UniFi UNAS Pro Review – A New Challenger Has Entered The Ring!
UPDATE – The UniFi UNAS Pro NAS is now available and can be found HERE
Clicks fingers and just like that, UniFi entered the network-attached storage space. After persistent rumors circling around network and server forums for the last couple of years, UniFi finally launched its UniFi UNAS Pro rackmount server system. Heavily influenced by the design and architecture of their existing UNVR system, this is the first entry in what is hoped to be a gradually expanded portfolio of network-attached storage devices for existing UniFi ecosystem users. It has to be said, though, that UniFi is not entering a particularly empty industry space right now—with numerous well-established players in both the desktop and rackmount NAS market having been in the space for over 20 years. Names such as Synology and QNAP have, for a long time, occupied numerous ever-growing UniFi-controlled networks. Also, Ubiquiti has not exactly put its foot on the accelerator in releasing a NAS system into their UniFi portfolio, and some might wonder if it is too little, too late. So today, we want to review the hardware and software of the UniFi UNAS Professional Rackmount system, but also discuss why this system had to happen at all.
Why is a UniFi NAS a big deal?
It’s a good question. When it comes to turnkey, ready-to-deploy NAS systems for enthusiasts and businesses, there are already some very well-experienced and established providers in the market. Why is it that Ubiquiti and UniFi think they can bring something new into this already well-fleshed-out solutions game? That single ecosystem advantage. That is pretty much what UniFi is all about. UniFi, as the name suggests, is about the unification of all of the devices in your network, all being managed, controlled, and securely gated by the UniFi network controller. The terminology has changed a few times in recent years, but the end result is the same—having your network equipment, wireless connectivity, surveillance systems, and security all managed within a single one-party ecosystem. With NAS products and private servers growing ever more popular, many long-established UniFi users have had to inject a third-party NAS solution from the likes of Synology or QNAP into this clean ecosystem. This means bringing parallel software UIs and UXs into the equation, as well as increasing the attack surface and vectors that managing multiple security updates across the board can introduce.
Equally, UniFi has an exceptionally well-established history for its network and internet security services, combined with an increasing number of their solutions arriving with storage services in place already. Systems like the UNVR series and the UniFi Dream Machine systems all arrive with SATA storage capabilities included, and some more hands-on users have gone ahead and soft-modded UniFi Protect surveillance systems into having a modicum of NAS ability. It doesn’t take much searching online to see that there has been a demand for a first-party network-attached storage solution by UniFi users for an exceptionally long time. Although they have clearly taken their time on it, is this the NAS system that users have been waiting for?
UniFi UNAS Pro Review – Quick Conclusion
I keep coming back to two words for the UniFi UNAS Pro—fundamentals and consistency. UniFi has clearly focused on making this system a strong addition to their ecosystem, prioritizing the essential storage needs of a NAS. They’ve succeeded in this, but comparisons with long-established competitors are inevitable. While solid, reliable, and stable, the UniFi UNAS Pro will take time to be competitive on the software front. If you’re deeply invested in the UniFi ecosystem, you’ll appreciate its ease of use and integration. However, outside of a UniFi network, it may feel feature-light compared to alternatives. The pricing is competitive for a launch product at $499, and while it’s not the best NAS on the market, it’s the most user-friendly and UniFi-ready. It will likely satisfy many users’ needs. I can certainly see this being integrated into existing UniFi networks as a 2nd stage backup alongside their already existing 3rd party NAS solution, with the potential to graduating to their primary storage as Ubiquiti continue to evolve this platform above and beyond the fundamentals their have nailed down in the UNAS Pro system.
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UniFi UNAS Pro Review – Price and Value vs Synology/QNAP
Despite the UNiFi UNAS Pro (and arguably ANY NAS solution) being purchased in order to solve a data storage problem (backups, access, sharing, etc), there is also the important matter of COST! This is UniFi’s first every NAS solution and, as mentioned already, they are entering a pretty busy market place right now in terms of available solutions to both home and business users. Plus, UniFi need to fund previous and future development into the private server market if they hope to continue to expand, so nailing down a good price is going to be paramount. I can confidently say that they have absolutely NAILED IT positively with the $499 introduction price of the UNAS Pro system.
On the face of it, just under $500 is not a small sum of money. However, we are talking about a license-free turnkey private cloud solution that supports up to seven SATA storage drives, 10GbE network connectivity, a quad-core ARM processor under the bonnet with 8GB of memory. Just to put that into perspective, the 4x HDD Synology DS923+ NAS is a $599, arrives with a dual-core (x86 though!) CPU, 8GB memory (ECC Though!) and 2x 1GbE. Synology has ALOT of solutions that range from as little as $100 (DS120j), but the nearest solution to the UniFI UNAS Pro in terms of hardware in the Synology portfolio is the smaller and less hardware-rich RS422+ at $699 or the more scalable 8-Bay 1GbE RS822+ at $999. Looking at price and cost ALONE is very simplistic of course (and I will go into way, way more detail about value and hardware features in this review later), but UniFi’s $499 price tag is certainly a very compelling entry price.
