Ugreen NASync for TrueNAS

TrueNAS General
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A post on the old forum made me aware of these:

…because somehow at that point I hadn’t seen any of the dozens of YouTube videos about them. They’re looking like some pretty decent hardware at pretty good prices, at least at the Kickstarter prices–and speaking of Kickstarter, it ends in a couple of days. Reports are that you can run pretty much any OS you want on it, they have reasonable CPU choices and RAM expandability. I’m thinking hard about picking up one of these as a backup NAS–running TrueNAS, of course.

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One thing I noticed, is that ECC is referenced as “ODECC”. It is highly unlikely that the low end CPUs used in these pre-built NAS’ support CPU based ECC.

Since all 6 models use only DDR5 memory, I am assuming they mean this;

On-Die ECC (Error Correction Code) is a new feature designed to correct bit errors within the DRAM chip.

So just understand what you are getting, which actually seems like a lot for the price.

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I’m pretty sure you’re correct here, and that it still seems pretty nice for the cost. Though I’m not sure a 12th-gen i5 is that “low end” these days.

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Might need to pick one of these up for offsite backup / remote access. They seem very good for the price & build quality, and luckily they’ve confirmed they’ll honor warranty with custom OS installs (they only confirmed this over the past couple weeks according to the review videos I watched, better late than never). I’ve had good experiences with UGREEN in the past getting replacements for bits like their 100w GaN chargers, so hopefully the same can be said for this product line.

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I pulled the trigger on one of the six-bay units. I’ll see how it goes, but reports are encouraging.

More broadly, I think there’s a bit of a market for devices like this without an OS. I don’t know how much Ugreen is spending to develop their NAS OS, but it isn’t nothing, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of its users/purchasers throw a different OS on it anyway. And there are a few good, solid options out there: TrueNAS of course, OpenMediaVault, I don’t think I’d put Unraid on that list but lots of others would. XigmaNAS, probably. Maybe others. Not sure if there are any that are quite as user-friendly as, e.g., Synology, which might be the sticking point here.

So I think there’d be a market for a decent hardware NAS–decent CPU, adequate/expandable RAM, room for a couple of m.2 SSDs, toolless drive bays, compact case, Intel NICs, adequate cooling–without bothering with the OS. No need for Ugreen/Terramaster/whoever to waste money developing an OS that nobody’s going to use anyway.

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Seems someone investigated the truenas potential for the ugreen

actually i was wondering about pcie expansion for this model.

Example, my old QNAP ts-653a does not have spare pcies slots, so you couldn’t just install a pcie addon like what i did for my qnap ts-877 (which had 3 pcie slots fyi e.g. i added a sfp+ 10g pcie so i could add a transceiver for fiber 10g, a 2x m.2 slot sata pcie, and a graphics card).

So when you get a nas similar to that, check whats under the hood as that could limit what you could do, to the point you are better off diy the parts cause then you have more options depending on what you source the parts to put together.

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The 6- and 8-bay units have a half-height (and I think full-length) PCIe 3.0 x4 slot available. They also have Thunderbolt 4, which might let you connect additional PCIe expansion.

But yes, TrueNAS has been shown to work. TBD whether the 10G interfaces will work under CORE and/or what kind of throughput they’d give.

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not sure if you knew but ugreen had a beta program for their nas. i couldn’t apply cause it was us only :cry: anyway it’s probably over by now xd.

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Looks like you had to apply by 31 Jan–I’m kind of late to the party here.

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The 2 bay and 4 bay non-Pro version are both N100 4 core, 4 thread CPU model with very low power, 6 watts. Next, maximum memory is 16GBs, over 1 channel. So yes, I believe my comment stands.

As for the 4 bay Pro model, it’s Gold 8505 has 1 performance core, (2 threads), and 4 efficiency cores, (1 thread per core), so I would not think of this as a speed daemon. But, the memory setup is better, up to 64GBs over 2 channels. So again, limited performance.

Now for the 6 & 8 bay as well as the NVMe only unit, the Core i5-1235U does have 2 performance cores, (4 threads), but remaining 8 cores are efficiency with 1 thread per core. Very suitable for many NAS configurations, and with TrueNAS / ZFS. However, these CPUs are not the performance parts, (the “U” at the end), so they would not perform like a desktop or server part.

I would hesitate to say the the 2 low end models are suitable for anything beyond simple NAS. So many people today insist that their NAS support multiple, (and critical to them), Apps, with reasonable high speed. Thus, I would think 2 low end models unsuitable in those configurations, (but that won’t stop people from buying and trying to use them as such!).

Of course, people buying minimal performing hardware, to run excessive amount of Apps / VMs, happens with all hardware. It is just that these are pre-packaged CPU, boards & chassis for NAS purposes. Thus, in my opinion a bit of warning about the lower end units when desiring to use them with TrueNAS.

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You’re right–I was mainly paying attention to what I’d “bought” (backed? Whatever it is via Kickstarter), which is the 6-bay unit. The lower-end units, yes, are rather more limited. Even they, I think, would be fine for a storage-only application, but I definitely wouldn’t want to plan on a dozen or more apps on the two-bay unit. Edit: really, I wouldn’t want to plan on more than one or two apps on any of the units that don’t have at least one m.2 slot. You could use a SATA SSD, but that really seems like a waste of a 3.5" drive bay.

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All 5 of the SATA units, (including the 3 lower end units), have 2 x M.2 slots. (They don’t mention NVMe or SATA… perhaps that is documented elsewhere.)

