UGREEN NAS vs Synology for a home lab: more hardware or better software

# Affiliate links: we may earn a commission. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. We also earn from qualifying purchases on eBay.

If you are choosing between a UGREEN NAS and a Synology NAS for a home lab, the trade is easy to state. UGREEN's two-bay DXP2800 (Amazon ›) gives you more hardware for the bay count: an Intel N100, 8 GB of DDR5, two M.2 NVMe slots and a 2.5 GbE port. A Synology NAS gives you DSM, with mature backup tools and an SNMP agent your monitoring server can poll on day one. If the box is mainly a backup target for configs, graph archives and laptops, Synology is the easier fit for a monitored lab. If it will also run a handful of containers, the UGREEN has the headroom, and you close its monitoring gap with an exporter.

Three questions before you buy

1. What will it hold? Config exports from the router and switches, database dumps from the monitoring host, laptop backups. Two drives in RAID 1 give you the capacity of one, so size from that.
2. Will it run anything? A NAS that only stores files needs little CPU or memory. One that also runs Uptime Kuma and a Git server needs memory first.
3. How will you know it is healthy? A NAS that fails quietly is worse than none, because you stop keeping other copies. Decide now whether it gets polled over SNMP or scraped through an agent.

UGREEN NAS vs Synology NAS: the hardware

Three details matter more than the table shows. The DS223j (Amazon ›) is an ARM box: its Container Manager package is the armv8 build, so every image needs an arm64 version, and 1 GB of memory is the real ceiling anyway. The DS225+ (Amazon ›) has an x86 CPU but only 2 GB, and Synology warns that non-Synology memory may void warranty and support, so budget for its own module if you want containers. The DXP2800 keeps its operating system on 32 GB of eMMC, leaving both bays and both M.2 slots for data.

The 2.5 GbE port pays off on the first full backup and on every large restore. The transfer time calculator shows the gap for your data size, and a 2.5G NAS port needs a 2.5G switch port to match; choosing a managed switch covers that side.

On drives, UGREEN says its NAS line has no vendor lock-in. Synology's DSM 7.3 announcement says 2025 model-year Plus, Value and J units accept non-validated third-party drives for storage pools, with M.2 pools and cache still limited to listed drives. The DS225+ is a 2025 model; the DS223j is older, so read its compatibility list first.

The software: DSM vs UGOS Pro

Here the gap is widest, and version numbers move, so treat this section as true at the time of writing.

Synology's DSM is at 7.4 on both models. Both get Hyper Backup, for scheduled backups to another NAS, a USB drive or a cloud bucket, and Snapshot Replication on Btrfs volumes. The DS225+ adds Active Backup for Business, which backs up PCs, servers and virtual machines, plus Virtual Machine Manager; neither is in the DS223j's package list. Both run an rsync service and the SNMP agent described below, with Synology's own MIB for system, drive and volume status.

UGREEN's UGOS Pro is younger and moving fast. UGREEN publishes update notes every month; the September 2026 release is firmware 1.20.0.0142, and recent releases added Amazon S3 and Backblaze as backup targets. The Docker app takes Compose projects, virtual machines are built in, and volumes are Btrfs with snapshots or ext4. There is an rsync service on port 873, and SSH with SFTP. What I could not find in UGREEN's documentation is an SNMP agent: UGOS uses SNMP only to talk to a network UPS. UGREEN's published twelve-month plan still lists rsync sync tasks in Sync & Backup and encrypted cloud backup as coming.

The short version: DSM is the more complete backup system and the one your monitor already understands. UGOS has the stronger box underneath and is filling in the software month by month.

Where graph history and config archives should live

One rule for both. Keep your monitor's live database (RRD files, Prometheus data, Zabbix's database) on the monitoring host's own SSD, and send the NAS dumps and archives. Prometheus's storage documentation says NFS is not supported for its local storage, and a database on network storage turns every NAS reboot into a monitoring outage. A nightly push to the NAS rsync service is enough:

# 03:15 every night: configs, exported switch backups and database dumps to the NAS
15 3 * * * rsync -a /srv/backups/ rsync://backup@192.168.10.20/labarchive/ --password-file=/root/.rsync-pass

Turn on daily snapshots for that shared folder, so a config overwritten by a bad night can be pulled back from last week. If you do want a database on the NAS, the DXP2800's M.2 slots are where it belongs: two NVMe drives such as the Samsung 990 PRO (Amazon ›) as a separate mirrored SSD pool, not as cache.

