The UGREEN DXP6800 Ultra and DXP8800 Ultra boot TrueNAS and Unraid through the same BIOS path as the older DXP boxes, but none of the community drivers that make a third-party OS comfortable on UGREEN hardware list either Ultra model as tested yet. The fan driver, the front-panel LED controller and every published hands-on review stop at the DXP6800 Pro and DXP8800 Plus.
That matters because the Ultra costs $350 more than the DXP6800 Pro and $410 more than the DXP8800 Plus on Amazon, and the main hardware gains are a newer Raptor Lake U-series CPU and a 96GB memory ceiling in place of 64GB. This guide sorts what carries over to TrueNAS and Unraid, what is still unproven, and when the Ultra is the right box to buy for a ZFS or Unraid build. Prices were read from the Amazon product API on October 5, 2026, and specs come from the UGREEN spec tables and Intel ARK.
Verdict: which DXP to buy for TrueNAS or Unraid
For a third-party OS today, the DXP6800 Pro and DXP8800 Plus are the safer purchase. They share the Ultra layout (dual 10GbE, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, two M.2 slots, one PCIe x4 slot) and have more than two years of community fan and LED work behind them. The Ultra earns its premium only for a build that will genuinely use more than 64GB of RAM, which in the 2026 memory market is an expensive plan in its own right.
| Buyer | Buy | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| TrueNAS or Unraid, 6 bays, under 64GB RAM | DXP6800 Pro ($1,099.99) | Same layout, $350 cheaper, partial fan driver support already |
| TrueNAS or Unraid, 8 bays, under 64GB RAM | DXP8800 Plus ($1,369.99) | LED controller lists it as tested, fan driver lists the DXP8800 |
| ZFS with a large ARC or many VMs, 6 bays | DXP6800 Ultra ($1,449.99) | 96GB memory ceiling, Core 5 120U |
| ZFS with a large ARC or many VMs, 8 bays | DXP8800 Ultra ($1,779.99) | 96GB ceiling, Core 7 150U with 96 EU graphics |
| Staying on UGOS Pro | Any of the four | The third-party gaps below do not apply |
DXP Ultra vs Pro and Plus: what actually changed
UGREEN kept the chassis, the bay count and the port layout, and swapped the platform. Both Ultra CPUs are 10-core, 12-thread Raptor Lake U parts with 2 performance and 8 efficient cores, a 15 W base power and a 55 W turbo limit, according to the Intel ARK entry for the Core 5 120U and its Core 7 150U sibling. The older boxes use the 12th-gen Core i5-1235U with the same core split.
| Spec | DXP6800 Ultra | DXP6800 Pro | DXP8800 Ultra | DXP8800 Plus |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CPU | Core 5 120U | Core i5-1235U | Core 7 150U | Core i5-1235U |
| Max turbo | 5.0 GHz | 4.4 GHz | 5.4 GHz | 4.4 GHz |
| iGPU execution units | 80 | 80 | 96 | 80 |
| RAM shipped / max | 8GB DDR5 / 96GB | 8GB DDR5 / 64GB | 8GB DDR5 / 96GB | 8GB DDR5 / 64GB |
| SATA bays + M.2 | 6 + 2 | 6 + 2 | 8 + 2 | 8 + 2 |
| Network | 2x 10GbE | 2x 10GbE | 2x 10GbE | 2x 10GbE |
| Thunderbolt 4 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| PCIe slot | Gen4 x4 | x4, generation not stated | Gen4 x4 | x4, generation not stated |
| Fans | 2x 90mm | 2x 90mm (ITPro) | 2x 120mm | dual fans, size not stated |
| UGREEN power figure, drives active / hibernated | 43.07 W / 24.91 W | 43.07 W / 24.91 W | 70.39 W / 28.99 W | 70.39 W / 28.99 W |
| Amazon price, Oct 5 2026 | $1,449.99 | $1,099.99 | $1,779.99 | $1,369.99 |
The CPU change is small in practice. PassMark averages quoted by NASCompares put the Core 5 120U at 15,363 and the Core 7 150U at 14,766, so the 8-bay model is not faster on multithreaded work despite the higher turbo clock. The How-To Geek hands-on review of the DXP6800 Ultra scored it 8 out of 10 and called it only a marginal improvement over the DXP6800 Pro. That review ran UGOS Pro, not a third-party OS.
