UGREEN HomeAgent HA100 Review: Smarter Cameras and Flexible Home Storage

UGREEN's home server makes camera footage more useful and brings photos, recordings and a media library together. Our follow-up testing shows why the idea is appealing, with some early software issues still to resolve.

The most useful thing the UGREEN HomeAgent HA100 did in our testing was also one of the easiest to appreciate. A camera event appeared in the app within about a second or two, with more context than a simple motion flag: a package, clothing colors or a rough description of something a person was carrying. For a product built around the idea of local AI at home, that is a good place to start. It helps explain what happened without first having to watch every clip.

Since our October first look, we have spent more time with the HA100's factory surveillance, photo, media and management applications. The combination is starting to make sense as a household appliance. Camera recording and playback worked, photo uploads were straightforward, and Theater gave us a practical way to watch demanding video files at a more suitable playback quality. The software still has rough edges, but the useful parts are tangible rather than just promised features on a launch slide.

Our setup and the outdoor installation question

We tested the HA100 with UGREEN's SynCare Indoor Cam ID500 Pro and SynCare PoE Cam OD600 Pro. The indoor camera watched a corridor; the outdoor camera was temporarily placed at a window. Getting a wired camera into its intended outdoor position has been a separate project. At our US home, routing the cable neatly means arranging an installer, and we have not yet been able to get that work scheduled. The window position let us continue testing while we waited. We see that as a practical installation consideration, not a major criticism of the camera. Clearer cable-routing advice and help finding installers would make it easier for households like ours to get started in the US.

That distinction matters. These are useful observations of the OD600 Pro's live feed and recording behavior, not a completed outdoor installation or a test of weather resistance. A window also introduces glass and reflections that a properly mounted outdoor camera would not have in front of its lens. We would want a permanent installation before judging its full outdoor performance.

The two 500GB mechanical drives were simply the disks we had available. They were enough to get the system running and investigate its features, but are smaller than we would choose for a new, long-term installation. Surveillance recordings occupied one of those drives. Camera access checks were made with the phone on home Wi-Fi, and media playback used an iPhone 17 Pro Max. Timings are approximate observations rather than laboratory benchmarks. We also tried basic voice conversations. More demanding language-model tasks, smart-home integrations and operation without an internet connection remain outside this round of testing.

Recording and tracking provide a useful foundation

From tapping a camera to seeing a usable live picture, the indoor feed took roughly five seconds and the outdoor feed about ten. There is room to shorten that wait, especially if you are checking something happening right now. Once the feeds opened, however, we did not encounter obvious stuttering, black screens or connection failures in these checks. Recorded clips could also be played back normally.

The person-following function was responsive, turning the camera promptly as the subject moved. That is a practical benefit in a corridor or room where a person may quickly leave a fixed camera's view. Together with working recording and playback, it gives the HA100 a useful surveillance foundation before considering the more ambitious AI features.

Storage capacity is where our deliberately modest test setup needs context. The 500GB surveillance disk filled in about 20 days, which works out to roughly 25GB per day. At the same recording rate, an 8TB surveillance drive would scale to around 320 days, or ten and a half months. That is a much more comfortable retention window and a better illustration of how we would provision the system for regular use.

This is a capacity estimate, not a retention test with an 8TB disk. Usable space, camera count, resolution, bitrate, recording mode and activity can all change the result. The separate storage and surveillance disks also should not be added together as though they formed one recording volume. Our short retention period reflects the small disk we happened to use, rather than a reason to dismiss local recording.

AI that makes the timeline easier to understand

The event timeline was the strongest demonstration of what the HA100 adds to ordinary camera storage. In the examples we tried, it could identify a package, recognize clothing colors, distinguish broad clothing types such as a skirt or trousers, and make a rough identification of objects being carried. Cough detection also worked convincingly in our checks. These details make a list of recordings more informative and give you a better idea of which clip is worth opening.

New event entries appeared in the app about one to two seconds after the activity occurred. That is separate from the five-to-ten-second wait to open a live picture, and it is not a measured push-notification delivery time. We did not test keyword or natural-language retrieval in this round, so the value we can directly describe is the richer event information itself.

