster than a single drive for large file copies nice considering that this is a brand new product I have to say that the OS is pretty welldeveloped and it's generally easy to use and I'm looking forward to seeing how ugreen is going to develop this further with future models and updates but now let's turn to the questions we posed at the outset and compare this Nas with a cloud-based service firstly with a file copy so I've taken this folder that's full of video clips of my office and there are 57 files in total adding up to 2.95 gab and I'm going to copy them all to my one drive cloud storage and see how long it takes here in the studio we have a dedicated fiber line but most users don't have access to that kind of connectivity so I'm going to do this test on my internet at home and my internet at home is fber but it's fiber to the cabinet which is a couple of miles away and then copper lines to my house so the upload speed maxes out at about 13 megabits per second and just remember there are eight bits in a bite so that's not even two me megab per second so it's not surprising then that the file copy took 29 minutes and 6 seconds here in the studio our upload speed is closer to 250 megabits per second but you're not even able to use all of that bandwidth because of course the copy is limited by the speed that the cloud provider offers at the other end so even on our super fast fiber line here at the studio that same copy still took well over 5 minutes but now let's do the same copy over the local network in my home office bear in mind this is a full 10 gbit per second Network so the transfer speed is only limited by the speed of the drives in the nas and the copy is done in 7 and 1/2 seconds that's a massive difference if you're backing up a large photo library or you've got multiple users accessing the storage the nas option is hands down the faster and more efficient way to work but this doesn't mean that you won't be able to access your storage over the Internet because you can set the nas up to be accessible via the Internet and there's support for Dynamic DNS names if you don't have a static IP address so if you're copying files to your Nas over the Internet it'll be the download speed of your connection that will govern the speed of the transfer not the upload and most connections at home have a much faster download so that might actually be an option for you and you might be surprised at the performance so next let's take a look at photos we're going to go into the app center and download the photos app and once we've done that and it's installed you'll notice that we now get a photos folder inside the personal folders for our users and I'm going to connect to the nas through the iPhone app which works in the same way as the mac and PC desktop app and once connected you can see we've got this nice interface where we can view some health and usage statistics for the device and in the apps library we just tap on the more icon and then we can see the photos app so let's launch that from here it's really easy to add photos from my iPhone photo library onto the nas just select the photos that you want to add and they quietly transfer in the background it's pretty seamless and pretty fast as well even over Wi-Fi you can then use the photo browser inside the app or from your desktop to quickly preview images I did wonder whether files would also be available through the desktop file manager but when you open the photos folder it's empty I also tried copying a photo over the network using Windows Explorer but um it doesn't appear and I think this would be a nice addition for a future software release so that you can access the photos either through the app or through a standard Network file share this isn't a deal breaker though because it is very easy to copy photos over using the app or if you've connected to your Nas through a web browser you can just press the ad button and browse anywhere on your computer thumbnails are generated in the background and will appear within a few seconds and you can also just drag and drop files from your finder or Explorer window straight onto the browser which makes it really easy I like this date scroller that comes up if you bring your mouse over to the right side of the window that's a useful touch you can copy video files over as well using exactly the same methods and you can play the videos within the app so it's a great library for all of your memories whether photo or video and the AI touches are nice too if we go into the album section you can see that the AI tool has already been working in the background to identify faces and we can start to add names to the faces so that future images will be automatically grouped by name now none of these systems can perfectly do this job because we change as we age and some photos have less resolution than others it seems that ug green has thought of that though because you can merge recognized faces together and this works great for these pictures of Ben we can combine his super cute 2-year-old face with a more recent image he's a good-looking lad got that from his mom now you may not know but Ben edits all of the constant geeker videos here and he does a great job so quick shout out to Ben and now back to the albums and you'll see that we also have a places album so if your photos have GPS data in them you can view them on a world map the map's default position is here over China and it does seem to have this habit of reverting to that default position in between looking at images but again this is pre-production software and I'm sure little bugs like this will get fixed and there are some other AI tools to explore which you can download from within the settings some of these are not available yet in the pre-release software so I haven't done any testing on them but here's what you get there's a a blurry photo recognition tool which would be kind of useful if you want to find and delete all of those out of focus shots from your evenings out with friends and the similar or duplicate photo recognition can again help you save space if you've taken multiple shots of the same image then we've got a tool to recognize potentially sensitive content which will cause phot phot to be blurred when browsing the library now many people have photos that might fall into this category and this perhaps highlights a top concern with cloud storage because there have been some Notorious leaks of compromising private images from cloud storage when certain celebrities were targeted by hackers so ug Greener at pains to state that all AI