NAS Software at Month Eight: DSM, UGOS Pro, TOS, QTS

The first month goes well on all of them. Drives spin up, shares mount, the phone app finds the photos, the transfer speed matches the box. Every NAS sold today clears that bar.

Month eight is the test. By then the hardware is a thing humming in a closet and what you are actually touching is the software — the backup scheduler, the container manager, the app you turned out to need six months after you bought the thing. Good hardware carries the first month. What is left at month eight is the software, and that is where these four separate. It is also where almost nobody reviews them.

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The drive policy got walked back. The transcoding did not.

Synology’s verified-drive requirement on the 2025 Plus line is why I stopped recommending them for most of last year. Not because I could not work around it. Because it told me where the product was heading.

Then they reversed it. Synology’s DSM 7.3 announcement of October 8, 2025 says that “25 model year DiskStation Plus, Value, and J series running DSM 7.3 will support the installation and storage pool creation of non-validated third-party drives.” One carve-out survives in the same announcement: “Creation of M.2 based storage pool and cache still requires drives on the HCL.” Fill the bays with whatever you want — the drive-level maths is unchanged now that the policy is gone — and you still need a Synology-listed NVMe to build a cache.

That reversal did not bring me back on its own. Synology-branded drives cost real money over the equivalent Exos and I was never able to identify what the premium bought — but the drives were the symptom, not the thing.

The thing that bothers me more is the one that did not get walked back, and almost nobody talks about it.

The DS425+ ships an Intel Celeron J4125. Intel’s own specification page for that chip lists UHD Graphics 600 and, on its own row, “Intel Quick Sync Video: Yes.” Synology’s spec sheet for the DS425+ lists the same J4125 and no video-transcoding section at all. The silicon is in the box and the driver is not. XDA’s Rich Edmonds walked through putting the removed drivers back by hand on October 21, 2025, using a community script that covers the DS925, DS425 and DS225 — which tells you the capability is sitting there.

The DS925+ makes it structural. Synology’s own spec sheet gives it an AMD Ryzen V1500B and, again, no transcoding section. That part ships without integrated graphics at all — worth saying plainly, because the XDA piece describes the DS925 as having an iGPU it is not allowed to use, and on this model the silicon is simply absent. One chip cannot do the work. The other can and is not permitted to. A drive policy reverses in a point release. This one is the roadmap.

If transcoding is the reason you are buying, the NAS transcoding guide sorts the current field by that spec alone.

Check the manufacturer’s spec sheet, not the retailer’s

Worth thirty seconds before you order. Newegg’s listing for this box carries the full product name “Synology 4-bay DiskStation DS925+ - 4GB DDR4 ECC SODIMM Intel Celeron J4125 Processor Diskless System,” and the same J4125 turns up again in its specification table. Synology says AMD Ryzen V1500B for the same model. The word “Ryzen” does not appear on the retailer page.

Buy on the Intel line in that listing and you are expecting a Quick Sync engine that the machine does not have. This is not a Synology-specific hazard, but it lands hardest here, because the Intel chip named in that row is exactly the one people buy these for.

The four boxes, as sold

Four-bay, diskless, opened on Newegg September 7:

Prices the same day: $889.99 for the DS925+, $656.99 for the UGREEN, $859.99 for the F4-424 Pro sold by TerraMaster’s own Newegg storefront. The TS-464 page carried offers from $379.99 to $742.21 depending on the seller, which is its own reason to read the seller name before the price.

Maker’s sheets for the specs: UGREEN’s for the OS features, TerraMaster’s for the F4-424 Pro, QNAP’s for the TS-464.

UGREEN sells the hardware Synology stopped selling

$656.99 against $889.99. For $233 less, the UGREEN has 10GbE where the Synology has 2.5GbE, DDR5 where the Synology has DDR4, headroom to 64GB where the Synology ships 4GB, and a Pentium Gold 8505 — a 2022 Intel part with UHD graphics and Quick Sync listed on Intel’s own page — where the Synology has an embedded chip with no video path at all.

That is the whole UGREEN pitch and every line of it is true. It is also the trap, because every line of it is a month-one comparison.

UGOS Pro is not finished

The app catalogue runs out fast. UGREEN’s own OS page leads with Docker (“Deploy containerized apps for media, automation, development, and self-hosted services”) and a virtual-machine app (“Run virtual machines on your NAS to test operating systems, host services, or build separate work environments without extra hardware”), and those two carry more weight on UGOS Pro than they do on DSM, because anything past the basics ends up in a container you assemble yourself.

If you were going to write compose files anyway, that is a feature and the price gap is free money. If you bought an appliance specifically so you would not have to, it is the thing you discover in month three and are still living with in month eight.

That is not a prediction about UGREEN’s future. Software ecosystems fill in. It is a statement about what you get if you order one this week.

TerraMaster: on sale, not at list

TOS sits in the same place as UGOS Pro and arrives less polished, with a smaller ecosystem around it. The HDMI port gets sold as a differentiator — TerraMaster’s spec sheet lists one HDMI 2.0b output — and what it gives you is a console. I have not found anything else to do with it.

At $859.99 the F4-424 Pro is $203 more than the UGREEN and spends the difference on a second 2.5GbE port instead of a 10GbE one. It does ship 32GB of DDR5, more than anything else on this page, in a single non-upgradable slot, which is a real advantage if you are running containers and a dead end if you later want more.

I would buy this on sale. I would not buy it at list.

QNAP: the interface was never the problem

QTS is fine. It has been fine for years, and QuTS hero gives you ZFS if you want it — the storage backend comparison covers what that buys you.

The exposure history is the problem. QNAP’s own DeadBolt advisory tells owners to “Disable the port forwarding function on the router” and to set up myQNAPcloud “to enable secure remote access and prevent exposure to the internet.” The company still runs a standing product-security advisory feed, which is the correct thing to do and also the thing you are signing up to follow.

I would not put a QNAP on the public internet. I would not put anything else there either — that half is not a QNAP rule. But this is the box where the history makes it impossible to wave off, and QNAP is wrong for you if you will not keep firmware current.

What nobody can tell you yet

UGREEN and TerraMaster are too new for me to tell you anything about multi-year reliability. Neither can anyone else. Synology and QNAP have a decade of field behaviour behind them; the other two do not have it yet, and no review published this year has it either.

That is not a mark against them. It is a thing you are accepting when you buy one, and it should be worth something to you in the price.

Buy the Synology unless you need hardware transcoding

Synology still makes the best NAS operating system, and I say that as someone who spent most of 2025 not recommending them. If the software is what you are still using at month eight, buy for the software.

Buy the DS925+ if hardware transcoding is not in your plans. You are paying $233 over the UGREEN for DSM and a decade of field history, and giving up the 10GbE port to get them. That is the trade, and it is worth making if the software is what you will be living in.

Buy the UGREEN DXP4800 Plus if you need Plex or Jellyfin to transcode, or if you have a 10GbE switch and something fast enough to feed it. You are getting more hardware for less money and accepting an app catalogue that will send you to Docker. Go in knowing that is the trade rather than finding it out in month three.

Prices move, and two of these pages carry marketplace sellers. Check the price and the seller before you order.

Wrong for

UGREEN and TerraMaster are wrong if you want a finished app ecosystem and no tinkering.

A 2025 Synology is wrong if you want hardware transcoding — no model in that line does it, driver or silicon — or if you were counting on a third-party NVMe cache, which is the one piece DSM 7.3 did not reopen.

QNAP is wrong if you will not keep firmware current.

All four are wrong if what you actually want is a machine you administer yourself. That is a different purchase with a different failure mode, and the storage backends are where it starts.