Likewise, when looking at the other big name in NAS, QNAP, you can get the TS-464 4-Bay desktop NAS for $550-599 (which is more hardware capable than the previously mentioned Synology DS923+) but is still around half the storage, half the memory and half the network bandwidth than the UniFi UNAS Pro. If you want to close the gap in terms of hardware on a QNAP system that is comparable to the UniFi UNAS Pro, you would be looking at the $900-1000 TS-832PXU rackmount.
Of course, the big elephant in the room when comparing the UniFi UNAS Pro with solutions from Synology and QNAP is that those two brand have well over 2 decades of history, experience and development in the NAS market! UniFi (and by extension Ubiquiti of course) have many, many years in the network biz – but only a comparatively short amount of time in the NAS market. That is why, in 2024/2025, we are looking at 1x UniFi NAS solution vs Synology/QNAP’s 50-100 active solutions in the market that cover a massive variety of desktop, rackmount, media, surveillance, power-user and data center class systems! The UNAS Pro arrives at a fantastic price point, but it would be foolish to overlook that right now Synology and QNAP have such a huge variety of solutions that allow the end user to scale their budget towards their ideal hardware requirements.
UniFi UNAS Pro Review – Design
So straight out of the gate, we need to discuss something that has already ruffled a few feathers online, and that is that the UniFi NAS system that Ubiquiti has launched has arrived in a rackmount chassis. Early leaked images and documents over the past two years did indeed highlight that a rackmount NAS server was being worked on by the brand; however, there were also whisperings of a desktop model too—a white tower-shaped model. It would appear that this is not a solution that is arriving anytime soon, or indeed at all! From any other brand, this might have been something of a crushing blow, but given that Ubiquiti’s portfolio is made up of rackmount devices by quite a lion’s share, this isn’t the end of the world. I do, however, hope that this release spurs UniFi to engage with a desktop NAS model in the near future.
The UniFi Professional Rackmount NAS arrives in a near-identical chassis to that of the UNVR system. There are definitely going to be users who think that UniFi has perhaps cut corners on this, but there is also the counterargument that there isn’t actually much more you can do beyond what they have already done with rackmount server design, and “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” may well apply here. It is a very sleek, half-depth rackmount enclosure, and even if it’s near identical to the UNVR, I am okay with that from a design point of view. The casing measures 442 x 325 x 87mm and weighs in at 9.2 kg with drives or mounting brackets.
That said, I’m still kind of confused by the fact that the system features seven storage bays. This is still a decent amount of storage and provides comfortable support for single and dual disk redundancy in RAID configurations (Effectively RAID 1/5 and a RAID 10 dual stack config – with RAID 6 promised soon), but it’s still just a really odd number. All that said, I’ve always been a tremendous fan of half-depth rackmount NAS chassis, as alongside the continuing popularity of smaller deployable rack cabinets, and UniFi’s own genuinely fantastic 6U mobile rack that I personally use almost every day, these systems tend to be low noise and low impact—something which in modern 24/7 private server use is always appealing!
Drive installation is incredibly straightforward using click-and-load drives for 3.5″ storage media. Additionally, although UniFi provides its own range of first-party drives (using the Toshiba MG series media), there are no aggressive limitations with regard to third-party storage media on this NAS, and I was comfortably able to use storage media from multiple brands, as well as testing drives all the way up to 24TB (the Seagate IronWolf Pro 24TB drives to be precise).
This 24TB HDD was immediately recognized by the system and it was absorbed into the NAS system storage pool (or used as a hot spare if preferred):
Additionally, the system does not need to be fully populated on day one, which is fairly standard for modern NAS solutions, and the storage wizard for creating your initial area of storage is tremendously straightforward, very easy to expand, and provides 1/2 disk fail options, as well as hot spare support. You will not need to muck around creating volumes, and newly injected drives will be automatically built into the existing storage pool.
That said, there did not seem to be much facility to create multiple storage pools. I can appreciate that UniFi wants to keep this system as user-friendly as possible, and therefore not playing around with concepts such as storage pools, block sizes, and volume makes a lot of sense in this context. Nevertheless, I do think there will be some users who will be a little disappointed that they cannot create secondary pools within a single UniFi NAS system here. Equally, I did not observe any support of mixed drive RAID pools such as those found in Synology Hybrid RAID or Terramasters TRAID. I appreciate that the need from a single system having multiple storage pools might sound a bit niche, but it’s surprisingly common for a modern NAS user to have a system populated with 1 pool made up of slower but larger HDDs and another made up of faster but smaller capacity SSDs – this allows for a Hot/Cold storage dynamic (with recent NVMe SSD integration into the world of NAS allowing for Hot-Warm-Cold setups).
