Is it time for ALL NVME in your HOMELAB? Ugreen NVMe NAS

Today I'm looking at the Ugreen DXP480T Plus, an ALL NVME NAS!

Key Specs:
- 4x m.2 2280 NVMe drive bays with cooling
- 10Gbe via Aquantia/Marvell NIC
- Intel Core i5-1235U processor with 8G DDR5, expandable to 64G
- 2x Thunderbolt expansion ports for high-speed IO or networking

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Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
00:43 - Unboxing
03:18 - Teardown
06:13 - IO Bandwidth
09:15 - Included Software
14:08 - Thunderbolt
17:35 - Power
18:05 - Thoughts

#ugreen #nas #homelab

[TheChadXperience]

Please, use "ip -c a", so it will color and highlight the addresses for your viewers. It just makes it easier to read.

[sevilnatas]

My NAS has NVMe drives as the tip of the spear storage (fast, critical storage for low latency operations like VM/Container OS images, data caching, database storage), SATA SSDs for less critical storage (often used data and warm archives), Rust drives for long term cold archive (straight up, "never touch these" type files and 1st tier backups). NVMe and SSD disks are on a 2 x 10g nics and Rust drives are on a 2.5g nic, all running on top of TrueNAS, on top of a 48 core Epyc CPU and 128gb of RAM. Used the Epc for the large RAM capacity, CPU cores for small low priority VMs and containers, many PCIe lanes and the fast exotic storage buses.

[TekJumble]

This is good for a ceph cluster if you have 3 of these, all three can communicate with each other over thunderbolt network and then you can expose ceph to users via the regular 10g link it would be a pretty efficient setup, if you don't have huge bandwidth requirements (and you probably don't in a home environment)

[TheChadXperience]

There's actually a way to test a Thunderbolt drive if all you have is a MacBook. You could place your MacBook into "target" mode, so it will act like a Thunderbolt-connected storage drive. Instructions are on the web.

Apple includes that as a backup data recovery method, in case you can't boot your Mac.

[AlexHerlan]

Why are you not a huge Docker fan? Maybe its because I'm also a developer, but as far i'm concerned Docker is a godsend for simplifying the distribution of all the multi-technology stacks used in modern software and web development. Its networking isn't that complicated if you understand just how its trying to security act in a explicit defined access only model. I've certainly never had an issue with it, although I guess maybe that comes with being a developer who works not only on how my containers communicate with the outside world, but also how different images and containers interact between each other, which probably helps me navigate all that quite a bit. Its definitely nothing thats gonna be easily used or fully understand with a GUI most of the time, absolutely is much easier just hacking away at the config files manually. Its a beautifully elegant solution that simplifies development, deployment and makes iteration on version of software much easier to manager. So idk... I love it, because I hack away at and mod lots of existing open source tools, and make a lot of my own, for things like this.

[eric-seastrand]

I would love a video about your distaste for Docker (and possible alternatives. Do you just run every app bare-metal?)
Btw - docker networking is less of a disaster if you use MacVLAN network type. It lets the container look like a VM to the network, complete with its own MAC address and IP.

[BackBackForwardLightning]

$1000, no disks included, and max individual disk size is 4TB.... you've gotta be kidding me.

[CryNomadsis]

Great coverage of the device! tbh, the Minisforum MS01 seems like a better value option? Especially the 12600h version has more power for an NVME NAS. The Dual Intel X710 10G SFP+ Connectors should work better than the Aquantia NIC and with an adaptercard in the 16x slot you can add a 4th NVMe SSDs. Sure you would give up an 5th Slot for the Boot SSD in camparision to the Ugreen but this is well worth imo!

[FinlayDaGk]

Looking like an interesting little travel NAS.
Would have been nice to see some benchmarks tho.

And a tip for the next install: Don't cover the NAND with thermal pads, just the controller.
NAND actually likes being a bit toasty.

[galactic_dust]

Only 4 drives bays ?
At this price, just get a PCIe extension card with 4 drives bays it will be only 50$

[shephusted]

it does have dual usb4 but other than that this is a clear case where you should really just build your own serious nas for half the price and double the performance - going with all ssd/nvme is a great way to go but having a spinning rust raid is always nice as well - prices for these will drop a bunch

[nadtz]

For the money I'd get the QNAP TBS-h574TX-i3-12G-US instead. 5 bays and can take E1.S which opens up a world of options for SSD's even with that unit's PCIE limitations. It is nice that the RAM is upgradeable in this unit though. What we really need is a NAS maker to use something like an Epyc Siena or ARM chip in one of these, fairly low power but gobs of PCIE lanes, none of these consumer chips have enough PCIE lanes to really do all NVME NAS's justice. Of course that would cost lot more though.

[travgrif]

Yea, I need more storage than that. I also don't need that fast of storage. Mechanical disks work perfect for my use.

[ErnieJohnsonCA]

I really want to love these SSD NAS units.. but I think I'll stick with my own 'built' system consisting of a MINI PC with 1 NVME and 1 SATA SSD and 64gb of RAM. Sure, there's no RAID running on it, but it as bandwidth permits, it stays in sync with a spinning disk server back at my main home office... I get my portability, speed and a powerhouse of a mini PC on top of it all that runs several virtual machines.

[RubberDuckDebugger]

I'm not an expert, but it seems like there should be been enough lanes for PCIe 4 x4 to the 4 main drives due to the lack on a dedicated GPU and only having 2 Thunderbolt ports.

Even connected two drives to the chipset should allow for both have PCIe 3 x4 (Note, the whole chipset is limited to about the same bandwidth as PCIe 3 x4, so this would only help when one of the two drive chipset linked slots are in use.)


All told, I would rather have all 4 drives at PCIe 4 x2 if x4 wasn't doable. It won't much mater for saturating the network, but it could help the system rebuild faster when a drive is replaced. Could even use the saved lanes for a 2nd NIC.

[frankwong]

For that price tag, How about something like minisforum ms01

[seanpalmer]

I hear about more and more people making 3-node clusters out of mini-pcs with Thunderbolt as the backend. I'm hoping we can see some optimizations to make the driver a bit more performant. I'd like to build my own sometime in the near future.

[espi]

"It's like unboxing an Apple product... if Apple made a NAS"

Funny thing is that Apple made NASes(-ish) in the past (the Time Machine boxes). They even made WAPs.

[tehehe]

It should be at least 8 nvme disks, preferably 16 even if 1xPCIe 4.0. BTW how cool it would be to have usb 4.0 network switches especially considering usb 4.0 v2 (80Gb/s) is a thing.

[hugevibez]

If you are testing a lot of devices like this it'd be nice if you got 2 sticks of 48GB RAM to test compatibility