[neogodless]

Given the article's bullet points, I would think the UGreen options bypass the first six... the following bullet points are just general market pricing issues and other issues outside of the NAS manufacturer's control.

EDIT: OK I see he doesn't like the onboard eMMC - fair enough.

I paid $280 for a DXP 2800, and was fortunate enough to get drives before the recent price increases. But I've only got 8GB and missed my window for an inexpensive jump to 16GB. Still it isn't having performance issues for my needs.

Serves as NAS, media server (Jellyfin), photo server (Immich). I've also dabbled with some web serving via pre-made docker images but haven't taken it very far.

[duxup]

Thank you. I don’t really sweat the hardware being modular as much as I do security and privacy.

[kotaKat]

I'm also team DXP2800. I was very surprised to see a super rural Walmart have DXP2800s and NAS-grade drives in stock and found out they did some weird partnership to sell UGreen hardware in some stores.

(Oddly, my store still has exactly one in stock for ~$240 on clearance which is really funny seeing the very current price hike at $439 "MSRP" now. That is painful. Of course, the $279 drive I bought in store is now $399, so that also sucks.)

I killed the onboard eMMC (it's just a BIOS setting - turn the eMMC off at the same time you disable the OS watchdog), slapped an NVMe inside the slot, and put my 10TB rust spinner in the bay and threw TrueNAS on the flash and it's happy as all can be.

ANNOYINGLY they now seem to stock an ARM-based UGreen for around $200 as the new 'Walmart' unit and that's kinda a bit more limited in what you can do.