Another staple of UniFi systems that has been implemented into their own NAS system is the highly functional and useful LCD screen that is featured on the majority of UniFi devices. LCD controls on NAS devices are hardly a new thing, but it has to be said, the way that UniFi approaches this is genuinely a breath of fresh air and arguably is at its peak when used on a NAS system.
Useful and intuitive on-system controls have always been something of an issue with NAS systems, even more so on a rackmount. Obviously, the majority of the management and control of any system of this architecture is going to be conducted remotely over the internet or on the LAN, but in the event of an alert, fans going bananas, troubleshooting, and more, an intuitive and usable local access control that doesn’t require hardware KVM is going to be hugely useful. It’s not even just that it is bright, clear, and intuitive (which it is), but more that you genuinely can control so much of the system via this small panel with a touch screen than some systems give you in their entire web GUI (I’m looking at you, WD, and your early WD My Cloud systems!). You can use this interface to identify IPs, check system resource utilization, get an understanding of your storage performance and benchmarks, manage system fans, assess active connected users, and gain analytics on the behavior of your NAS. Bloody brilliant! I think it would be fair to say that I have visited more than a handful of server rooms in the last year alone where an alert was going off. And not only are you not able to disable audio alerts without access to the GUI, but you don’t even know what the nature of the alert is—something as simple as a 10° temp increase might be okay, but what if that audio alert represents two drives failing in a RAID 10/6 environment? That is something you want to act upon quickly, and an indistinguishable alert tone does not help! Many times I have heard a loud alert while desperately speaking to on-site teams to verify two-factor authentication, desperately wishing I had a means of local system control. Lastly, for those concerned that a local control panel like this poses a security issue, it can be completely disabled if need be within the UniFi NAS control panel.
Talking of system management, it is also worth highlighting that you do not strictly need to create a ui.com account or have an internet connection to set up and use the UniFi UNAS Pro server. Both during the initialization and during further setup and usage of this device, you are not strictly required to use a ui.com account or have an internet connection. It kind of seems mad to me in 2024 that some systems still arrive with this limitation, so it is a huge relief that UniFi has not pursued this particular means of limiting gateway access for their device.
Another thing worth touching on is that although Ubiquiti has a vested interest in most users adopting the UniFi network platform to make the most of their devices, you do not need to have an established network controller environment or UniFi peripherals in order to use the UniFi UNAS Pro. The system can be utilized on its own if you wish, as well as allowing for adoption within an existing UniFi network if need be.
That said, one thing I do find ever so slightly perplexing is the ports and connections on the UniFi UNAS Pro. On the positive side, the system adopts the existing front-mounted port you would find in the majority of UniFi network devices for recommended deployment, unlike other NAS devices that tend to place storage at the front and ports at the back. That meant his device will sit and connect very well with an existing UniFi rack deployment, but will look a little messy in a shared server cabinet with 3rd party servers.
Additionally, the system arrives with a front-mounted 10GbE port in fiber (SFP+) and an additional port that is copper-based. However, that secondary port is just 1GbE, and although aspirations towards 10GbE and multiple ports would be limited on a 7-bay NAS system, I am a little disappointed by this. Realistically, for your outside connection coming into the NAS, with the 10GbE port clearly being designed to feed this network, full network saturation beyond 10GbE isn’t really going to be a thing unless you go out of your way to install SATA SSDs, and even then you would struggle to fully saturate a twin 10GbE network. Nevertheless, for a brand with an extensive legacy and pedigree in network equipment, I’m kind of surprised that the system rolls out the gate with a single usable 10GbE port and that 1GbE port that is largely reserved for outside connections coming in.
Additionally, there really aren’t any other ports here on this system. There are no ports in place for expanding storage via local expansion (perhaps over SAS, eSATA, or USB), no place for a PCIe upgrade card to scale up your network connectivity down the road, and not even basic USB connectivity to be utilized for additional storage. I can appreciate that the absence of USB and other localized ports may well be related to security, with USB connectivity being pretty thin on the ground across the bulk of their systems. Nevertheless, there have been several proven examples in the past of why a NAS system could utilize a locally injected mass storage device input, and although I’m sure the merits of limiting this kind of input in terms of security are merited, I do think that this is something that is weirdly missing here. There is the means for the input of the UniFi power support device, but that’s really it in terms of additional input.
