The Ugreen NASync iDX6011 Professional AI NAS is overkill for common client and small enterprise community storage wants, however its capabilities can be engaging to fanatics — even when the AI is not nice but.
Over time, AppleInsider has seen network-attached storage choices develop in scope. Successfully a cut-down pc that centered on storage above all else, the format has advanced to carry extra utility.
Apps allowed customers to do issues like run Plex servers or different companies on their house community. This was beforehand in a restrained method, because of the limitations of the included {hardware} normally.
In newer releases, this has advanced into together with onboard AI capabilities, because of the continuing development of including synthetic intelligence in all places. To do that on the native community as an alternative of by way of a cloud server, you want an honest quantity of processing efficiency that the everyday NAS merely would not have.
Ugreen is on a roll with its NAS lineup, and the NASync iDX6011 Professional goals to proceed that development by including extra to the general NAS package deal.
There’s possibly an excessive amount of right here for even prosumer-grade workflows.
Ugreen NASync iDX6011 Professional AI NAS assessment: Bodily Design
A typical enclosure for a NAS is an train in compact performance. It is a system designed to take a bunch of drives and have comparatively few different elements to incorporate within the package deal.
This mannequin would not stray removed from that mindset, however it is usually fairly sizable. It is 13.7 inches vast by 10.2 inches by 8.3 inches, making it a really hefty field.
Ugreen NASync iDX6011 Professional NAS assessment: M4 Mac mini for scale
It has the standard aluminum enclosure, in addition to a row of front-facing drive bays, together with some port entry in direction of the bottom.
Across the again are extra ports, a big fan grille, and an influence enter. That fan part features a magnetic mud mesh filter, making it easy to wash and take away mud and air buildup occasionally.
The sizable nature is available in as a result of it is a system able to taking six bodily massive onerous drives. There’s nothing Ugreen can actually do to compensate for the mass of storage you’ll be able to put into it, however it’s not attempting to be ultra-slim with the development right here.
There are, nonetheless, two very uncommon parts that are not often included in a NAS.
Ugreen NASync iDX6011 Professional NAS assessment: That is a large detachable fan grille.
First, there is a slim touchscreen on the entrance, accompanying the standard line of drive indicator lights. It is a 3.7-inch LCD panel that gives quick entry to numerous stats and settings, like monitoring the CPU and built-in GPT, the NPU, reminiscence utilization, community load, and storage utilization.
This a neat addition in case you’re into monitoring the NAS however do not wish to examine the necessities from a web-accessible portal.
The opposite relative-oddity is the PCIe slot with PCIe Gen4 x8 assist. There are a variety of prospects right here, like PCI-E GPU, a fiberchannel card, extra ethernet ports, and the like.
Ugreen NASync iDX6011 Professional AI NAS assessment: Storage
There are six lockable drive bays on the entrance, numbered from left to proper, with trays that may be pulled out for drive set up. These bays are tool-free and hot-swappable, which helps velocity up set up and upkeep significantly.
Whereas you should use six SATA drives with it, there are additionally a pair of M.2 SSD ports inside. These will be arrange each as SSD volumes in their very own proper, separate from the principle SATA drive pool, or as an SSD cache for elevated velocity.
We examined the unit with six 4TB Seagate Crimson drives supplied by Ugreen. We additionally used 4 24TB WD Crimson Professional, that retail for $688.99 on Amazon.
SSDs used for testing included a pair of Samsung 990 Evo Plus drives, and a pair of Samsung SSD 9100 Professional 1TB drives. You need not use drives this quick. Keep on with PCI-E 3.0 drives when you have them, as they’re cheaper, and nonetheless present greater than sufficient velocity.
Ugreen says that there is a most capability of 196TB out there, in case you can afford and might supply sufficiently large-enough drives to fulfill that stage. It says it has verified 30TB drives with the system, and so they occur to be the biggest to have been examined, however there may be the opportunity of utilizing higher-capacity fashions as properly.
Ugreen NASync iDX6011 Professional NAS assessment: Cracking open a drive bay.
This is not all the storage, although. There’s additionally a separate 128GB SSD that’s used because the system disk. That is the place the purposes that may be run on the NAS can be saved.
