I believe in supporting the artists whose media I consume, so I buy the media I want to own.

For the longest time this meant VHS Tape, then LaserDisc, then DVD, then Blu-Ray, then Digital. I liked digital because I didn't have to make space for physical media in my home, and it seemed the ideal solution for being able to access the stuff I buy from wherever I'm at. Except it didn't end up working that way. Unlike when you buy a movie on DVD, when you purchase via Digital, you aren't purchasing the media. Instead you are purchasing a license to view that media... and it's a license which the studio or licensee can terminate at any time. And when a TV show I bought was removed by the studio, I swore I would never buy digital again and went back to physical media.

Physical media that I ultimately rip into a digital format as a personal backup (because physical media can deteriorate and become unusable). But all that digital media has to be stored somewhere, and that's where Network Attached Storage (NAS) comes in. This is a box of hard drives that hooks up to your network and can serve your files to wherever you allow it. Meaning that I can access my purchased media wherever I want.

When I went shopping for a NAS years ago, all I wanted was Synology hardware. But I couldn't afford it, so I went with QNAP which was supposed to be the next best thing. It was not. Multiple problems culminated with a ransomware attack that would have lost all my files if not for the fact that I maintain a backup. Between this horrific bullshit and the fact that QNAP apps are always numerous versions behind in their app store and I was done with QNAP, but still stuck with it because I couldn't afford to replace the thing. Instead I turned off all outside access, which was a bummer because I could no longer access my media away from home.

Fast-forward to May 2025 and Synology made a move towards requiring proprietary drives, something to which I said "Oh fuck no!" and scratched them off my list of NAS manufacturers I wanted to deal with. After the fiasco with WD, I buy Seagate IronWolf Pro drives. Period.

Fast-forward again to Black Friday 2025, and I ended up buying a replacement NAS from UGREEN because my QNAP NAS has gotten old with its Celeron J1900 processor, and the 8.5× to 10.5× speed jump of the Pentium Gold 8505 processor in the 4-Bay UGREEN 4800+ was too good to pass up. Even if I had to put it on a credit card to pay the $550.00 price tag.

UGREEN, which is a highly reviewed relatively new player in the NAS market, wasn't originally on my list of options. I don't have anything against a device made in China (because isn't everything?), but knowing that their government might have built a back-door into the system which may compromise my cat photos, and that was a deal-breaker.

But then I found out you can replace the OS with TrueNAS Open Source, if needed, and was like... alrighty then. Not that it much matters, because I was going to firewall it off completely, remove UGREENlink, and go with VPN-only access.

But Anyway...

I've been slowly transferring all my media to the new NAS and have been quite happy with it. The UGREEN model is freakishly faster compared to the old QNAP model I had. Usually, NAS manufacturers put old, slow CPUs in their boxes because you don't need really fast chips to perform file serving tasks. Except serving files is not all that a NAS does. In my case, the NAS also has to run apps to serve media for my laptop and my television (which I do with an app called Plex)... along with a bunch of other apps which do various tasks with my data. And having a fast CPU for those tasks is important.

One of those apps is TailScale, a secure connectivity app which allows me access to my data without having to go through QNAP or UGREEN. Kinda like a private VPN. Thus eliminating my distrust of major companies... no matter where they're located.

Overall I'm very happy with the UGREEN 4800+ NAS. If I have a gripe it's that they don't have many app packages available. For example Plex can't simply be downloaded, installed, and set-up from within the UGREEN app repository. It don't exist. Instead you have to download an abstraction layer called Docker which has all kinds of apps (including Plex and TailScale) to be run and set up as containers that are interpreted for UGREEN. It's nowhere near as easy to go this route than to have a native app, but it does work if you're willing to put in a little research, time, and effort. It took me a couple days to get Plex working correctly because the various "instruction" videos were contradictory and often glazed past critical information, but it's running just fine now.

The quality of the hardware is also very good. The housing is an aluminum alloy instead of the janky plastic housing on my QNAP, for example. I also like the trays for the hard drives, which are tool-free fr 3.5" drives. There are a variety of ports... including SD card slot, USB-C, and USB-A on the front... and HDMI, 3 USB-A, plus 2.5Gb and 10Gb ethernet ports. As if that wasn't enough, the unit arrives with upgrade tools to install an SSD cache and more memory, two CAT-7 ethernet cables, and a power adapter. Maximum capacity is a whopping 136TB over four drives (I have four 16TB drives in a RAID 6 configuration which gives me 29TB of usable space, because I like redundancy for safety).

If I have an outright complaint to offer, it has nothing to do with UGREEN. Instead it's with Plex. This is by far my favorite media serving platform (I bought a lifetime pass within a month of installing it), but it's not without its faults. For one thing, it wants to build movie "collections" even if you tell it not to by setting it to "disabled." And most all of these collections are fucking useless and stupid, so I end up deleting them all. Which takes a crazy amount of time because there are so many. But even worse is the fact that I have found no easy way of transferring all my title adjustments and poster art from my old install for all the titles I have. Which means I'm going to have to start all over again from scratch. That's hours and hours of work. Why there isn't just a folder I can copy over I have no idea. There's a "config" folder, but what I'm looking for isn't there. I guess. Because if there is, I'm not finding it. You'd think that this would be a no-brainer.

I just wish I had the free time to get my latest media purchases ripped so I could add them to my new NAS. I've been wanting to re-watch Superman, and this would be a great excuse to do that.