Many of these design criticisms could arguably be dismissed under the umbrella that this is a business-led device that is meant to be utilized at its best within an existing UniFi network—and there’s probably a decent amount of argument for that! Additionally, it is genuinely a very well-designed rackmount NAS, and temperature levels were remarkably good. Still, aside from their own in-house design, UniFi is not exactly reinventing the wheel in terms of rackmount server design. Let’s talk a little bit about the inside of this system.
UniFi UNAS Pro Review – Internal Hardware
Opening up the external casing by removing eight surrounding screws, we find inside a surprisingly intricate multi-PCB internal layout. As the drive bays are in a slightly unique configuration, and this is a half-depth rackmount, the internal system uses a uniquely shingled, overlapping internal architecture.
| Specification | Details |
|---|---|
| Brand | UniFi (from Ubiquiti) |
| Model | UniFi UNAS Professional Rackmount NAS |
| Dimensions | 442.4 x 325 x 43.7 mm (17.4 x 12.8 x 1.7 inches) |
| Weight | Without Rackmount Brackets: 5.11 kg (11.27 lb) |
| With Rackmount Brackets: 5.20 kg (11.46 lb) | |
| Enclosure Characteristics | SGCC Steel |
| Processor | Quad-Core ARM Cortex-A57 at 1.7 GHz |
| System Memory | 8GB DDR4 |
| On-Board Flash Storage | SPI NOR 32 MB, USB Flash 8 GB |
| Power Supply | 200W Lipet Internal |
| Max. Power Consumption | 160W |
| Max. Power Budget for Drives | 135W |
| Power Method | (1) Universal AC Input |
| (1) RPS DC Input | |
| Power Supply | 100-240VAC, 50/60 Hz, 2A |
| Networking Interfaces | (1) 10/100/1000 Mbps RJ45 Ethernet |
| (1) 1/10 Gbps SFP+ Ethernet | |
| Management Interface | Ethernet In-Band Management |
| ESD/EMP Protection | Air: ±12kV, Contact: ±8kV |
| Operating Temperature | -5 to 40° C (23 to 104° F) |
| Operating Humidity | 5 – 95% Non-condensing |
| LED Indicators | System: (1) Power, Blue/White |
| Flashing White: Bootup in Progress | |
| Flashing Blue: Firmware Upgrading | |
| Steady White: Factory Defaults, Awaiting Adoption | |
| Steady Blue: Device is Adopted | |
| Ethernet: Green: 1000 Mbps, Amber: 10/100 Mbps | |
| SFP+: White: 10 Gbps, Green: 1 Gbps | |
| HDD: Amber: Disk Error, White: Disk Detected | |
| Storage Bays | 7 x 3.5-inch SATA HDD bays (supports hot-swapping, 1-2 disk redundancy in RAID configurations) |
| Drive Installation | Tool-less, click-and-load for 3.5-inch drives; supports up to 24TB drives (tested with Seagate IronWolf Pro 24TB) |
| Storage Expansion | No expansion ports available (e.g., SAS, eSATA, USB) |
| Cache SSD Support | Not supported |
| PCIe Expansion | Not supported |
| LCD Display | Front-mounted, provides system status, IP address, resource utilization, storage performance, and more |
| Power Supply Unit (PSU) | Custom-built 200W PSU |
| Noise Levels | Low noise, especially compared to similar systems |
| Operating System | UniFi NAS OS (compatible with UniFi Network ecosystem, setup via LAN or Bluetooth, no UI.com account required) |
| Snapshots | Supported (with immutability option) |
| Backup Options | Supports local and remote backups via SMB/CIFS; cloud backup supported (Google Drive at launch) |
| Mobile Setup | Supported, with Bluetooth setup and dynamic tips |
| Security Features | File sharing with detailed permissions, UniFi Identity client tools for access verification per device |
The CPU of the system is a power-efficient yet arguably modest ARM-based processor. This is going to please some users and disappoint others, as although ARM CPUs are phenomenally low in power consumption when left on for days, weeks, months, and years at a time, it has to be said that the scope of their abilities is noticeably reduced when compared to x86 processors from the likes of Intel and AMD. This is still a 64-bit architecture ARM processor, but that still means that the amount of horsepower this processor can throw at the average process is going to be noticeably less.
Likewise, ARM processors are designed to take instructions in a far more compressed fashion than traditional x86 processors, which are so popular with more mobile and battery-focused devices as they tend to use less power per CPU transaction. The CPU inside appears to be a Quad-Core ARM Cortex-A57, with 1.7 GHz clock speed per core, with the OS running on a 32 GB onboard flash eMMC/DOM.