Familiar-face matching needs more refinement. Face recognition management is available inside Surveillance Center through the three-dot menu and Settings. It took some exploration to find, but it does let you register a familiar face. Clear frontal captures were the easiest to select in our footage; less favorable angles and lower-quality captures tended to remain labeled as new faces. Even after registration, a subsequent test with the same person still produced “New Face.”

The distinction is worth keeping: the system can notice and describe useful activity even when it is less dependable at assigning a person's identity. Reflections in a glass door also produced incorrect detections. We would use the descriptions to help navigate footage and check the image when a label looks questionable, rather than treating every AI interpretation as a definitive account of the scene.

Why the AI accelerator matters

The dedicated AI accelerator is an important part of what makes the HA100 interesting beyond storage. UGREEN specifies 20 TOPS for the accelerator alongside a 6 TOPS built-in NPU, for an advertised total of 26 TOPS. Compared with a storage-focused NAS without dedicated AI hardware, this gives the system additional processing resources for running AI locally. Combined with its camera software and smart-home controls, the appeal is having storage and local intelligence in one appliance, rather than assembling those pieces separately. UGREEN currently advertises a built-in 4B-parameter model, although the compute rating alone does not tell us how well every AI task will perform.

The quick camera-event responses we saw made that local-AI approach useful in practice. We have not isolated the accelerator's contribution with a controlled comparison, so the responsiveness is best understood as a result of the hardware and software working together. Nor should its AI rating be confused with a video-transcoding benchmark. We also tested the voice assistant through simple conversations. That was an introductory check; more demanding language-model tasks are something we want to explore before drawing broader conclusions about its capabilities.

Photos and fast on-the-fly video conversion

The HA100 becomes more interesting when the storage is doing more than holding surveillance clips. Photo uploads felt quick in our checks and did not present an obvious problem. For a household that wants its own photo and video storage alongside cameras, having those functions in the same system is an appealing proposition.

Playback depends on the application and the file. In Photos, the 1080p-and-lower videos we tried played directly. Our tested 4K material opened through an additional player and sometimes buffered over Wi-Fi. Theater was the more revealing test: its on-the-fly quality conversion made high-resolution files much easier to watch.

Theater builds a library around files already stored on the HA100. Its media-folder setting tells it where to look, while TMDB supplies information such as posters and descriptions; creating a library does not supply the films themselves. We used Personal folder/Movie and completed an import by sending files from the Mac to the iPhone through AirDrop, then importing through the mobile app. That worked, although we would prefer a direct computer workflow for a large collection.

With an 8K 24fps palm-tree clip on the iPhone 17 Pro Max, switching from Original to 4K quickly produced smooth playback; 1080p was available as well. The conversion happened on demand, without a separate export or advance preparation. An 8K 60fps mountain clip also played smoothly with the 4K option, and 1080p felt smoother still. For the palm-tree clip, the menu labeled its alternatives 4K at 6.15Mbps and 1080p at 5.15Mbps. Those are the displayed quality settings, not measured network throughput.

Original-quality 8K playback stuttered in these tests, but the mountain file also failed to play properly when stored locally on the phone. That limits what we can conclude about the source of the bottleneck. The more useful finding was how promptly Theater adapted the 8K sources to a watchable output. For a household media library, this is a meaningful strength: you can keep the high-resolution original and choose a more practical stream when watching. We did not measure conversion latency or simultaneous-stream capacity, so these results are not a universal 8K transcoding benchmark.

Computer access is available through SMB

Most management in this review happened in the phone app. Opening the HA100's address in a desktop browser returned “Web access is currently not supported,” so there was no working browser desktop on our unit during the tests. That initially made transferring large files seem less straightforward than it needed to be.

SMB provides another route. In the app, File sharing contains the SMB service switch, Windows and Mac connection addresses, and a View local account link. After enabling it and using the device's local account, we successfully signed in from the Mac. The local credentials are distinct from simply using the account for UGREEN's cloud services.

