Synology vs. UGREEN vs. Mac Mini: The Boring Storage Decision I Can't Put Off Anymore

I have three SSDs. Two SanDisk Extreme Pro 2TB drives and a Samsung T7 Shield. Six terabytes combined, and all six are full.

That's not a healthy way to run a video business, but it's exactly how I've been running mine. Bought with my own money, all three, and I've been treating portable SSDs as long-term storage when that was never what they were built for. Between client work, my own YouTube footage, and the flood of raw photos and edited files that started the day I picked up the Canon R6 Mark II, I'm out of room and the SSD market picked a genuinely bad time to get more expensive.

So I spent an evening walking through three different ways out of this: a Synology NAS, an UGREEN NAS, and turning a Mac Mini into a DIY storage server. The video below is me thinking out loud through that decision, in real time, un-sponsored, still undecided by the end of it. This post is the part that comes after: the specs I went back and checked against the manufacturers directly, the redundancy math laid out properly, and one thing I said on camera that turned out to be slightly off once I looked closer.

Why portable SSDs stop working past a certain point

Quick context if you're earlier in your career than "three full drives": SSDs like the ones I use are fantastic for what they're designed for, which is shooting and editing on the go. Fast, small, durable enough to survive being tossed in a bag. What they're not designed for is being the only copy of years of client work and family footage sitting in a drawer.

I store the raw and edited version of basically everything, including family photos and video since my son was born, so the math adds up fast. 4K footage alone eats through 2TB drives quickly, and I genuinely don't know how people shooting 7K or 8K raw manage their storage at all.

The three options below are all trying to solve the same problem: get my active project files off of "the drives that are always almost full" and onto something built to hold data long-term, with actual protection against a single drive dying on me.

The three contenders, compared properly

Here's the spec comparison the video doesn't slow down for, checked against Synology's and UGREEN's own product pages rather than going from memory.

That last row is the one I think matters more than any spec sheet number, and I'll come back to it.

The thing I got wrong on camera: Synology and 10GbE

In the video, I said you'd need to step up to a 5-bay Synology unit to get a 10-gigabit port. That's not quite right, and it's worth correcting properly rather than letting it sit.

The DS925+ doesn't have a 10GbE option at all, on any bay count. Older Synology "Plus" models, like the DS923+, had a PCIe slot that let you add a 10GbE module after the fact. Synology removed that slot on the current 925+ generation entirely. Reviewers have flagged this as a real step backward, since it means the only native networking you get on this unit, period, is dual 2.5GbE. If you want genuine 10-gigabit speeds out of Synology's current lineup, you're looking at a different tier of hardware than the one I was pricing out, not just a bigger box in the same family.

That matters for my use case specifically, since the whole reason a 10-gigabit connection is appealing is being able to edit 4K files directly off the NAS without waiting on transfers. If that's your plan too, cross the current DS925+ off your list for that reason alone. The 2.5GbE it does have is still a real jump over a standard gigabit home network, just not the ceiling I was describing on camera.

A quick note on which UGREEN tier this actually is

Worth being precise here since UGREEN's naming across this line is easy to get tangled: the DXP4800 Pro sits above the DXP4800 Plus, with a newer Intel Core i3-1315U, 6-core processor (versus the Plus's 5-core Pentium Gold 8505) and a higher maximum RAM ceiling of 96GB instead of 64GB. That extra headroom matters if you're planning to run Docker containers, a few VMs, or Plex with multiple simultaneous transcodes on top of just holding footage. If a NAS is purely going to sit there as storage and occasionally serve files, the gap between Plus and Pro is smaller in real-world terms than the price difference suggests, so it's worth being honest with yourself about which workload you're actually buying for.

Networking is identical between the two tiers: both the Plus and the Pro ship with 1x 10GbE and 1x 2.5GbE built in, no add-in card required. That's the detail that makes UGREEN genuinely competitive against Synology on hardware, regardless of which tier you land on.

RAID is not a backup, and here's the math that proves it

I said this on camera and I want to actually walk through why, because "RAID is not a backup" is one of those lines that gets repeated without the reasoning behind it.

Parity RAID (RAID 5 or 6, or Synology's SHR), which is what both the Synology and UGREEN options would run: you lose the equivalent of one drive's capacity to store parity data, and any single drive can fail without losing anything. Three 12TB drives in RAID 5 gives you roughly 24TB usable, not 36TB. The math is: usable capacity = (number of drives − 1) × drive size.

Mirroring (RAID 1), which is the realistic setup for a two-bay Mac Mini DAS: you lose half your raw capacity, full stop. Two drives mirrored give you exactly one drive's worth of usable space. To land on 24TB usable this way, you need two 24TB drives, not two 12TB drives. That's why the Mac Mini path can quietly cost more in drives than it looks like at first glance, even though the compute itself might be cheaper or already sitting on your desk.

What neither setup protects against: accidental deletion, ransomware, fire, theft, or a controller failure that takes out every drive in the array at once. RAID protects you from a mechanical drive failure, which is a real and common thing to plan for, but it is not a substitute for a genuine backup copy that lives somewhere else entirely. If the footage matters, it needs to exist in at least two places that can't fail for the same reason at the same time.

Running the actual cost of each path

Prices below are USD, checked against current retailer listings rather than the video's rough mental math, and they'll run higher in the EU once VAT is added. Drive prices especially have been volatile lately, which lines up with exactly what prompted this whole video in the first place.

Target: roughly 24TB usable, redundant, of spinning storage.

That gap is bigger than the video's estimate suggested, mostly because mirroring's 2x capacity tax hits harder at 24TB than it does at smaller sizes, and because Mac-compatible DAS enclosures with genuinely fast interfaces (Thunderbolt) aren't cheap once you actually price them instead of assuming "I already have the computer."

The Mac Mini route does have a real advantage the table doesn't capture: if remote access to the whole Apple ecosystem, and staying out of a third-party NAS vendor's software entirely, matters more to you than upfront cost, that's a legitimate reason to pay the premium. It's just not the "using hardware I already have" bargain it looks like on paper once you add a compatible enclosure and drives sized for mirroring instead of parity.

Where this fits into my kit

This whole storage question exists because of what's already feeding it: raw files off the Canon R6 Mark II, 4K footage from the DJI Osmo Nano I've been carrying on three separate trips now, and proxy recordings off the Hollyland Pyro 5 monitor on client shoots. None of that gear is the bottleneck. The bottleneck is what happens after the card comes out of the camera, which is exactly the unglamorous part nobody makes a gear review about.

Where I've landed, honestly

I haven't bought anything yet. Between the two NAS options, UGREEN's built-in 10GbE and newer, faster hardware for a similar price is genuinely tempting, and I lean toward believing the "underdog fights harder" theory in my gut. But Synology's DSM software has two decades of being battle-tested behind it, and that's not nothing when the entire point of this purchase is not losing footage. The Mac Mini path is the most flexible and the most expensive once you price it out properly, and it asks you to build and test your own redundancy rather than getting it out of the box.

If you've run either the Synology or UGREEN ecosystem, or you're deep into the Mac Mini as NAS approach and know something the spec sheets don't show, I'd genuinely like to hear it in the comments of my video before I spend this money. And if you want to see which one I actually end up with, that'll be its own video once I set it up. Subscribe if you don't want to miss it.

What's actually holding your storage together right now: a NAS, a pile of drives, or a system you're slightly afraid to look at too closely?