Now that isn’t necessarily going to mean that this system is going to be in any way subpar—far from it. In fact, I will say right now that after years of reviewing and evaluating ARM systems, the UniFi UNAS Pro does an incredible job of keeping the system responsive and fluid while running on a CPU that most other NAS brands can’t run half as well on. Even during my more extensive 10GbE SMB testing of the system while simultaneously running snapshots and backups, the system CPU never really got above around 75% usage. The rest of the time, the CPU tended to always be around 10 to 15% utilization for most average processes. Of course, there is also a counterargument to be made that the range of services that the UniFi NAS offers is also a little debatable, but I’ll come around to that later on in the review.
Alongside the pre-attached ARM CPU, the system also arrives with 8GB of DDR4 presoldered memory internally. This is fairly standard when it comes to ARM-powered NAS systems. Although, as mentioned earlier, the CPU utilization by the system was pretty reasonable at all times, memory utilization by the device was much higher, and whether the system was reserving onboard memory to ensure further smooth running or just that the system is memory hungry, RAM utilization was always around 30 to 50% at all times. It would be very easy to criticize this NAS for not allowing the ability to increase the base level memory, perhaps via a SODIMM module or similar. However, given the rather modest CPU inside, more often than not, presoldered memory is the done thing with these CPUs to further increase power efficiency and onboard data efficiency.
The system is connected via its own independent PCB with the onboard SFP transceiver injector mounted next to the traditional Ethernet copper port. Not too much to say here—this 10GbE port certainly did the job, and full network saturation, although tough with just using SATA hard drives, was still very possible with the right tweaks, and I did not observe any limitations here in terms of that NIC board.
Likewise, the dynamic LCD panel is mounted on its own individual board. I have not had an opportunity to open up a UniFi UNVR surveillance system prior to reviewing the UniFi UNAS Pro, but I suspect the internal hardware architecture I’m seeing here will be largely identical to the already available UniFi Protect class system.
I feel like I’m heavily criticizing this CPU too much, but it has to be said that this CPU does have a tendency to lower the hardware capabilities and expandability of the rest of the system to the system’s detriment—more precisely in direct comparison to other alternative NAS devices in the market. One feature that is absent here that has become a growing trend in modern NAS rackmount and desktop systems is PCIe upgradability or M.2 SSDs.
This system does not feature either of these, and although the system OS runs from its own small internal drive, the lack of ability to include a cacheable SSD drive, fast access internal storage pool, or the option to increase network connectivity via PCIe has always been the way in which many brands that roll out a more modest power-efficient system offer the end user the ability to improve upon the default hardware over time. The absence of these features here does limit the long-term scalability of the system hardware.
The internal power supply is a custom-built 200W PSU designed for this smaller-scale chassis. Not using an easy-to-remove SFX/ATX/TX power supply is not unusual for rackmount chassis, and in particular, this chassis. As mentioned earlier, the system is remarkably power-efficient for its scale (especially as a rackmount server), and the system noise was very low, especially when compared to the likes of the Synology RS1221+ and QNAP TS-873AU.
Nevertheless, I can imagine that in the event of needing to replace this PSU, that is going to be something of a tall order, and alongside the lack of any redundant PSU support, replacing this custom-built PSU is going to be a bit of a handful too. That’s fine, and I’m sure it’s covered under the warranty, and UniFi will take care of the shipping either way, as well as the support of the aforementioned power block system that UniFi has in their portfolio too. But this does seem like an odd oversight on a rackmount chassis with a target audience who are probably the most interested in redundant PSUs for continued and uninterrupted deployment.
The power consumption of the device when all drives were being accessed over a live 10GbE connection and the system resources were at 25% use was 79.3W. When the system was in idle, this dropped to 61.5W.
As mentioned at the beginning of this section, the UniFi UNAS Pro is not trying to be a beast server and, moreover, is not trying to reinvent the wheel in terms of how NAS servers are built. UniFi has a remit here that they want to produce an efficient and very ecosystem-friendly server solution to their hardware portfolio, and I do think the UniFi UNAS Pro meets this remit. Nevertheless, I think it would be fair to say that the hardware on offer here is not going to blow users away, and the hardware scalability on this system is somewhat muted. However, let’s discuss the big UniFi-shaped elephant in the room—what about the software? What is packed alongside the hardware in the UniFi UNAS Pro, and how does this server system make itself appealing to new and existing UniFi users?
UniFi UNAS Pro Review – Software
If you are in any way familiar with the UniFi dashboard and how management and control are deployed in those networks, then the UniFi NAS OS is going to be incredibly intuitive for you. That isn’t to say that it isn’t going to be easy for everyone to understand how it works, but in particular, Ubiquiti has ensured that the UX of their existing solutions has been carried over faithfully here.
