UGREEN NAS – 2 Years Later – Interview with the Brand About The Past, Present and Future
UGREEN NASync Celebrates 2 Years – But Is UGREEN Ready for the Big Leagues?
Two years ago, the popular battery and PC accessory company UGREEN, launched their Kickstarter campaign for the NASync personal NAS series of devices. The brand already had a steadily growing foothold in China with their DX series of NAS devices, but were still a huge outsider in the world of NAS globally. Fast forward two years, a $6 Million crowdfunding campaign, 6 new NAS releases, a new NAS kickstarter in progress (the IDX6011 AI NAS) and generally undermining long-time players who have been in the NAS market for more than a decade – UGREEN is looking like quite a beast in the world of NAS! But two years, UGREEN now finds that along with an increased market position also comes increased demand, scrutiny and expectation. I went to Shenzhen, China, to speak directly with the teams who direct and create their NASync division to ask them them questions about the development of this series, lessons that were learnt, where they are going and what they still need to do to further establish their position in the turnkey NAS market.
Full Disclosure – this Q&A has NOT been sponsored, subsidised or creatively controlled by UGREEN. These questions are my own, submitted to UGREEN 48 hours prior to the interview, and the answers provided were directly from their team.
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UGREEN was already a well-established company in its own right before it expanded into NAS systems. So, currently, what is the scale of the teams and resources that your company has allocated to this? R&D, Design, Development, Technical Support, etc?
UGREEN put together its NAS team back in 2018, released its first NAS product in China in 2021, and went global for the first time in 2024, bringing its NAS products to markets around the world. NAS is one of the company’s key strategic product lines, with a team of several hundred people working on it—including product, R&D, design, testing, security, and more. This doesn’t count shared support teams like industrial design, legal, or finance; we’re only talking about people directly focused on NAS. In this whole building, every floor is filled with NAS team members—except for the third floor, which is just the cafeteria.
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What has been the biggest challenge in the continued development of your NASync/UGOS services in these last 2 years?
One challenge is resource allocation. We need to support international users at the same time, which means balancing different priorities and expectations. Another challenge is localization. It’s not just about language, but also understanding different user behaviors and usage scenarios. So we had to spend a lot more time to research and validate what users actually need in each region. Based on that, we’ve been continuously adjusting our product direction and improving UGOS to better fit a global audience. It’s definitely an ongoing process, but it’s helped us build a much clearer understanding of the market.
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Two years on from your initial crowdfunding, your position in the ‘turnkey NAS market’ from comparative obscurity has catapulted to effectively being in the top 5 (if not top 3) – What do you think UGREEN have brought to the market (or change in the market as a whole) that caused this?
There are a few key things behind that.
Hardware DNA, Built for AI
UGREEN is a hardware company at heart. With our NAS products, we insist on solid hardware—high-performance CPUs, ample memory, high-performance CPUs and ample memory—not just for reliability, but for computing power. AI NAS demands serious performance. Without a strong hardware foundation, AI is nothing more than a concept. Our hardware is designed to make AI run stable and fast.
User-Centric, Not Just a Slogan
We’ve always put ourselves in our users’ shoes. We listen to every voice—on social media, in forums, through user interviews. Many of our features, like snapshots and SAN Manager, came directly from users telling us, “I need this.” Our products aren’t built in a vacuum; they’re shaped together with you.
R&D Investment, Bringing NAS to Everyone
We established our software R&D team, including an AI pre-research team, early on. User feedback has driven us to keep investing, with one goal in mind: to shorten the learning curve. NAS shouldn’t be just a toy for tech enthusiasts. We believe the future of NAS is for everyone—simple, smart, and accessible. This is the path we’re on, and it’s one we want to walk together with you.
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The UGREEN IDX6011 AI NAS series has been in development for a long time, and will be headed to its own crowdfunding campaign shortly. What was the biggest challenge you faced in its development and/or lesson that you learned about this new profile of solution?
The biggest challenge was finding the right balance between AI capabilities and real user value. It’s relatively easy to add AI features from a technical perspective, but making them actually useful, stable, and well-integrated into everyday workflows is much harder. Especially on a NAS, NAS is essentially a local storage product, everything runs locally, so for us, it was important that AI features also run locally. But hardware resources and compute power are limited. So the question is, how do we build useful and stable AI features without affecting NAS core functionality like storage, backup and overall system performance? That’s very difficult.
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And from product design perspective,it’s also challenging to define the right AI use cases. It’s not about adding more AI features, but making sure they are scenario-driven and actually solve real problems, like better file organization, smarter search, easier intraction… We need to keep the experience simple. Many users are still new to AI on a NAS, so we wanna make things natural and do not add extra complexity. So right now, we’re still in the process of refining and validating these ideas, and making sure we deliver something that’s both practical and reliable for users.
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I think it would be fair to say that UGREEN has chiefly focused on Desktop NAS server ownership in their portfolio of solutions to date. But have you explored rackmount solutions, and/or is this something that could happen in the near future?