The instructions are useful once you find them. Making that path easier to discover would help new owners, particularly those arriving with a desktop NAS workflow in mind. Our test confirmed SMB sign-in, not a completed file-copy benchmark or an end-to-end computer-to-Theater import. FTP/FTPS, WebDAV and rsync also appeared in the sharing settings, but we did not test those protocols.

SSH and root access leave room to experiment

The HA100 also provides SSH and root access, a meaningful advantage for owners who want more control than a closed appliance normally offers. Alongside its ready-made camera and media applications, that access leaves room to explore additional software and ways to use the hardware. It is one of the reasons we are interested in continuing to work with this machine.

We plan to investigate more of those possibilities as our needs develop. That is a future project, not a claim that every application or operating-system change will work: software compatibility, available resources and the consequences of changes still need to be checked. For now, the useful distinction is that the system offers administrative access rather than limiting owners entirely to its factory interface.

A clear dashboard and a few early software fixes

Task manager is one of the better parts of the app. CPU utilization and temperature, memory use, fan readings, network activity and drive activity are presented together in a clear view. It makes a fairly ambitious home server easier to understand without opening a terminal. That visibility is useful when recording, media and other applications share one machine.

Our unit did experience one unexpected restart after an apparent memory-related problem. Testing continued afterward, but we have not established the cause. This unit had previously been used for separate software experiments, so the incident does not isolate a fault in the factory applications. It is an observation we will keep tracking, rather than enough evidence to diagnose a general reliability problem or claim that long-term stability has been proved.

A reproducible interface issue appeared in the playback calendar. November 2024 showed November 3 twice, November 2025 repeated November 2, and November 2026 repeated November 1. The duplicate shifted the following dates across the weekday columns; November 10, 2026 appeared under Wednesday although it was a Tuesday. October and December looked normal in our checks.

The repeated dates match the first Sunday in November, when US regions observing daylight saving time turn their clocks back. That makes a daylight-saving or time-zone calculation issue a plausible explanation, not a confirmed diagnosis. The screenshots establish a calendar-display error; they do not establish missing recordings or incorrect stored timestamps. For us, this is a small localization detail to refine, not a major drawback. Alongside practical installation guidance, better handling of US calendar and time-zone conventions would help the system feel more at home in this market.

Availability and our verdict

The HA100 remains a preorder-stage product, not an in-stock retail purchase. As checked on November 10, 2026, UGREEN's US campaign page lists reservations through April 12, 2027, Kickstarter opening on April 13, and HA100 shipments expected to begin in late June 2027. It advertises a $799 Super Early Bird price and a $50 reservation, with the final purchase completed through the campaign. Cameras are optional add-ons.

Check the final package contents, required storage drives and optional accessories before pledging, and confirm any promotional gift eligibility directly with UGREEN. The reservation deposit can be refunded on request before the Kickstarter campaign ends, but the crowdfunding reward is subject to a separate return policy that does not provide unconditional change-of-mind returns, except where applicable law requires otherwise. Older dates and promotional deadlines remain elsewhere in UGREEN's material, so buyers should reconfirm the current schedule, bundle and terms before paying. Expected shipment dates are not guaranteed delivery dates.

Our follow-up leaves us more positive about the HA100's practical role than a specification sheet alone would. Fast event entries, useful descriptions, responsive tracking and local recording give its camera functions a clear purpose. Photos and Theater add everyday uses for the storage, while the monitoring dashboard helps make the system approachable. With a suitably sized surveillance drive, the capacity could also be far more useful than our two spare 500GB disks suggest.

It is still early software. Face matching and some navigation need refinement, while longer-term testing will help establish reliability. The calendar and outdoor setup points feel like manageable localization details, and we hope UGREEN keeps adapting the experience for US households. For buyers interested in combining cameras, family media and local storage, though, the HA100 is worth watching as it moves toward shipment. The appeal is now supported by things we have actually used, and the remaining questions are specific enough to revisit in a later update.

Review hardware was supplied by UGREEN. Hardware photographs are reused from HyperDeep.ai's first-look coverage; app screenshots document this follow-up testing.

11/10/2026

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