As mentioned earlier, the system can be easily deployed without the need for a ui.com account, which although will limit some remote access capabilities and access to updates, is still going to be desirable to those who like to have their storage completely inaccessible outside of the network.
Also, the system can be set up purely on the LAN, so no need to be reliant on a web management window for setting up the device. I imagine there had been hot debate internally at Ubiquiti over this, as creating a user-friendly system generally always involves wrapping a web management portal around it for simplicity, so kudos to Ubiquiti for not sticking this system universally behind a web management UI.
Storage creation is also incredibly streamlined, with the system automatically recognizing the drives internally and offering user-friendly storage redundancy choices at the outset. That said, although I saw configurations for one disk failure protection and two disk failure protection (and hot spare support too), there wasn’t an option for RAID 0 support. Obviously, UniFi might argue that offering a completely redundancy-free storage option would be a little too unsafe, and as mentioned earlier, the CPU and SATA bay configuration for this device also limit the potential performance boosts that a RAID 0 would have offered anyway. However, I raised this mainly because I could not find any option here that allowed me to create separate storage pools. Again, there is arguably a little more niche demand for a NAS system made up of multiple RAID pools, but it is more popular than most might think, and all too often, I know users who want to use different media types (e.g., SATA HDDs and SATA SSDs) and place them in different storage pools to leverage their performance or capacity individually. In that storage scenario, I can imagine users wanting a larger RAID 5/6 configuration, but then perhaps 2-3 SSDs in a RAID 0. Again, this is arguably still quite a niche setup, but it’s just one of several examples of why a RAID 0 and multiple RAID pools would be desirable.
All this aside, it has to be said that UniFi has streamlined the hell out of the initial setup of this device, and the system will genuinely be deployable inside 5 minutes from cold boot to storage setup and initialization completion.
Also, additional credit to just how streamlined the mobile setup of this device is. Alongside the existing UniFi mobile appliances supporting the setup of this system, the UniFi UNAS Pro also features Bluetooth setup, which means that you do not even need to ping the device on the network for initialization.
Instead, you can just use your mobile phone and set up the device after just a couple of minutes from powering on, and it is incredibly intuitive.
Moreover, they have somewhat gamified the setup of the UniFi NAS on mobile, as during the setup, you are provided with dynamic tips and demonstrations of how you can set up the device while the system is being set up! With links to tutorials and guides throughout, it’s a neat little touch and definitely goes that extra step towards making the system silky smooth to set up and provides a great first impression.
From adding new users and setting up storage shares, to managing your backup operations and fine-tuning the system, big brands like Synology and QNAP could stand to learn a lot from this presentation, balancing the line between simplicity and understanding just what your system can do.
The main software dashboard is definitely going to feel a little jarring to existing Synology or QNAP users, both of which use far more operating system-stylized dashboards that are accessed through the web browser. The UniFi dashboard, however, whether you access the system locally or access the system remotely over the internet via ui.com, is a little bit more comparable to that of the TrueNAS GUI. Navigation options are listed on the left-hand side, and tabs at the top of the screen are used for each of the system features and overall UniFi network system management.
Technically, the UniFi UNAS Pro has two dashboards. There is the system back-end dashboard for managing updates, system time, network settings, system log, and general config options. This option is a little bit more text-heavy, but it’s still presented in quite a user-friendly fashion, and it’s designed for simplicity yet ease of configuration. Whereas the drive dashboard is a lot more colorful and dynamic, providing real-time access information, real-time active share information, dynamic resources on the system storage, and analytical information about system resource use. It is user-friendly, and each one of these widgets opens out into a separate tab for managing that particular appliance attribute. Overall, I quite like it
Also, I really like how pretty much all of the system analytical and activity-based information is presented on a single screen here. It allows you to understand at a glance just what is happening with the UniFi NAS, and don’t forget that the front-mounted LCD panel provides a similar level of information and control at your fingertips very quickly. I really do respect the time and effort that has gone into presenting a lot of arguably more jargon-heavy information in a very user-friendly fashion.
Another useful little native feature of this NAS operating system is the file explorer that is immediately available from the dashboard. This may seem obvious, but you would be surprised just how many business NAS operating systems do not provide local file/folder access from the browser GUI, instead offering users the ability to create storage that needs to be managed via SMB or FTP file protocol, for example.
This file explorer is perhaps a little more limited than similar offerings on Synology DSM or QNAP QTS, but it does hold its own, is responsive, and does all of the baseline-level services you’re going to need.
Additionally, file sharing is particularly straightforward and easy here, with contextual right-click options for sharing files, as well as multiple security provisions that range from selective accessible users, strict local or remote-level link access, validity dates, and password control—all provided in a very responsive and intuitive fashion.