processing happens locally on the device itself and none of your images get uploaded to anywhere on the internet nobody wants their private images out there where they can be potentially viewed by unknown individuals even if it's perfectly innocent pictures of your kids at the beach or at bath time you want private pictures to stay private pet lovers are going to be pleased to see that pet recognition is an installable feature and it says it's going to be able to recognize 32 different cat and dog breeds and that's really cool and there's also that text recognition which will allow you to search for text within images of course many of these features exist in your smartphone photo library or as part of a cloud storage provider service so why should you have to give up all of those sorts of conveniences if you choose to stay in control of your data so I really like that ugreen is focusing on delivering this sort of experience because it really enhances the overall appeal of a product like the na sync so what do you think which is better having your files in the cloud or having your own network storage personally I'm tired of all of the subscription models and the trend towards not owning anything even your own data and there's a big part of me that wants to stand up and just say enough but part of the problem is that running your own solution at home has always required a bit of Technical knowhow and that raises a barrier to entry for most people but Nas appliances have become much more user friendly and this NAS from ugreen is no exception I think most folks would be able to load this up with drives get a simple storage volume set up and start using it for more advanced us then the more advanced features will be there if you need them I think though it's a really promising start and it's only going to get better with future software updates so I like this product and I like the ethos behind it and based on what I've seen in my testing and the quality of the hardware I think it's safe to say that ug green have made a pretty solid entry into the nas market and I really hope they focus their development on making this thing so easy to set up and use that everybody has got the option to take take control of their own data so big thanks to ug green for sending this over and for sponsoring this episode I think it's a really interesting subject um if you're interested though in the Naas sync range please check out the links in the description because at time of recording it's available to pre-order through Kickstarter at that reduced price but I'm Keen to know what you think about using Nas versus storing your files in the cloud please leave a comment with your thoughts and if you've got any questions leave those as well I'll try and answer them thanks as always for your find support and I'll see you again soon for some more geekwhich would you say is better storing your files in the cloud or having your own network storage of course there are pros and cons to both approaches we like cloud services because they're easy to use and provided you continue paying your subscription fees your data is safe in theory but it's that in theory bit that gives us pause for thought is your data backed up are your photos and videos truly private and we kind of like the additional features that these CL Services often provide things like automatic creation of photo albums based on AI tools like face detection but what if you can have your own private network storage which the whole family or office can use but where you've got complete control over permissions and security and where you can install as much storage as you like without having to move to ever higher Cloud subscription tiers and that's where a network attached storage or Nas appliance comes in and there's a new player in the Market ug green now they asked me if I'd like to take a look at one of their new Nas models and this is the na sync dxp 4800 plus it's one of the 4 Bay models in their new Range which also includes two six and 8 bay models and there's even an all flash option which looks really interesting the specs and features vary across the range as you'd probably expect so we'll just pop up a comparison on the screen that you can pause if you want to have a look at that and when I first looked at the specs there were three things that caught my attention first of all the connectivity because there's a 10 gbit ethernet port and a 2 and 1/2 gbit port and I really like that a 2 and a half gbit Port will give a single user full speed access or go up to 10 gbit to add more concurrency or more simultaneous users and secondly we've got a five core Intel Pentium processor inside which is offering a bit more performance than you normally get with these types of devices and that's great for speeding up those AI image tools the third thing that caught my eye is the price because the MSRP for this particular model is $700 and that's already competitive but if you use the link in the description for this video you can currently get up to 35% off the price so This na async dxp 4800 pluses Four 3 and 1/2 in Drive bays and two nvme Drive bays and that means that you can have a maximum storage capacity of up to 96 terabytes which should be enough it also comes spe with 8 GB of ddr5 memory but you can expand that all the way up to 64 gigs and that's great if you plan to run some virtual machines on the asz ug green are also promising some interesting software features so there's an integrated AI smart assistant which can recognize and classify images without having an internet connection you'll also be able to search pictures with text keywords and there's smart photo albums that intelligently identify and classify faces places animals and more and naturally there's an app to help you get the most from the device which is going to be important because one of the key selling points of this Nas is that it can be an alternative to cloud storage where you're in complete control of your data so if privacy is important to you and you want to keep your images and files on a storage system that you control but you don't want to give up on all of those sort of cool AI features maybe this is a solution and it seems that you don't necessarily have to compromise on security either apart from the obvious benefit of having your data on your own trusted local device there's a security manager in the app which helps to protect your data and you can even perform scheduled virus scans so there seems like a good spec here lots on offer a good price and perhaps even some bold claims I've bought