Of course, the generalized specifications don’t list how many PCIe lanes, nor their speed, so it could be pretty limited. But, on the other hand, a single PCIe 2.x lane, (4Gbit/ps for data), is still pretty fast. And a single PCIe 3.x lane, (8Gbit/ps for data), is faster than SATA III, (6Gbit/ps).

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Sure enough; I’m not sure why I was thinking otherwise–maybe I was thinking of the fact that the lower two models have the OS on eMMC rather than another m.2 SSD? Not sure.

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Many thanks to the developers who are developing support for Ugreen. Great news for us!

Since my budget is very limited, I would like to ask if the smaller 2-bay Ugreen model (dxp2800) is also supported by TrueNas. Unfortunately, I have not found anything about this in the forum search.

2-bay-small-NAS
2-bay-small-NAS682×978 45 KB

forum-search-dxp2800
forum-search-dxp28001134×468 45.4 KB

Does the dxp2800 also have enough power to enable ZFS encryption?
Encryption is a killer-feature for me.

best regards and thank you

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@Olivia - Welcome to the TrueNAS forums.

The following says the Intel N100 supports AES encryption instruction set;
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/231803/intel-processor-n100-6m-cache-up-to-3-40-ghz.html

Whether it is fast enough for your purposes is up to you to decide. Also note that at rest encryption, (aka on disk encryption), does not prevent a hacker or valid user from accessing an already mounted file system.

Next, the N100 is limited to 16GB of memory. Some consider this the bare minimum for TrueNAS, even without Apps or VMs. Adding Apps or VMs on such low memory computers could lead to appearance of slow access.

Last, I have no knowledge if the UGreen NASes are able to run TrueNAS, SCALE or Core.

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There are two german youtubers who ran scale and unraid on their boxes and made a performance comparison between those two nas os’s. They said that the ugreen boxes all use normal bios version that are fully accessible.

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There are a number of videos on YT showing the UGreen NASs running a variety of popular OSs, including Windows, Proxmox, and TrueNAS. BIOS is reported to be somewhat minimal, but adequate (though I’m not sure it exposes all the virtualization options one might want to see). I’d question whether CORE would support the onboard NICs, but I’d be kind of surprised if SCALE wouldn’t.

Agree that the 16 GB maximum for RAM would be a bit of a limit if the goal were to use the system for anything other than just file storage.

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There are many reports of people using >16GB of RAM on an N100 processor and I believe some have reported doing so with TrueNAS Scale. If so, that would alleviate some of the RAM issues.

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Yes, I saw some reports as well of >16GB of RAM on the Intel N100.

However, this CPU has only 1 memory channel. So the amount of memory above 16GB could be dependent on the type of memory module(s) installed. For example, Intel ARK lists LPDDR5 4800 MT/s which may have a better chance of going above 16GBs.

Further, any system board vendor with a good reputation will only advertise what the CPU vendor supports. This is to avoid having returns or legal action for false advertising on failures. Thus, buyer beware, (aka caveat emptor).


I just noticed that this N100 chip is really low power, 6 watts TDP. Kinda reminds me of the 10 year old AMD A10 Micro-6700T APU. It too has 4 cores / 4 threads, 1 memory channel and runs about 5 watts. My current media server uses that AMD chip, with OpenZFS, and it works fine for the intended use.
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My DXP6800 from the Kickstarter arrived Tuesday evening, and I’ve been playing around with it a bit. I don’t have any intention of running the stock OS on the thing; this will likely end up running SCALE, but I may play with some other OSs on it first. So I didn’t even connect it to power before removing the boot SSD. Some initial thoughts:

  • It comes with an honest-to-goodness printed manual.
  • That manual covers disassembly, at least to the extent necessary to install a PCIe card
    • Removing the boot SSD requires removing four more screws and moving a bracket out of the way.
  • Disassembly to this extent can be done without breaking any warranty seals
  • The housing is nicely-anodized aluminum (aluminium for non-American readers) and seems fairly sturdy
  • Drive installation and removal is as straightforward as it’s been shown. It’s toolless, but the drive caddies don’t cam in and out as they do in my Dell and Supermicro rack gear.
  • SCALE recognizes and supports the onboard NICs
  • OmniOS doesn’t, nor does TrueNAS CORE 13.3 BETA 2. For some reason, FreeBSD 14.1 not only doesn’t recognize the onboard NIC, it also doesn’t recognize the T420.
  • The disk and network activity LEDs don’t work properly with any OS I tried; they just light sequentially, repeating every second or so.
  • Drive cooling isn’t great, easily exceeding 45°C during a badblocks test.

OmniOS / napp-it

For the sake of trying something new, and because I hadn’t seen anyone on YouTube try it, I installed OmniOS r151050 on the DXP6800. As expected, it didn’t recognize the onboard NICs, so I installed a spare Chelsio T420 I had. It still wasn’t able to configure that interface through the installer, but I was able to bring it up at the shell once I rebooted. I then installed napp-it by running wget -O - www.napp-it.org/nappit | perl. I probably won’t use it long-term, but thought it’d be interesting to play with a Solarish OS a little bit.

  • According to its installer, it sounds like napp-it should work on Debian Linux as well as a Solarish OS
  • The napp-it GUI looks, well, pretty spartan
  • Creating a pool, dataset, and share were quite straightforward–it offers to create a share when you create a dataset. SMB sharing works as expected; I haven’t tried NFS or iSCSI.
  • The free version of napp-it is somewhat feature-limited, and you have to contact them for a quote for the “pro” version. But you get a 30-day trial of those features.

TrueNAS CORE

CORE installs and runs without issues, so long as you install a supported NIC.

TrueNAS SCALE

There really isn’t much to say about it–it installs and runs perfectly normally without any changes to the system.

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