Equally, there is a very responsive and incredibly clear sharing dashboard built into the UniFi NAS operating system that allows you to micromanage all active shares at any given time, see who has access to them, and get a little bit more analytical information on the value of individual shares. Equally, this can also be used to modify existing shares and their permissions on the fly.
That said, I am a little disappointed with the way the native file explorer handles metadata that practically any file has. By this, I mean that although the NAS system is able to give you the date of the file’s creation, the size of the file, and details on who has access to this file at any given time, that is pretty much it. Some details more specific to media files that are locked in with the metadata (such as camera aperture, file compression technique, resolution, etc.) are inaccessible and therefore unusable for smarter filtering or creating more appropriate repositories of data.
The most common use of this is in photography management, where you want to find photos that have been taken in a certain way or are of a certain quality, or multimedia files where this information is used to create more appropriate containers of multiple files easily for later cataloging and classification. There is every possibility that UniFi will pursue features like this in future updates to the system software, but it’s a real shame it’s not there on day one.
I do like the ease of drive encryption however. Found in the Services menu – it allows you to create an encrypted folder/drive that ensures that does not allow for ease of access in the way other shared drives are presented. Encrypted drives will need a password lock in order to allow for access, or you can download a local key from the system which can also be used to unlock the drive. This access can be scaled quite a lot in the system console and drive menu. Crucially, this means that you can create a super safe area of drive space on the system that requires further verification to allow access and reduces unapproved users reaching it.
More importantly, if the system undergoes a restart (perhaps from a power cut, a system update or even in the event of the device being stolen and illegal users are trying to access the encrypted data), the encrypted drive area can be set to not allow for auto mounting at startup without the login key – a small feature that you would be surprised how rare it is in modern NAS.
Network management on the system is actually surprisingly lackluster. I’m a little surprised by this, given the heavy pedigree that UniFi solutions have toward network management, and almost certainly this is down to the system working at its best within a larger UniFi network, therefore kind of undermining the need for the NAS to have particularly comprehensive network controls. Nevertheless, for the NAS being utilized on its own, aside from the ability to change the IP, enable static or dynamic IPs, change subnet, and even create a secondary failover IP, there really isn’t much else to play with.
You can’t adjust the jumbo frames, auto-block, and reactive settings for heavy IP, with much of this either being assumed to be managed in the back end or (once again, more likely) that UniFi relies on this system already being within an existing UniFi network, and therefore doubling down on these controls is at best unnecessary and at worst going to cause internal conflicts. Still, it does seem a very limited network control for a NAS system in the singular.
UniFi has clearly made a point here to want to nail down the fundamentals of what a network-attached storage device can do within their own, particularly owned system, and almost certainly plan to build upon this to expand existing features and add brand new ones. Therefore, one of the most popular features of modern NAS systems that has grown in recent years is snapshots.
Unlike your traditional full-size system backup restoration, snapshots are a much smaller impact alternative, but allow you to create numerous scheduled timeline backups of select files and folders on the system, which can then be restored considerably more quickly and with lesser system resource and architecture change. Limitations I have seen of snapshots on any NAS platform, at least as far as how the user understands controls and can restore those snapshots, are implemented right at the start and are presented in a user-friendly and easy-to-understand fashion. The impact of the choices the user makes on the scheduling, numeracy, and retention of these snapshots is made abundantly clear.
Equally, when the process for restoring a snapshot is begun, browsing the existing snapshots on the system is presented in an intuitive file explorer fashion, so you’re able to flick through the timeline and see the precise changes that have occurred on a file/folder directory over time and therefore understand exactly what you stand to gain or lose in the restoration of a snapshot.
Moreover, I really like how the system offers to create an additional restoration snapshot just before you revert to an older one in the timeline, and therefore still give you that final “out” in case restoring an older snapshot ends up not being the most desirable outcome. It’s a small feature and one that some brands have implemented, but crucially not many, and certainly none of them in such a clear and understandable fashion.
Finally, while I’m singing the praises of how this brand has approached snapshots, it’s also worth highlighting that snapshots do feature an element of immutability. That is to say, you can choose to lock specific snapshots if you wish to ensure that if a certain point in time in the history of a file/folder is too important to accidentally be overwritten due to a limited retention policy, you can lock that snapshot to ensure that is never the case, and the system will alert you if you are nearing the maximum retention of your snapshot that could have risked overwriting. It’s a small thing, and given the subject of immutability now being at its height due to increasing concerns over ransomware, this is a lovely little option that, once again, is being presented in jargon-free, beginner-friendly language!
The same can be said (to a point) about how backups and connecting external storage devices are handled on the UniFi UNAS Professional system. Right out of the box, the system arrives with the ability to connect or mount towards a third-party or first-party NAS system to create a local network or remote backup using SMB/CIFS. The process is tremendously straightforward, and I was able to connect the UniFi NAS to a Synology NAS in under 2 minutes and was able to set up backup operations in just one minute more!