A home lab NAS in one table

The Rack list

Three boxes and the drive to fill them. The DXP2800 is the one I would put in most labs that want containers next to their backups. The DS223j is the lean choice: a backup target polled over SNMP, running nothing heavy. The DS225+ is the step up in software, with DSM's Plus package list, a second network port and a three-year warranty. The IronWolf is a CMR drive made for always-on NAS duty; buy two of the same size for a mirror.

How these four got here: I read the makers' spec pages, their documentation and published reviews. None of them has been on my bench, so check the current spec page before you order; both companies move features between releases. If you would rather buy the DXP2800 from the maker than from a marketplace, UGREEN sells it through its own NAS store.

Watching the NAS from your monitoring server

Synology: SNMP and the Synology MIB

The agent lives at Control Panel > Terminal & SNMP > SNMP. Tick SNMPv3, set a user and password, enable privacy, and pick SHA and AES where the menu offers them. Then check from the monitoring host:

snmpwalk -v3 -l authPriv -u monitor -a SHA -A "$AUTH_PASS" -x AES -X "$PRIV_PASS" \
  192.168.10.20 1.3.6.1.4.1.6574.2.1.1.13

Synology's MIB guide recommends SNMPv2c for reading the complete Synology tree. If a Synology table comes back empty over v3, fall back to v2c with a made-up community such as n0c-r34d, and let DSM's firewall admit only the monitor's address on UDP 161. Never leave public on. Import Synology's MIB files together, since they depend on each other. The objects worth alerting on first:

1.3.6.1.4.1.6574.1.1.0     systemStatus      1 normal, 2 failed
1.3.6.1.4.1.6574.1.2.0     temperature       system temperature
1.3.6.1.4.1.6574.2.1.1.6   diskTemperature   one row per drive
1.3.6.1.4.1.6574.2.1.1.13  diskHealthStatus  1 normal, 2 warning, 3 critical, 4 failing (DSM 7.1 and later)
1.3.6.1.4.1.6574.3.1.1.3   raidStatus        1 normal, 11 degraded, 12 crashed
1.3.6.1.2.1.31.1.1.1.6     ifHCInOctets      traffic per NAS port (IF-MIB)

Alert on any disk health above 1 and on a degraded volume, and graph the temperatures. In Storage Manager, the HDD/SSD Test Scheduler runs quick and extended S.M.A.R.T. tests; weekly quick and monthly extended is a sensible start.

UGREEN: an exporter in a container

With no agent to poll, run one. node_exporter from the Prometheus project reports CPU, memory, filesystems, disk I/O and network counters. In the Docker app, create a Compose project with this:

services:
  node_exporter:
    image: quay.io/prometheus/node-exporter:latest
    command:
      - '--path.rootfs=/host'
    network_mode: host
    pid: host
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - '/:/host:ro,rslave'

It listens on TCP 9100; add a scrape job on the monitoring host and keep that port off networks your guests and IoT devices can reach. node_exporter does not read S.M.A.R.T. data, so set up status test plans in Storage > Hard Drive, where UGOS shows each drive's health, temperature and S.M.A.R.T. attributes. Add a TCP check on SMB (445) from the monitor, so you know the shares answer, not only the box.

UPS shutdown through NUT

Both systems speak NUT. With the UPS's USB data cable in the NAS, either box can serve UPS status to the rest of the rack: DSM calls it the network UPS server, UGOS calls it NUT Server, on port 3493. Check that your UPS has a USB data port, not only USB charging ports.

In the rack from the NUT shutdown guide, the Pi from the weekend monitoring build holds the USB cable as primary and the NAS is a secondary. DSM's client setting, "Synology UPS server", asks only for an IP address; UGOS's "Network UPS Slave" asks for an IP and a port. Neither asks for a NUT user, so the primary has to offer the UPS name and account each NAS expects, and the guide covers matching them.

All three boxes draw about 16 to 17 W while accessing drives, by the makers' figures. Put the whole rack into the UPS runtime calculator and set the NAS to shut down with battery still in hand.

When to spend more

Spend more when you hit one of these, not before:

• More than two drives. Two bays give you a mirror and nothing else; RAID 5 or 6, or a hot spare, means four bays or more.
• A second copy. Before a bigger NAS, buy the second place your backups live: a USB drive kept away from the house, or a cloud target through Hyper Backup or UGOS's S3 and Backblaze support. RAID 1 is one copy on two disks.
• Faster networking. 10 GbE pays off only when your switch and hosts have it and SSDs sit behind it.
• Memory. On a DS225+ that runs containers, the move to 6 GB comes first.

Short of those, the one thing to remember: put the NAS on your monitor the same day it goes on the shelf, because the failure you need to catch is the quiet one.