Neither CPU supports ECC memory, and Intel ARK lists that as a flat No for both. The ODECC entry on the UGREEN spec table refers to the on-die error correction inside every DDR5 chip, which does not report corrected errors to the operating system. A ZFS build that requires end-to-end ECC does not belong on any DXP model.
What carries over from the older DXP boxes
The install path for the DXP6800 Pro and DXP8800 Plus is well documented, and nothing in the Ultra spec suggests a different firmware layout. NASCompares documents the procedure for Unraid on UGREEN DXP models, and the same three BIOS steps apply to a TrueNAS install:
- Connect HDMI and a USB keyboard, power on, and press Ctrl+F12 repeatedly to enter the BIOS (some units respond to F12 or Delete instead).
- Disable the watchdog timer under Advanced (on the i5 models it sat on a separate tab). Left enabled, it reboots the box every few minutes because UGOS Pro never checks in.
- Set the USB installer first in the boot order. Optionally disable the internal SSD slot to keep UGOS Pro intact and out of the way.
UGREEN has stated that a third-party OS does not by itself change the hardware warranty, while it does not support software problems caused by that OS. Damage from disabled fans or overheating is a separate matter, which is the practical reason fan control is the first thing to sort out after the install.
The 10GbE, SATA and NVMe controllers on the older models work with stock TrueNAS and Unraid kernels, according to community reports collected by Need to Know IT. UGREEN does not name the Ultra network or SATA controller chips on its spec pages, so treat driver support on the Ultra as likely but unconfirmed until the first lspci dumps appear.
What is still unproven on the Ultra
Three pieces of the third-party experience depend on reverse-engineered, model-specific work, and none of them covers the Ultra yet:
- Fan control. The UGREEN DXP fan driver project patches the it87 Super I/O driver per model. It lists the DXP2800, DXP4800 and DXP8800 as supported, the DXP6800 Pro as partial, and has no entry for either Ultra. Without it, the fans follow the BIOS curve, which a TrueNAS fan-control project for the DXP4800 describes as following CPU temperature only, not drive temperature.
- Front-panel LEDs. The ugreen_leds_controller project drives the LEDs over I2C and lists the DXP6800 Pro and DXP8800 Plus as tested. The Ultra models are missing. Under a non-UGOS system, DXP front LEDs blink in a rolling sequence by default, so a failed-disk LED is not available.
- Independent third-party OS testing. Prospective buyers have opened Unraid forum threads asking whether Unraid runs on the DXP8800 Ultra, and no published review that could be found has run TrueNAS or Unraid on either Ultra yet.
None of this blocks a working NAS. Storage, networking and Docker apps do not depend on the LED or fan drivers. The gap is comfort and monitoring: louder or warmer than needed, and no per-bay status lights.
TrueNAS on the DXP Ultra: RAM, ARC and the boot drive
ZFS uses spare RAM as its ARC read cache, so the 96GB ceiling is the strongest technical reason to pick the Ultra for TrueNAS. The catch is the price of filling it. On October 5, 2026, a Crucial 32GB DDR5-5600 SO-DIMM kit (2 x 16GB) listed at $589.99, the Crucial 96GB kit was out of stock, and the cheapest in-stock 2 x 48GB SO-DIMM kit in an Amazon search was $1,614.99. Maxing the memory now costs more than the 6-bay DXP6800 Ultra itself, and close to the price of the 8-bay. For a pool of six or eight hard drives serving files and a few containers, 32GB is a sensible target, and the 64GB ceiling of the older boxes is not the limit.
The internal 128GB SSD can serve as the TrueNAS boot device. TrueNAS recommends an SSD boot device and advises against USB sticks, so installing onto the internal SSD keeps both M.2 slots free. That install erases UGOS Pro from the SSD. Those two slots then fit a mirrored apps pool, or a mirrored special vdev for metadata. A special vdev needs at least the redundancy of the data vdevs, because losing it makes the whole pool unreadable.
A six-bay RAIDZ2 pool keeps four drives of usable capacity and survives two failures. With 12TB WD Red Plus drives at $459.99 each, six drives cost $2,759.94 for about 48TB before ZFS overhead. The eight-bay model with RAIDZ2 keeps six drives of usable capacity. The TrueNAS vs Unraid lab test compares how each OS handles capacity, expansion and bit-rot repair on identical hardware.
Unraid on the DXP Ultra: the license tier trap
Unraid sells three perpetual licenses: Starter at $49 for up to 6 storage devices, Unleashed at $109 with no limit, and Lifetime at $249, which adds lifetime updates. Starter and Unleashed include one year of updates, then an optional $36 annual extension. The device count is where the DXP6800 Ultra catches buyers out.