quite a few different ug green products over the years mainly USBC dongles hubs and adapters and some cables and I've always been pleased with the quality but network attached storage is a new product area for the brand and they are entering a fairly competitive market space so I'm kind of curious to see what they've been able to achieve in their first Nas outing is it worth considering this unit over more established brands well I'm going to give this a good test and I'll show you the whole process from the unboxing to the drive installation and the setup and of course we'll try out some of those features and do some performance tests so just a couple of things to note I did the initial setup here in the studio but the tests were running my home office where I have a 10 gbit Network set up and I'm using both Mac and PC for the desktop tests and iPhone for the mobile tests and I think it's only fair to state that this is a pre-production unit running pre-production software and I did come across a few minor bugs mostly with the UI but the systems already had one update which fixed most of those things so ug green are clearly working to refine and improve the software prior to launch let's start with the unboxing experience which was really good and I got to say I like the packaging the specs are printed on the side of the box which I'll run through in a moment and we've got some of the key features highlighted and I'm pleased to see support for Docker and virtual machine hosting after all a Naas Appliance is a server and can be used for more than just storing data so developers will love having the ability to spin up Docker containers and movie Buffs will appreciate having a DLNA compliant Network media server again as I said this is a pre-production unit so um Docker support was added in the latest update and I have given that a quick test I spun up an engine X container which may mean something to the devs out there uh ug green told me though that virtual machine support is coming in the next update uh which a time of recording is due in a week or two so haven't had chance to test that yet but it should be ready by the time these units ship these kind of additional functions I think it's fair to say you just don't get those with cloud storage so that's one of the really attractive features of Nas devices so in inside we've got a box labeled accessories and then the nas unit itself and first impressions are really good I like the design and it feels reassuringly well made and the drive bays are really easy to slide out and back in and they've got a a basic safety lock I really like this magnetic dust filter that just snaps straight over the fan on the back of the NZ uh really easy to remove and clean up the dust I noticed also this metal door that's secured with two screws and I love taking things apart so now naturally I immediately grabbed a screwdriver and under the door we've got the two nvme slots with the fixing screws provided and there are two sodum slots for Ram at the moment there's a single 8 GB module installed but that's a really easy upgrade if you want a bit more memory the nvme slots can be used for storage or for fast caching now if you've got multiple users that need concurrent access to the nas caching is really going to help performance I probably will install a couple of drives in here for a future episode and do a bit more in-depth performance testing with that so this is a good time to remind you to subscribe to the channel and ring the bell so that you can be notified when that content drops inside that accessories box we have an actual printed manual when was the last time you got one of those now if you're new to installing Hardware that's going to be useful it's a really nice touch and there's also a warranty card for the 2-year warranty that ug green are offering with this product we've got a 150 W power brick and a Main's cable and there's also Al two ethernet cables supplied which are compatible with 10 GB ethernet of course there is also a screwdriver and 16 screws in the box but you'll only need those if you're planning to install 2 and 1/2 in drives these Drive sleds can take either a 3 and 1/2 in drive or a 2 and 1/2 in drive so you have the option of going with an all flash storage solution if you used SATA ssds uh which would be fast and quiet and I'll show you in a moment why you don't need the screws for conventional 3 and 1/2 in drives we've also got two keys for the safety locks on the drive Bays now these aren't security Keys it's just a little protection against accidental Drive removal because these aren't hot swappable Drive Bays so let's get on and install some drives and we've got four Seagate Iron Wolf drives each with 4 terabyt of capacity and I expect for a home user this will be probably the most popular and cost effective configuration these drives are less than $100 each or if you do want a little more performance the Iron Wolf pro has a faster spin rate for around $30 to $40 more per drive I'll pop some links in the description for those drives they are specifically designed for Naas use and that is important now as you can see installation is really easy because the drive sleds have got this neat slide out mechanism and there are four pins that hold the drive in place super simple to install and no need for any fiddly screws now of course even though it's a four Drive Bay unit you don't have to put four drives in it you could start with two and add more capacity later and I say two rather than just one because you really want some redundancy in case a drive fails let's just take you through the ports and the external features now starting with the front we've got a power switch with LED and there are five activity LEDs one is for network and one for each of the drive Bays um but I don't see an LED for either of the mvme slots we also have an SD card slot which is UHS type 1 I'd prefer to see a type two slot but that's just a personal preference often if you're offloading your SD cards directly to the nas speed may not be your top priority uh next we've got a USB type c Port which supports USB 3.2 generation 2 at 10 GB per second and that's a nice feature for connecting fast external storage just plug in a drive and it gets recognized within the file manager in the system so you can offload files or back up files whichever you prefer and finally on the front we also have a 5 gbit USB Type A a port on the rear we've got an HDMI port which can output 4K so if you want to use the nas as a media center you can plug it directly into your TV and then use the