Having been left high and dry with the collapse of Drobo, I have been looking at NAS system. It seems the relatively new Ugreen NAS line up has been getting favourable reviews, and they will use non specific HDD’s. Has anyone taken the plunge and if so what are your thoughts?
One of the motivations I had when buying my first NAS was to have all my data inside of my home and under my control.
The following points were important to me:
- company located in a country I trust
- long-standing history of developing, manufacturing and releasing NAS devices and operating systems coming with a device like that
- concentration on developing NAS devices and not doing “everything” from USB cables to whatever else
- long-standing history handling security incidents responsibly
- build quality, energy efficiency
My first NAS was a QNAP, I switched to Synology later on. Both brands are fine. My personal view: QNAP is more aggressive in providing hardware that is powerful and has the latest and greatest features as soon as possible. Sometimes I think that this approach leads to a not so polished OS. Synology takes its time to implement stuff, its hardware is just fine, sometimes they are taking the Apple way in apparently thinking that they know better than me what to implement in a device. 
But Synology has a very good record in fixing security holes and there haven’t been too many in the first place.
So, Ugreen:
Not for me. 
Do I have negative experiences with Ugreen? No. But the intricate nature of a NAS and the level of trust I have to provide to use a device like that does not encourage me to use a Ugreen NAS. It is quite a new kid on the block and I fear that they do not fit into the categories that are important to me.
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I am a long time synology user (currently manage 4, one is my dads and I have a remote and 2 local). I’ve had to offload running apps to a N100 device with proxmox as synology processors are…slow.
Software experience is amazing. If you are looking for easy plug and play, safe, and using apps like Synology drive and photo (highly recommend both), Synology is king.
I am also looking at Ugreen due to speed/power and price. While I am considering this, I would not use it without a good backup strategy. I trust Synology more right now, and will keep one around as the backup appliance. If your use case is just storage, honestly synology is still king (fyi can still bring own drives). Yes the path they are taking sucks and they aren’t going the right direction for consumers, but ugreen isn’t there yet.
If your using this as a do it all NAS to run docker, or throw truenas scale or unraid on, then I would say it’s as good as you can get prebuilt.
UGREEN has been climbing the ladder from simpler products (cables, hubs, docks) to NAS and more.
All positive feedback and good reviews. I’ved started using UGREEN over the past few years for standard stuff with no complaints. (e.g. their USB dongle for adding analog audio ports to systems works very well and has a great price).
I have not used their NAS, but it would be definitely be on my list of products to look at.
IMHO, it is rising to the top of the list for no-nonsense, reputable NAS devices for storage.
They aren’t aiming to be a do-it-all server solution with Docker, cloud services, and office apps (doc, photo editing etc.) like Synology.
Synology has had a mixed reputation. Especially their stance on hard drives and clamping down on using non-Synology branded drives in some of their systems.
I used Synology routers and found them to be “meh”.
On the vendor reputation side, Synology is a mainland China company, so other than splitting hairs (“big” Chinese company versus “up and coming” Chinese company), the HQ location of both companies might be an issue for some.
Synology is based in Taiwan. Without going into the intricacies of its political status, that’s not mainland China (PRC).
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On Synology: I have used Synology for years (I had a total of four devices, two of which are still up and running, with one being 7+ years old), but some of their recent moves have been questionable.
For example, the Video Station package and software video transcoding ability were abandoned late last year, apparently because they did not want to license H.265 codecs any further. Both of these moves are pretty user-hostile, as upgrading to the newest OS (DSM) meant that Video Station, one of the core advertised features of the NAS, stopped working entirely for anyone who upgraded with no way to restore the video streaming functionality (and many of their NASes do not support running Plex natively).
Other than that, their products have been stable and well-supported over the years, but I’ll consider QNAP and others when I’m due for an upgrade for these recent moves alone.