Your spinning steel drives can formatted as Only a Bunch of Disks (JBOD) in addition to RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 6, and RAID 10. This provides customers a variety of choices, relying on whether or not they wish to prioritize velocity of entry or the safety of their information.
The UGOS Professional working system permits customers so as to add extra drives to an current RAID, which is sweet. It takes time, and count on this to take a really very long time, typically days, within the case of RAID 5.
Usually, with nearly any NAS, there may be additionally the expectation of storage enlargement by way of using different ports on the system, akin to Thunderbolt or USB. Except for the aforementioned PCIe card, which may present enlargement in a number of methods, there’s additionally an OCuLink connection.
Ugreen NASync iDX6011 Professional NAS assessment: Rear view, exhibiting the PCIe slot.
It is a high-bandwidth connection that can be utilized to hook up with an exterior GPU enclosure or different gadgets. The fundamental use right here is that it might feasibly be used to attach extra storage to the NAS itself.
Sadly, we weren’t in a position to take a look at the OcuLink performance. Whereas I nonetheless have some Thunderbolt enclosures kicking round, I would not have any OcuLink, and wasn’t in a position to safe one in time for the launch of the Kickstarter.
It is a good suggestion, although, for future enlargement.
Ugreen NASync iDX6011 Professional AI NAS assessment: Ports and Connectivity
Across the entrance, there is a single USB-A 3.2 connection, working at 10Gbps, in addition to an SD 4.0 card slot and a pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports.
Ugreen NASync iDX6011 Professional NAS assessment: Entrance Thunderbolt 4 ports are uncommon, however good to have.
The Thunderbolt 4 ports are primarily supposed to ingest information from different drives and retailer it domestically. They can be utilized to broaden storage too, in case you want.
You can even use them to community over Thunderbolt with one other pc, however solely as much as as quick as 10 gigabits. To say it plainly, the NASync iDX6011 will not be a Drobo desktop substitute, which is unlucky.
On the learn of the unit, there’s the PCIe Gen 4 x8 slot, a second USB-A 3.2 connection, and two extra USB 2.0 ports. There’s additionally an HDMI port that’s able to 8K video, which is beneficial in case you’re working purposes from the NAS instantly as an alternative of over the community.
The previously-discussed OcuLink port can also be within the rear port array.
Ugreen NASync iDX6011 Professional NAS assessment: Rear ports.
Talking of networking, Ugreen features a pair of Ethernet connections right here. Extra importantly, they’re 10-gigabit ports, that means it might have a 20-gigabit connection to your community in case you use each of them and have the infrastructure out there.
Only a few individuals could have a 10-gigabit community at house, so this is not one thing that the majority shoppers will be capable to totally make the most of. That is extra one thing for enterprise customers who can afford the high-speed community infrastructure, and might probably use it to its most functionality.
It’s definitely evident that there is a variety of connectivity potential right here, and it is one thing that can be very useful for enterprise or enterprise customers. For house customers, it is simply good to have the capability to go increased sooner or later.
Ugreen NASync iDX6011 Professional AI NAS assessment: Performance
It is one factor to have a variety of storage to play with, however the regular expectation is that the app-usage expertise on a NAS is subpar. There’s often sufficient efficiency to get one thing working, like Plex, however not something requiring large quantities of efficiency.
It is a very totally different story with the NASync iDX6011 Professional.
Operating the present is the Intel Core Extremely 7 255H, which is much from the standard low-power quad-core CPUs you’d discover in a NAS. As an alternative, this can be a 16-core system with six efficiency cores with a max turbo velocity of 5.1GHz, together with eight effectivity cores and two low-power-efficient cores.
It is nonetheless comparatively much less power-hungry than regular, because it has a base energy of 28W and a max turbo energy of 115W.
It is supported by the built-in Intel Arc 140T GPU able to 74 trillion operations per second, in addition to Intel AI Enhance. That is an NPU able to 13 trillion operations per second, which is able to assist with any AI-related duties.
To place this into perspective, Geekbench places the 255H at a single-core rating of two,505 and a multi-core rating of 13,327.
