Ugreen to Challenge Synology with Affordable Series of NAS Hardware

https://petapixel.com/2024/03/26/ugreen-to-challenge-synology-with-affordable-series-of-nas-hardware/

by PaulHoule • 2 years ago

7 14 2 years ago

Nice to see Debian under the hood; very solid base.

Good market rife for some disruption from below. The existing offerings all feel pretty pricey, especially for the tiny embedded cores that run most of them.

Also excited to see ARM finally finally showing up. DIY board, but Linus Tech Tips reviewed the rk3588 based FriendELEC CM3588 with 4x m.2 slots (yes, vastly oversubscribed PCIe), and had nice things to say. It would make a very competent sata NAS and fine for a lot of ssd uses. Its wild to me how bad ARM has been at getting cores out people can use for general computing, just incredible non-delivery forever, but maybe some day more mobile/desktop class cores can emerge at reasonable price points & stir up some entrenched x86, maybe, perhaps, someday, maybe, one of these decades... https://youtu.be/QsM6b5yix0U?si=PoemX6Iu5vTCS85Q https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product%2Fprodu...

Edit: UgreenOS being vanilla Debian + management UI was mentioned in TwoGuyzTech review, https://youtu.be/205rlkyK_QE?si=edzzy7tvUW8hhI0d#t=4m

Also the HDMI out makes so much sense. Pity there's not better off the shelf protocol/software solutions. Miracast wouldn't make sense because someone else would have to read from the nas then send the video via Miracast to it.

Google/w3c has been forever mucking about with a Open Screen Protocol, which aims to fulfill promises to support more than proprietary Chromecast protocol devices when they added Presentation API back in 2015. https://caniuse.com/mdn-api_presentation It would be a great fit & let existing media apps like Jellyfin or Twitch or Spotify just work. Almost a decade down the road though & it's slowboating through standards committees with one blessed engineer slowly coaxing it along, very frustrating long limbo. https://github.com/w3c/openscreenprotocol . There's a demo/reference repo in Chromium that works, and there's actually been consistent movement recently, by >1 engineer, which I'd dare to say is quite uncharacteristic & possibly even exciting. https://chromium.googlesource.com/openscreen/

Matter just cooked their own competing Cast protocol up, with Amazon's help. Dunno what impls/softwares are available. https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/9/24030324/amazon-matter-cas...

The rk3588 mentioned above also has HDMI-In and a 4k120 HEVC video encoder, which is worth noting especially for it's really interesting streaming possibilities; a gratis highly capable stream capture card, sort of.

imglorp2• 2 years ago

I couldn't find the Debian reference. Linky please?

PaulHoule• 2 years ago

It’s a little bit like asking why Intel can’t make phones.

out_of_protocol• 2 years ago

Anyone have seen very simple and compact NAS with nvme or high speed usb? I don't want to build one myself out of raspberry pi

aeurielesn• 2 years ago

Anyone have any first-hand experience with this brand?

tommiegannert• 2 years ago

They show up quite a lot in accessories on AliExpress, like USB cables, hubs, chargers. Small electronics stuff. One of those semi-branded things out of China, the kind that feels like they're trying to build a brand rather than shipping crap as quickly as possible. The USB hub was fine. Something like a NAS feels like a sensible next step if they want to grow margins.

rany_2• 2 years ago

I bought a phone holder, USB hub and USB to SATA adapter from them. It works as advertised, but personally I wouldn't recommend buying anything too expensive from them.

CommanderData• 2 years ago

Software is where Synology wins. I tried a few competitors before settling with Synology for a small business.

I wonder how mature Ugreens software is comparatively.

rany_2• 2 years ago

I wonder how mature Ugreens software is comparatively.

To be fair, it's not like this software is going to be really complicated. At the end of the day it's just a web front-end to more mature tools. I don't think it's going to be too difficult to compete.

imglorp2• 2 years ago

On the plus side, Synology IS Linux and you can shell in and see some of what's going on and install your own things. It's been super solid and a drive failure just remirrored and done.

On the down side,

1. They are pushing cloud connectivity and telemetry very hard. Not sure if you can opt out any more?

2. The local control panel tries to be everything to everyone and as a result sometimes doesn't surface features you want from the underlying programs. They package a TON of things and don't really have time to surface all the config. I'd rather they package just NAS things well and leave the rest alone.

3. Their packaging is largely opaque, compiled code instead of linux standards, possibly for obfuscation, and it doesn't always play nice eg if you install your own VPN because the UI doesn't work for you, then it may step on you so you have to do it their way anyway.

rickydroll• 2 years ago

Like you have picked Synology, I've settled on TrueNAS. I'd consider getting one of the Ugreens boxes if I could switch it to TrueNAS.

snapplebobapple• 2 years ago

me too. This is the killer feature for this hardware, not some half baked setup based on debian. if they opened the platform instead of saying it's explicitly not open, they would sell way more of these.

Fire-Dragon-DoL• 2 years ago

Me too, but truenas has its fare share of problems. Now I need to migrate to truenas scale and rebuild all my jails from scratch

azurenumber• 2 years ago

What is the point of saying ODECC is supported when it is just part of DDR5 specification and not a replacement for ECC?

Ugreen to Challenge Synology with Affordable Series of NAS Hardware

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