It’s one factor so as to add terabytes of additional cupboard space to your private home community, but it surely’s one other to have your individual personal, native massive language mannequin at your beck and name as a substitute of getting to depend on ChatGPT for all issues AI. After getting Ugreen’s new iDX6011 Professional arrange and working, that’s precisely what I did.
Late final yr, I lastly tried out a NAS (Community Connected Storage) system and it’s been the most effective upgrades for my house community but. In actual fact, I’d say it’s made as a lot of a distinction as switching to fiber web and the most effective Wi-Fi 7 routers. Whereas my mesh router gave me sooner speeds and whole-home connectivity, what I like about my NAS is that I can rapidly and simply entry my saved movies, images, and information from anyplace on the earth.
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Though Ugreen’s first DXP gadgets had been aimed toward prosumers, and its DH collection catered to the much less tech-savvy amongst us, the flagship iDX6011 Professional is treading new floor completely.
I’m nonetheless considerably of a NAS-newbie myself, however after trying out this highly effective new machine, I can safely say the longer term has arrived. Whereas the additional energy and ports make a large distinction, it’s the built-in native AI that basically transforms this NAS from a file storage system to a multipurpose one.
A NAS constructed like a server
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At 8.3 × 13.7 × 10.2 inches and practically 22 kilos by itself (with out laborious drives put in), the iDX6011 Professional is a large machine. Because of its matte aluminum alloy casing, it’s additionally a big step up from the plastic enclosure of the DH4300 Plus I examined out beforehand.
Within the field, you get the iDX6011 Professional itself, high-speed Ethernet cables, an influence cable, and a few instruments — although you will not essentially want them relying on which sort of drives you put in.
Round entrance, you get six drive bays with enclosures that come out for straightforward entry. Subsequent to them on the appropriate is a vibrant 3.71-inch vertical LCD display screen, however extra on that later. On the underside of the iDX6011 Professional, there’s an influence button on the left, LED indicators for every of your drives, and a handful of helpful ports — together with twin Thunderbolt 4 ones, a high-speed USB-A port, and an SD card slot. This manner, you’ll be able to switch information onto the system utilizing the most effective exterior laborious drives, a flash drive, and even an SD card with out having to tug out your telephone or get in your pc.
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Identical to with the most effective gaming PCs, there’s a magnetic mud cowl round again. Talking of PCs, the iDX6011 Professional makes use of a normal PC energy cable as a result of, with an Intel Core Extremely 7 255H processor and 64GB of LPDDR5x on board, this NAS is principally a pc itself.
One factor you don’t ever see on a NAS, although, is the PCIe growth slot on the far left. Whereas PCIe is commonly used so as to add the most effective graphics playing cards to a normal pc, right here it’s used for different specialised playing cards — like these for even sooner networking, additional NVMe storage, or perhaps a devoted video seize card.
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Relating to graphics playing cards, you’ll be able to truly join a type of, too, through the OCuLink port round again. The rationale for doing this might be to run much more demanding AI workloads regionally, not for gaming. Nevertheless, relying in your wants, you won’t even must go this far because the Intel chip that powers the iDX6011 Professional options 96 TOPS (Trillions of Operations Per Second) proper out of the field.
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Along with that OCuLink port, you additionally get one other high-speed USB-A port, two USB 2.0 ports, an HDMI 2.1 port, and twin 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports round again. The 10G Ethernet ports are particularly necessary, as they allow you to switch knowledge forwards and backwards a lot sooner than I might with the two.5G Ethernet port on the DH4300 Plus.
With every little thing out of the field, it was time to begin putting in the laborious drives and getting the iDX6011 Professional prepared for its preliminary setup.
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Alongside the iDX6011 Professional, Ugreen additionally despatched over a number of 4TB Seagate Ironwolf drives to refill all six slots on the entrance of the system. With six 4TB drives, that will theoretically give me 24TB of cupboard space. Nevertheless, since redundancy is without doubt one of the causes you’d go for a NAS over simply a big exterior laborious drive, in apply, you find yourself working with much less storage general so that you’ve additional house for backups within the occasion of a drive failure.
Once I added 4 of those similar laborious drives to the DH4300 Plus, there was a bit extra work concerned since I needed to bodily screw in every drive earlier than inserting it. With the iDX6011 Professional although, in case you’re utilizing customary 3.5-inch laborious drives, then you definately don’t must screw them in in any respect. With smaller SSDs although, you’ll have to use the included screws.
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The short launch mechanism Ugreen carried out right here is fairly nice. After taking a drive bay out, you press down a tab on the again and the enclosure expands. Then you definitely put your laborious drive in and push either side of the enclosure collectively to lock it in place. From there, you simply slide the drive into the iDX6011 Professional and also you’re good to go.