On the Apple aspect, you might get the identical multi-core efficiency from a Mac Studio with an M1 Max, or an iMac with an M4 chip. The one-core efficiency is about the identical because the M2.
Certain, that is Intel and a few generations behind Apple’s present technology of Apple Silicon. Having this a lot energy in a NAS opens up every kind of use circumstances, assuming you have got sufficient RAM.
Ugreen additionally contains 64GB of LPDDR5X reminiscence, however sadly, it is not upgradeable. That mentioned, 64GB is a really wholesome quantity, particularly if you are going to be working purposes on it past the standard NAS fare.
And run purposes you’ll be able to. It is working on UGOS Professional as an working system, which works decently sufficient after a number of years of growth at this level. I might say it is about 90% of Synology’s providing on this respect.
Whereas it as soon as wasn’t, UGOS Professional is simple to arrange, simple to handle, and simple to manage entry.
The onboard software program choices are what you’d count on from a typical NAS. You might have your personal picture album library system, your video storage and playback instruments, and different productivity-centric objects.
If you happen to’re into downloading massive information legitimately by way of Bittorrent, there is a device in-built for simply that, however you’ll be able to set up extra if you’d like.
However, with all of this efficiency on faucet, eventual customers might wish to do extra. Fortunately, there’s Docker assist, so you’ll be able to set up an array of various community companies on the NAS.
Do not like Docker? You can even run digital machines on it as an alternative.
With the efficiency of the chip used right here, these companies can be fairly quick and snappy. You are not going to see a lot of a lag in efficiency right here.
Sure, you’ll be able to put Plex on there, and there is full hardware-accelerated 4K transcoding on faucet. It could actually even deal with as much as 10 concurrent 4K streams, in each direct play and transcoded codecs, as long as you have got sufficient purchasers and community bandwidth.
I do. I examined this, and on a 10-gigabit wired community, I hit 10 4K60 HDR streams to Apple TV items, utilizing Infuse because the playback app, and a direct streams with out transcoding. I managed eight when transcoding, which continues to be unbelievable.
Ugreen NASync iDX6011 Professional NAS assessment: Bandwidth is not an issue right here.
Once more, that is efficiency that buyers in search of a house NAS might not essentially want, however the functionality to push the {hardware} is all the time there.
On the safety aspect, there are encryption and authentication programs, in addition to virus safety with real-time monitoring and automated updates. Intrusion prevention is supplied by way of its personal firewall, full with DoS safety and detection options.
If you happen to want it for backups, there’s assist for Time Machine, although it is not instantly usable. We’re not going to get into the process right here, however UGreen has a video about it. The assist doc is a bit higher, although.
Setup lacks the simplicity of the Time Capsule. The velocity of the backup and restore can be far slower versus a directly-connected storage system, similar to that Time Capsule. It does, nonetheless, nonetheless work properly on this regard.
You possibly can again up utilizing SMB mapping, automated Sync and Backup duties, switch over by way of an exterior drive, and even make the most of these Thunderbolt 4 connections for networking, if you’d like.
Ugreen NASync iDX6011 Professional AI NAS assessment: A phrase on AI
A giant promoting level is Ugreen’s insistence that it has nice AI capabilities. In concept, with the selection of chip with its GPU and NPU capabilities, what it does do ought to be pretty spectacular, the place on-device AI processing is worried.
On this occasion, it’s based mostly round a device known as Uliya. It is mainly the ChatGPT interface that connects to the native language mannequin and to its numerous features.
For instance, the photograph library will be accessed for pictures based mostly on a immediate, for instance, “cats from 2024.” Like Apple Pictures and others, it is going to attempt to discover mentioned cat pictures from the saved picture assortment.
There are additionally different parts like audio transcription. Give it some audio information, and it’ll create transcripts and thoughts maps based mostly on what’s mentioned.
Have a variety of information cluttering your storage? It will routinely tag your media for you. You can even inform the AI to type by way of them, ordering the information based mostly on what it thinks you need, full with context consciousness.
Then there are easy queries that you could ask of the native language mannequin.
