Network attached storage (NAS) devices offer the best way to add shared storage to your home network, giving everyone in your house a place to store and retrieve large files. Problem is, most NAS solutions are designed for commercial use, making them quite the expensive computing accessory for home users, which is why options like the UGreen NASync DH2300 are such a welcome option in the category.
Designed specifically for home users, the NAS drive is touted as an offline alternative to cloud platforms like OneDrive or DropBox, giving folks a place to keep large files right in their home network. It’s designed to be beginner-friendly, making it a great option for folks installing a NAS for the first time, all while providing enough functionality to handle the most common user needs.
The UGreen NASync DH2300 is a NAS drive with two SATA slots, each of which can accommodate a 30TB HDD. That’s right, you can have a whopping 60TB of storage space available locally right on your network, allowing you to keep all your photos, videos, and all sorts of media collections readily available offline. It doesn’t come with any HDDs, though, so you’ll have to purchase and install them separately, so you get to choose exactly the make and model of storage you want on your NAS drive. Sadly, there’s no M2 connection, so you’re restricted to SATA-based HDD and SSDs.
Like other NAS drives, this isn’t just a simple enclosure with SATA connections like your typical external drives. Instead, it’s a mini-computer designed to function as a standalone storage service right on your network. As such, it gets an eight-core Rockchip RK3576 processor, 4GB of DDR4 RAM, and 32GB of system storage preinstalled with the outfit’s custom software.
The UGreen NASync DH2300 runs the company’s UGOS Pro OS, which guides users step-by-step through the setup process. That means, there’s no need to spend a day learning how to properly configure a NAS drive, with the outfit claiming most users should be able to have it up and running in as little as 10 minutes. According to UGreen, it supports BOD, Basic, RAID 0, and RAID 1 configurations. The NAS can be accessed through the outfit’s custom apps on mobile, PC, and other platforms, while offering features like universal search, file management, automatic backups, media streaming, auto-organization (it can group photos into albums), file sharing, cloud syncing, and more.
All data stored on the NAS is protected during transit via TLS/SSL, RSA, and AES to prevent unwanted access, so you get safety precautions even while working in your own home network. It comes with a USB-C port, two USB-A Ports (you can these to add external drives to the mix), a LAN port for stable wired connection, and even an HDMI slot, so you can play media directly from the NAS drive. If you need a NAS with bigger capacity, the outfit also offers the DH4300, which offers four SATA drive bays for a total of 120TB of storage capacity.
The UGreen NASync DH2300 is available now, with a Nov. 17th ship date. Price is $188.99.