The Unraid licensing FAQ counts all storage devices present before array start, except one eMMC device and one USB device. Six SATA drives plus the internal 128GB UGREEN SSD makes seven devices, which is over the Starter limit before any NVMe drive goes in. Booting Unraid from that SSD does not help, because the internal boot FAQ counts an internal boot drive toward the limit too. Either disable the internal SSD slot in the BIOS, remove the SSD, or budget for Unleashed.
| Configuration | Devices counted | Minimum license |
|---|---|---|
| DXP6800 Ultra, 6 HDDs, internal SSD disabled | 6 | Starter ($49) |
| DXP6800 Ultra, 6 HDDs, internal SSD left in | 7 | Unleashed ($109) |
| DXP6800 Ultra, 6 HDDs + 2 NVMe cache | 8 or 9 | Unleashed ($109) |
| DXP8800 Ultra, any full build | 8 or more | Unleashed ($109) |
The Unraid community has a fan control plugin and an LED plugin for supported UGREEN models, which is one more reason the DXP8800 Plus is the lower-friction Unraid box until those plugins add the Ultra.
Quick Sync for Plex and Jellyfin
Both Ultra CPUs hardware-encode and decode H.264 and HEVC through Quick Sync, and decode AV1 without encoding it. The Core 7 150U has 96 execution units against 80 on the Core 5 120U. Under TrueNAS, the Plex and Jellyfin apps have a setting that passes the Intel iGPU into the container. Under Unraid, the same works by mapping /dev/dri into the Docker container. For a household of transcoding clients, either Ultra or either older model has more than enough. The guide to the best NAS for Plex, Jellyfin and self-hosting covers how transcode capacity differs across NAS platforms.
The DXP Ultra models and their alternatives
UGREEN DXP6800 Ultra: six bays, 96GB ceiling
The 6-bay model at $1,449.99, the same price as on the UGREEN store. Buy it for TrueNAS with a memory plan beyond 64GB. For anything smaller, the DXP6800 Pro below runs the same OS on the same layout.
UGREEN DXP8800 Ultra: eight bays, Core 7 and bigger fans
The 8-bay model at $1,779.99 on Amazon and on the UGREEN store. Its two 120mm fans move more air over eight spinning drives than the 90mm pair in the 6-bay Ultra chassis. It is the Ultra to pick for an eight-wide RAIDZ2 pool with room for VMs.
Cheaper alternatives with community support
The UGREEN DXP6800 Pro at $1,099.99 and the UGREEN DXP8800 Plus at $1,369.99 are the boxes the TrueNAS and Unraid community has actually tested. The ZimaCube 2 vs UGREEN DXP6800 comparison collects the power, noise and 10GbE throughput figures that independent reviewers measured on the DXP6800 Pro. Buyers still deciding between a prebuilt and a self-built box can check the DIY TrueNAS and Unraid builds on a mini PC, which start far below either UGREEN.
For drives, the 16TB WD Red Pro at $699.50 and the 12TB WD Red Plus are both CMR. The NAS hard drive guide covers price per terabyte across the current lineup, and the UPS guide for a NAS covers clean shutdowns, which ZFS and the Unraid parity array both depend on.
First-hour checks after installing TrueNAS or Unraid
Before copying data onto an Ultra running a third-party OS, confirm the hardware the spec pages do not name. Start with the network and storage controllers:
lspci -nn | grep -iE 'ethernet|sata|non-volatile'Both 10GbE ports and the SATA controller should appear, plus one non-volatile memory line for the 128GB system SSD and one for each populated M.2 slot. Next, check whether the Super I/O chip exposes fan readings to the stock driver:
sudo modprobe it87 && sensorsNo fan RPM lines, or a modprobe error, means the stock it87 driver is not exposing the fans, and they stay on the BIOS curve. TrueNAS may not ship the sensors tool at all, in which case the fan driver project above is the route. Watch drive temperatures through the first full scrub or parity check, since that is the sustained load the BIOS curve was not tuned for:
sudo smartctl -A /dev/sda | grep -i temperatureDrives that settle above the high 40s Celsius during a scrub on a BIOS fan curve are the signal to set a higher fixed fan speed in the BIOS until a model-specific driver lands. Posting the lspci and sensors output to the fan driver issue tracker is also how the Ultra models get added to it.