A key to that is that it is all dealt with on-device, in that the processing occurs on the NAS. There is no such thing as a exterior connection required for processing, which due to this fact makes it extra personal.
This doesn’t work out of the field, neither is it automated. Customers are additionally not compelled to make use of any of the AI performance, as they need to be actively downloaded and put in prior to make use of.
If you happen to’re not going to be needing a lot speech-to-text transcription, the software program driving that have would not must be put in within the first place.
That mentioned, there are some limits when it comes to what the AI can really do. You are not going to get generative AI capabilities right here, like picture or video technology.
Additionally, like different AI fashions, there may be all the time the chance that it’s going to make errors. It’ll have in depth entry to your locally-stored information, however that is no assure that it’s going to create the appropriate outcome.
It is truthful to say that the extra developed AI options, like picture recognition, are strong. There’s nonetheless much more work to be executed earlier than the remainder of the AI expertise catches up with actuality.
After we examined this out, we didn’t see vital community site visitors after the set up, whereas the information have been being listed, or when searches have been made. We’ll regulate this going ahead, although.
AI is all the way down to belief. I don’t belief Google and the wish to index my information and hold what they be taught personal, no matter guarantees probably made with crossed fingers behind their backs, given historic habits. I do belief Apple, no less than for now.
So, I very a lot wish to flip off the AI options on this system, and I’d if the unit have been mine to maintain endlessly.
Ugreen NASync iDX6011 Professional AI NAS assessment: The correct of overkill
The common house person could have no actual want to select up a Ugreen NASync iDX6011 Professional AI NAS. With an MSRP of $2,599 with out drives, or $1,819 or $1,559 beneath Kickstarter Early-Fowl Pricing, it is an costly system from the outset.
That apart, it does supply many compelling parts for customers with far increased storage wants than regular, and for enterprise customers. The capability and community velocity supplied right here is appreciable in a NAS that Ugreen thinks would do properly within the house, however actually, it surpasses house person wants on virtually each stage.
Ugreen NASync iDX6011 Professional NAS assessment: Oculink is a rarity on a house NAS.
After all, the AI is an enormous driving issue right here from Ugreen’s advertising and marketing. It is a good buzzwordy sideshow. That space has some enhancements to endure earlier than it may be deemed actually helpful, after which there’s the matter of belief, which I talked about earlier.
The larger draw right here is the blistering efficiency for virtualization. This mix of a high-performance Intel chip and 64GB of reminiscence, albeit mounted in capability, is greater than sufficient to let a number of community companies run on it all the time.
In essence, the NASync iDX6011 Professional is a desktop-encloded rack-mounted server, with all that entails. For the appropriate client or small enterprise, this may definitely match the invoice. You completely do not want it at house, although.
Ugreen NASync iDX6011 Professional AI NAS Professionals
- Huge efficiency
- Storage capability and connectivity
- Docker assist
- PCIe enlargement
Ugreen NASync iDX6011 Professional AI NAS Cons
- Flagship AI function might do with much more work
- Excessive sticker value, however it does get you a variety of energy
Score: 4 out of 5
The place to purchase the Ugreen NASync iDX6011 Professional AI NAS
The Ugreen NASync iDX6011 Professional is being made out there by way of Kickstarter initially, however Ugreen is taking early reservations earlier than the marketing campaign begins in March. The Tremendous Early Fowl Worth is $1,599, with the Early Fowl value at $1,819. After the marketing campaign, it is going to have an MSRP of $2,599.
As a part of the assessment, we have additionally integrated the truth that it is a crowdfunded mission. As a crowdfunded mission, there may be all the time the chance of the product not transport as promised — or in any respect.
And, there’s been some shenanigans with people that pre-paid $30 to ensure a spot — which because it seems will not be assured in any respect. That is left a foul style in our mouth whereas the preorder interval has been occurring.
AppleInsider would not cowl the vast majority of crowdfunding efforts as a rule, except {hardware} is obtainable and after an evaluation of the group behind the trouble and their earlier releases, if any. We have been fairly pleased with uGreen, and we’ll see how the preorder $30 deposit state of affairs shakes out.