You might know UGREEN from its many wall chargers, portable batteries, and other accessories. This week at CES, the company is introducing its first network attached storage (NAS) devices, potentially giving Synology and Western Digital a run for their money.

UGREEN’s new NASync Network Attached Storage series covers all the basics: the devices can give you a local file server, video streaming and encoding, and other typical home server and NAS features in one conivnent box. There’s a model with two swappable drive bays (DXP2800), two four-bay options (DXP4800 and DXP4800 Plus), a six-bay model (DXP6800 Pro), an eight-bay version (DXP8800 Plus), and a compact model that uses internal NVMe drives (DXP480T Plus). That should cover everything from basic home use to businesses that need reliable file access for many users.

The drives are all equipped with two M.2 NVMe slots (in addition to the larger drive bays), which can be used for super-fast storage or cache space. There’s a mix of different processors across the series: the two-bay DXP2800 and four-bay DXP4800 using a 12th generation Intel N series CPU, the four-ay DXP4800 Plus has a 12th gen Intel Pentium Gold, and the rest have 12th gen Intel Core i5 chips. The connectivity options, maximum supported RAM, and other hardware also varies by model. Several of the units have two Thunderbolt 4 ports, giving you a super-fast way of moving files or just adding even more storage.

The software features and experience are critical with any NAS system: all the storage in the world doesn’t matter if it can’t run the apps and services you want. UGREEN is promising an all-in-one app with the ability to stream movies, access photos, and transfer files from any device. That includes the ability to recognize details in photos and search by text, similar to Google Photos—we’ll have to wait and see how well that works. UGREEN also told us at CES that support for Docker is planned, which would make it about as capable as any other dedicated NAS system.

Security is also an important consideration with NAS products, as we’ve learned from the multiple hacking problems with Western Digital’s “My Cloud” NAS devices. UGREEN says its devices have “reliable local space and robust transmission and account encryption protocols to safeguard your sensitive information.” Again, we’ll have to wait and see what safeguards show up on the final product.

UGREEN will open pre-orders for the NASync Network Attached Storage series on Kickstarter sometime in the near future. You can sign up for email notifications on the company’s website to know when the pre-orders go live.

Source: UGREEN