app on your phone to select movies to play also on the back you get another USB 3.2 generation one type a port and then there are two USB 2.0 type A ports you've got the 2 and 1/2 GB ethernet port and the 10 GB ethernet port and there's also a reset button and the power input so we've got our drives installed it's time to have a look at the operating system which is called ug OS Pro and we'll go through the initial setup and I should say that the OS in this particular model is installed to a 128 gig internal SSD so you're not giving up any of your storage drives for system files and the core apps but additional apps that you install will get installed onto the storage volume so let's plug in the nas and I'm actually connecting to a 1 GB Lan here for the initial setup and I'll switch to that faster Network at home for the performance testing later but once you've powered up the device and connected it to the same network as your computer you should be able to open a browser type in find. ugnazi that doesn't work but it's not a problem because we'll just download the app we can then search the network and there's the Nas and we start the setup process by creating a local administrator account almost immediately we're prompted to redirect insecure web access to a secure connection and we're going to want to do that just bear in mind that this Nas like all other Nas units will use a self-signed secure certificate and your browser doesn't know to trust that certificate so the first time you connect you'll see this warning and that's completely normal the connection however is encrypted and it is secure that's probably a topic for another video another day but back to the nas we can now set up user accounts and groups so it should be pretty easy to manage the permissions on the device and you'll notice too that we can enable the personal folder for each user group Next we need to set up the storage volume itself and I'm not going to do anything complicated here we'll just put the four drives into a single storage pool and then we'll create a single volume using one of the raid modes now I'm not going to go into what all of the different modes mean in this video you'll notice that you green are recommending a selection of raid five and I'm going to go with that so that means that I'll get the capacity of three out of the four drives and the remaining drive is used for parity data what this means is that any one of the four drives can fail and you shouldn't lose any data now before the comment section lights up I will say that raid five has the potential to be problematic with larger volumes due to something called unrecoverable read errors or ures but again that's for another video if your drives like mine are 4 tabt or less raid five should be a safe choice but if you are going for larger drives then you should consider raid six and raid six will mean that you get half of the total capacity of the four drives here but any two of the drives can fail having data redundancy is essential for network storage like this but it is wise to remember that redundancy is not the same thing as a backup so you might want to snapshot critical data to an external drive or even another Nas and ug green have provided various methods for syncing and for backup so there's plenty of flexibility here you could actually replicate the entire storage volume to another server using rsync or you could plug an external Drive-In and do scheduled backups and more options besides that let's go back to our specific setup and our final capacity is 12 terabytes or slightly less once formatted and because we're spanning data across those four drives we're also going to get a performance benefit so the storage volume will be faster than a single drive for large file copies nice considering that this is a brand new product I have to say that the OS is pretty welldeveloped and it's generally easy to use and I'm looking forward to seeing how ugreen is going to develop this further with future models and updates but now let's turn to the questions we posed at the outset and compare this Nas with a cloud-based service firstly with a file copy so I've taken this folder that's full of video clips of my office and there are 57 files in total adding up to 2.95 gab and I'm going to copy them all to my one drive cloud storage and see how long it takes here in the studio we have a dedicated fiber line but most users don't have access to that kind of connectivity so I'm going to do this test on my internet at home and my internet at home is fber but it's fiber to the cabinet which is a couple of miles away and then copper lines to my house so the upload speed maxes out at about 13 megabits per second and just remember there are eight bits in a bite so that's not even two me megab per second so it's not surprising then that the file copy took 29 minutes and 6 seconds here in the studio our upload speed is closer to 250 megabits per second but you're not even able to use all of that bandwidth because of course the copy is limited by the speed that the cloud provider offers at the other end so even on our super fast fiber line here at the studio that same copy still took well over 5 minutes but now let's do the same copy over the local network in my home office bear in mind this is a full 10 gbit per second Network so the transfer speed is only limited by the speed of the drives in the nas and the copy is done in 7 and 1/2 seconds that's a massive difference if you're backing up a large photo library or you've got multiple users accessing the storage the nas option is hands down the faster and more efficient way to work but this doesn't mean that you won't be able to access your storage over the Internet because you can set the nas up to be accessible via the Internet and there's support for Dynamic DNS names if you don't have a static IP address so if you're copying files to your Nas over the Internet it'll be the download speed of your connection that will govern the speed of the transfer not the upload and most connections at home have a much faster download so that might actually be an option for you and you might be surprised at the performance so next let's take a look at photos we're going to go into the app center and download the photos app and once we've done that and it's installed you'll notice that we now get a photos folder inside the personal folders for our users and I'm going to connect to the nas through the iPhone app which works in the same way as the mac and PC desktop app and once connected you can see we've got this nice interface where