Actually we’ve done some internal research on rackmount solutions, it’s quite different from desktop NAS in terms of target audience, hardware, software and sales. So it’s not just an extension of what we’re doing now, it requires a different product strategy. For now, our focus is still on improving and expanding our desktop NAS lineup, in the short term, we don’t have a concrete plan for rackmount products, but it’s something we’ll continue to evaluate over time.
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Now that UGREEN is a largely established player in the turnkey NAS market, there is a lot more scrutiny on the extent to which your brand preemptively prepares against cyber security threats. What is UGREEN doing to address (in terms of foundations on this platform and broader services) this to avoid a potential slow moving snowballing security incident?
Security is something we take very seriously. At the product level, we provide a range of built-in security features. For example, users can enable DoS protection to defend against network attacks, automatically block IP addresses after multiple failed login attempts, and set up firewall rules to control access from specific IP addresses and built-in Security app to scan for suspicious files We also have a dedicated internal security team and a well-established vulnerability handling process, so critical issues can be identified and resolved quickly. We also provide a vulnerability reporting channel on our official website. If users discover any potential security issues, they can report them to us, and we will assess and respond accordingly.
(Below is a snippet of the Security Disclosure page from UGREEN, available HERE)
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At CES 2026, UGREEN unveiled its surveillance platform and edge AI cameras. At that time, your team was kind enough to allow me to see the early development of your NAS surveillance application that will allow full management, direct control and storage of these new Surveillance services. Is development still continuing on this and will this be a service that existing NASync owners will have access to in the future
Yes, development is still ongoing. The surveillance platform you saw at CES is actually a part we are exploring, and is still under active development. From what I understand, AIOT is a broad ecosystem that is going to feature ai NAS, ai-based home security cameras, and many more AI-empowered hardware devices for a smarter lifestyle. On the NAS side, we’re also building our own surveillance application for NASync. We plan to launch it within this year. In terms of compatibility, we aim to support both UGREEN cameras and third-party cameras, so users have more flexibility to build their setup. So overall, both sides are moving forward, but they are different products within the UGREEN ecosystem.
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In the last year, UGREEN released two ARM RK chip-powered NAS solutions in the DH2300 and DH4300 – How easy/hard was scaling UGOS onto this more modest hardware base, and were there any useful lessons learned that have benefited your NAS development as a whole?
DH series is our entry-level lineup, designed mainly for NAS beginners and users with simpler needs. From a technical perspective, running UGOS on an ARM-based platform is definitely more constrained compared to x86, especially in terms of performance and resource availability. A lot of things can’t just be directly carried over, we need to re-adapt them for the ARM architecture, including the kernel, system services, and many core features. So we had to be more selective and thoughtful about which features to include and how to optimize them. And from a product perspective, it actually helped us become more focused. With the DXP series, we already emphasized user-friendliness, but with the DH series, we really wanted to take that further and make it as simple as possible, essentially positioning it as a user’s first NAS.
So in practice, we streamlined certain features based on the hardware and target users. For example, we simplified or did not include things like virtual machines and some AI capabilities, and instead focused on delivering a smooth and reliable core experience. One key lesson we learned is that not every product needs to do everything. It’s more important to match the right experience to the right user group. And that thinking has also helped us better define our overall NAS product lineup.
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I canvased a large group of UGREEN NAS users (many of whom were part of your original Kickstarter campaign) who are still using their NASync systems to this day, and have followed you on your journey so far. I asked them which features or improvements they would like to see in future updates and revisions to UGOS. Are you able to share if these are features that are on the roadmap, or have been explored?
- Full Volume Encryption
- WORM support
- A mixed drive RAID storage system (comparable to Synology Hybrid RAID or Terramaster TRAID)
- A tiered storage system (unlike the copy system of ‘caching’, but a SSD+HDD composite pool that intelligently moves ‘hot’, ‘warm’ and ‘cold’ data to appropriate storage areas)
- ZFS as a file system choice
- A native Plex Media Server Application
- A local client application for Mac/Windows for file pinning, streaming, intelligent 30-day deletion (see Synology Drive, QNAP Qsync, etc)
- A more comprehensive security scanner (eg scanning for unsecure open ports, SSH being open, weak passwords, admin accounts, auto blocks disabled, etc)
We’ve actually seen many of these requests from our users as well, these are very valuable suggestions and we’ve already had internal discussions around most of them. But many of these features, like full volume encryption, hybrid RAID, or tiered storage are quite complex, they take time to design, develop and validate, especially we wanted to make them stable and reliable.
So at this stage, we don’t have a specific timeline we can share yet. But these are definitely things we take seriously, and we’ll plan them carefully based on user demand and overall product direction. If we see strong demand from users, we’ll absolutely prioritize them accordingly.
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Thank you to the team at UGREEN for their time in this interview. As mentioned, the answers about were provided in their entirety and without prejudice. This will be a video soon that covers this, the tour of the facilities, as well as further discussion around the IDX6011 NAS Kickstarter and how this has been managed.
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