After doing this with all six of the drives, it was time to get the iDX6011 Professional plugged into the wall and linked to my house community. Given it is a a lot bigger NAS with highly effective parts that require loads of airflow, I made a decision to place it on high of a aspect desk by itself. As soon as I plugged its energy twine into the wall, I then proceeded to attach it through Ethernet cable to my eero Max 7 mesh router on high of the cupboard I was a hidden hub with the remainder of my networking gear.
Even in case you don’t have the most effective Wi-Fi routers with a ten Gigabit Ethernet port round again, the iDX6011 Professional ought to connect with the router you may have simply positive. Nevertheless, one with sooner ports will provide you with higher add and obtain speeds. Now for that second 10G port, you should use that to attach the iDX6011 Professional straight. You’ll run into an identical drawback with most PCs or Macs although, as they sometimes come outfitted with gigabit or possibly 2.5G Ethernet ports. Happily, you’ll be able to at all times add a networking card to your PC or go for a Mac with a sooner Ethernet port like how one can spend an additional $100 to get a 10G one on the Mac mini M4.
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Moreover making set up a breeze, Ugreen’s fast launch mechanism additionally makes it straightforward to swap out one laborious drive for an additional. This could turn out to be useful if you need to rapidly pull knowledge off an outdated laborious drive or if certainly one of your drives fails and it’s good to change it with a brand new one.
With the iDX6011 Professional arrange and plugged in, I used to be prepared to leap on my PC and do the preliminary configuration through my browser. Whereas the {hardware} aspect of issues was a large improve over my final NAS, I used to be most excited to see if the software program — and particularly that native AI — might reside as much as the hype.
Energy you’ll be able to contact
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When you can obtain the Ugreen NAS app in your iPhone or Android system for the preliminary setup, you don’t must. As an alternative, on a pc linked to the identical community, all you must do is open your browser and head to seek out.ugnas.com. There, it’s best to see an image of your Ugreen NAS and might start the setup course of that approach.
After organising my username and password, the iDX6011 Professional put in a couple of updates and I discovered myself in Ugreen’s UGOS Professional working system. Within the OS, it’s good to do a couple of issues first like making a storage pool and organising the system’s native AI assistant Uliya.
Since I’ve a number of drives and need to have the ability to totally get better one within the occasion of a failure, I went with a RAID 5 configuration for my storage pool. Bear in mind what I stated about shedding some theoretical cupboard space? Nicely, on this configuration, I’ve 20TB of usable storage and 4TB is devoted to parity, which permits the system to reconstruct my knowledge if a type of six drives fails. There are a couple of totally different configurations to select from however Ugreen explains the ins and outs of every one from inside its Storage app in a simple to grasp approach.
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With each different NAS, you both must open its respective app in your telephone or pc or login through your browser to get information on its efficiency and out there cupboard space. This isn’t the case on the iDX6011 Professional. With a faucet and some swipes on its 3.71-inch vertical touchscreen, you may have fast entry to all of these stats. Whereas I want you possibly can customise it a bit additional, you’ll be able to change the background wallpaper, choose your most popular language and management the display screen’s brightness.
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Since I’m at all times switching between computer systems as a part of my work reviewing the very best mini PCs (one of many causes I needed a NAS within the first place), I had principally been accessing my NAS through my browser. Nevertheless, to make issues a bit simpler on my principal pc, I made a decision to put in Ugreen’s devoted NAS app on my PC as a substitute. It really works the identical approach because the browser method however you don’t must take care of an handle bar and bookmarks taking on house on the high of the window.
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One of the crucial helpful upgrades with the iDX6011 Professional are the ports on the entrance. With the DH4300 Plus, you solely get a single USB-C port up entrance however with this one, you may have much more choices. These Thunderbolt 4 ports make for sooner knowledge transfers whereas the SD card reader helps you to get images proper off your digicam’s SD card. Personally, I like having that USB-A port up entrance to get knowledge off of my older flash drives with no need an adapter or worse, a dongle.
On condition that I’m fairly aware of UGOS, I already knew which apps I needed to put in however there are many different helpful ones in Ugreen’s App Heart. This time round although, there have been a couple of iDX6011 Professional particular apps that allow you to put the Intel Core Extremely 7 255H’s NPU to good use. Now it was time to attempt them out and see whether or not or not having a neighborhood AI assistant made for a greater NAS.
From storing to analyzing information
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Though some apps come pre-installed on the iDX6011 Professional, Uliya isn’t certainly one of them. To get began utilizing Ugreen’s native AI assistant, you first have to take a seat via a 13.5GB obtain however this didn’t take lengthy in any respect on my 10 gigabit connection. The rationale the Uliya app is so massive is as a result of it’s powered by the Qwen 3 LLM and that is a part of that obtain.