we can view some health and usage statistics for the device and in the apps library we just tap on the more icon and then we can see the photos app so let's launch that from here it's really easy to add photos from my iPhone photo library onto the nas just select the photos that you want to add and they quietly transfer in the background it's pretty seamless and pretty fast as well even over Wi-Fi you can then use the photo browser inside the app or from your desktop to quickly preview images I did wonder whether files would also be available through the desktop file manager but when you open the photos folder it's empty I also tried copying a photo over the network using Windows Explorer but um it doesn't appear and I think this would be a nice addition for a future software release so that you can access the photos either through the app or through a standard Network file share this isn't a deal breaker though because it is very easy to copy photos over using the app or if you've connected to your Nas through a web browser you can just press the ad button and browse anywhere on your computer thumbnails are generated in the background and will appear within a few seconds and you can also just drag and drop files from your finder or Explorer window straight onto the browser which makes it really easy I like this date scroller that comes up if you bring your mouse over to the right side of the window that's a useful touch you can copy video files over as well using exactly the same methods and you can play the videos within the app so it's a great library for all of your memories whether photo or video and the AI touches are nice too if we go into the album section you can see that the AI tool has already been working in the background to identify faces and we can start to add names to the faces so that future images will be automatically grouped by name now none of these systems can perfectly do this job because we change as we age and some photos have less resolution than others it seems that ug green has thought of that though because you can merge recognized faces together and this works great for these pictures of Ben we can combine his super cute 2-year-old face with a more recent image he's a good-looking lad got that from his mom now you may not know but Ben edits all of the constant geeker videos here and he does a great job so quick shout out to Ben and now back to the albums and you'll see that we also have a places album so if your photos have GPS data in them you can view them on a world map the map's default position is here over China and it does seem to have this habit of reverting to that default position in between looking at images but again this is pre-production software and I'm sure little bugs like this will get fixed and there are some other AI tools to explore which you can download from within the settings some of these are not available yet in the pre-release software so I haven't done any testing on them but here's what you get there's a a blurry photo recognition tool which would be kind of useful if you want to find and delete all of those out of focus shots from your evenings out with friends and the similar or duplicate photo recognition can again help you save space if you've taken multiple shots of the same image then we've got a tool to recognize potentially sensitive content which will cause phot phot to be blurred when browsing the library now many people have photos that might fall into this category and this perhaps highlights a top concern with cloud storage because there have been some Notorious leaks of compromising private images from cloud storage when certain celebrities were targeted by hackers so ug Greener at pains to state that all AI processing happens locally on the device itself and none of your images get uploaded to anywhere on the internet nobody wants their private images out there where they can be potentially viewed by unknown individuals even if it's perfectly innocent pictures of your kids at the beach or at bath time you want private pictures to stay private pet lovers are going to be pleased to see that pet recognition is an installable feature and it says it's going to be able to recognize 32 different cat and dog breeds and that's really cool and there's also that text recognition which will allow you to search for text within images of course many of these features exist in your smartphone photo library or as part of a cloud storage provider service so why should you have to give up all of those sorts of conveniences if you choose to stay in control of your data so I really like that ugreen is focusing on delivering this sort of experience because it really enhances the overall appeal of a product like the na sync so what do you think which is better having your files in the cloud or having your own network storage personally I'm tired of all of the subscription models and the trend towards not owning anything even your own data and there's a big part of me that wants to stand up and just say enough but part of the problem is that running your own solution at home has always required a bit of Technical knowhow and that raises a barrier to entry for most people but Nas appliances have become much more user friendly and this NAS from ugreen is no exception I think most folks would be able to load this up with drives get a simple storage volume set up and start using it for more advanced us then the more advanced features will be there if you need them I think though it's a really promising start and it's only going to get better with future software updates so I like this product and I like the ethos behind it and based on what I've seen in my testing and the quality of the hardware I think it's safe to say that ug green have made a pretty solid entry into the nas market and I really hope they focus their development on making this thing so easy to set up and use that everybody has got the option to take take control of their own data so big thanks to ug green for sending this over and for sponsoring this episode I think it's a really interesting subject um if you're interested though in the Naas sync range please check out the links in the description because at time of recording it's available to pre-order through Kickstarter at that reduced price but I'm Keen to know what you think about using Nas versus storing your files in the cloud please leave a comment with your thoughts and if you've got any questions leave those as well I'll try and answer them thanks as always for your find support and I'll see you again soon for some more geek\n"