For these unfamiliar, Qwen is an LLM created by Alibaba Cloud, not OpenAI, Google or Perplexity. Now on its third iteration, this LLM is understood for being a really environment friendly open-weight mannequin that’s well-suited for coding, math and multilingual duties. When you can run Qwen 3 on-line, on the iDX6011 Professional, the LLM is put in on the NAS’s laborious drive and is run in RAM. It makes use of 12GB of the iDX6011 Professional’s 64GB of RAM and operates at speeds of 8.22 tokens per second.
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To place this in perspective, a fully-loaded gaming PC with a Nvidia RTX 5090 has a typical velocity of 70-120 tokens per second whereas ChatGPT and Claude supply speeds of fifty to 100 tokens per second. As such, if you ask Qwen 3 a query, as a substitute of an immediate response, you actually see the phrases being typed out on display screen. I didn’t have any drawback with this because it was nonetheless fairly quick given it was working on native {hardware} and to be sincere, I sort of bought a kick out of watching the phrases magically seem one after one other like on a typing check.
With the intention to familiarize myself with the mannequin a bit extra, I began out my AI journey on the iDX6011 Professional by asking Qwen 3 about itself. It informed me who created it after which supplied an extended listing of the entire issues it might do. From answering questions on varied matters to writing tales, creating paperwork, fixing math and programming issues and translation, it’s fairly succesful for a neighborhood LLM.
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Uliya isn’t the one AI app Ugreen provides although as there’s additionally a Voice Memos app too. It will probably transcribe textual content from audio, present a abstract and even make a thoughts map of what it transcribed. To place it to the check, I uploaded some audio from an interview I did with Nintendo’s Invoice Trinen in the course of the Nintendo Swap 2 launch occasion in New York. Nevertheless, earlier than doing so, I did must obtain an 8.2GB speech-to-text mannequin first.
As soon as that was put in, it took lower than 5 minutes to transcribe my 20 minute interview. There have been a couple of errors right here and there but it surely bought the vast majority of my dialog with Invoice Trinen right from the get go.
Identical to with different transcription providers, you’ll be able to identify the audio system however you can even play again the unique recording in case one thing went mistaken in the course of the transcription course of. Is Voice Memos excellent on the iDX6011 Professional? No, but it surely certain beats importing a recording to Otter.AI and working into the varied limitations with its free plan.
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From there I put Uliya’s doc abstract function to the check. To take action, I downloaded the overview information for the Govee Ceiling Gentle Extremely I simply put in in my house and requested Uliya to elucidate the highest 5 options of the brand new hard-wired good mild. Regardless that Qwen 3’s dataset solely goes up till 2024, Uliya did an amazing job of summarizing the doc and pulling out a very powerful particulars and key options of the Govee Ceiling Gentle Extremely.
I’m nonetheless within the technique of shifting over the info from the DH4300 Plus however as soon as I do, there’s much more you are able to do from the Sensible Instructions tab in Uliya. As an illustration, you’ll be able to have the AI search your images, create albums, play music, set timers and extra. I’m certain its capabilities will solely get higher over time too.
NAS-ing with much less
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Now don’t get me mistaken, the iDX6011 Professional is a robust NAS with all of the bells and whistles and few additions like a neighborhood AI assistant and a touchscreen you simply received’t discover anyplace else. Nevertheless, at $2,600 for the system itself with none laborious drives, it’s a steep funding that makes extra sense for professional customers and even small enterprise house owners trying to retailer their information securely whereas doing a little bit of native AI work on the similar time.
For most individuals although, the extra consumer-focused DH4300 Plus and even the cheaper, two-bay DH2300 will likely be a greater match. Each of these NAS gadgets allow you to retailer your images, movies, music and information and entry them from anyplace. You’ll be able to even play your downloaded motion pictures and TV exhibits proper in your TV over your private home community. In actual fact, after I tried this on my Roku Extremely, I solely needed to allow DLNA and my NAS immediately confirmed up there and on my Samsung good monitor too.
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If you happen to just like the ports and simpler entry to your drive bays you get on the iDX6011 Professional however need one thing smaller and extra inexpensive, there’s additionally the four-bay DXP4800 and the two-bay DXP2800. Likewise, given how invested Ugreen now could be with NAS, I count on we’ll see much more gadgets with a wide range of designs sooner or later.
The DH4300 Plus might have been the begin to my NAS journey however the iDX6011 Professional confirmed me simply how far this tech can go together with extra highly effective parts below the hood. I can’t wait to see what Ugreen has in retailer subsequent and I’ve a sense I probably will at Computex in Taiwan this summer season.
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