Likewise, for the launch of the system, you can connect with a cloud storage provider. However, at this time, there only appears to be one cloud provider supported—Google Drive—which, although arguably one of the most popular prosumer/enthusiast/small business cloud options in the market, larger organizations are leaning more and more towards bigger AWS or SaaS-linked platforms that UniFi is going to need to engage with on this platform to make it more desirable to larger enterprises.
Nevertheless, connecting those cloud providers was incredibly straightforward and did require an extra layer of authentication than I’ve seen on other NAS devices, requiring additional two-way code submission (not just a password and you’re in!).
I certainly would have liked to have seen more cloud providers, as well as their roadmap, perhaps indicating down the line that larger-scale cloud synchronization to make migration away from those subscription platforms possible, but at least the fundamentals are being nailed here.
Another one of those very “UniFi” things that was featured in the backup section that I also quite liked was the topography image of backups. This indicated what kind of backup operations were being conducted from the UniFi NAS, the direction they are in, and their current status.
This whole panel again made understanding the security of your data in the event of a backup requirement being made a great deal clearer, and perhaps integration of further updates to platforms that are supported by these backup/sync services will also encourage further dynamism in this topography (much as we see in the topography and network overview featured in the UniFi controller dashboard).
Also, when it comes to the system configuration backups (so, users, authentication, system layout, permissions, etc), there are plenty of Day 1 provisions in place to manage this. I have seen too, TOO many NAS systems arrive in the last 10 years WITHOUT serious consideration for restoration policies for this – focusing on the data, and NOT the infrastructure around it! I am VERY pleased to say that UniFi have taken this pretty seriously on their system. The ability to restore a configuration backup is baked into the first initialization screen:
Additionally, you are not limited to a single configuration backup, with the option to scroll through time scheduled backups as per your requirements.
It’s also very pleasing to see that configuration backups are baked into both the UI cleanly, clearly and supporting both a local USB config backup, as well as directly to your associated UI.com account. It’s a small thing, but not enough attention is often paid to the restoration of a system configuration. Yes, your DATA is important – but think of the hours that go into arranging shares, user accounts, permissions, paths, etc.
Let’s be clear – UniFi did not ‘invent config backups’, but I do think it’s worth praising them on taking the time to smooth this out so well in their version 1.0 (more accurately, revision 4)! Updates for the NAS operating system are pretty straightforward, and if you’re signed in with your ui.com account, you have full access to feature updates, early release builds of software, and fully confirmed stable releases as per your own requirements. There did not appear to be any means to manually upload it onto the NAS, but alongside the system being quite new and this review being conducted with a pre-release system, this is also not really something that UniFi has engaged with on their current existing UniFi network equipment either.
This is hardly a deal breaker, but might prove inconvenient for users looking at running the system purely offline, and is not something that UniFi didn’t make clear during initialization if you are opting for a pure offline deployment.
Alongside creating shared folders and opening up SMB shares, the UniFi NAS does also allow you to create multiple shared drive spaces (each of which can have their own permission controls and snapshot scheduling too). This feature seems to be designed around client sync tools that are either early in development or not available at the time of review. Nonetheless, I can definitely see this being a useful team storage feature, and when you integrate SMB-mapped sharing, it’s another step in the road of the NAS being widely used, but the OS being left to do its own thing smoothly.
Additionally, you can use the UniFi Identity client tools to verify access ‘per device’ and lock it to a specific user for security. If and when UniFi can build on this with a client tool for intelligent storage syncing (as seen in Synology Drive and QNAP Qsync), it will easily be one of the flagship applications here.
But that in turn raises the matter of ‘other apps and tools,’ as that is something that will divide opinion—especially for those weighing up existing third-party NAS solutions in the market. The UniFi NAS and its software do not feature any kind of app center or plugin base. This is not the end of the world, as this is a storage-focused device, and plugins/apps are not something the brand has included on systems like the Dream Machine either. However, modern NAS solutions are more than just hard drives on the internet, and most modern NAS solutions also support container deployment—which in turn opens the door to third-party apps.
Again, it’s not a massive surprise that UniFi (with its single portal access and security position) has not engaged with this much. But with many existing UniFi network users already experienced with Synology DSM and QNAP QTS software, there is a danger that the UniFi NAS will appear under-featured. Applications for multimedia are understandably absent in a system that is not focused on that target market, however, the lack of an application for iSCSI LUNs or perhaps SaaS services like Office 365 or Google Workspace integration to add a bare-metal sync to those cloud software providers is notably absent here.
But arguably the most glaring omission is the lack of ability to install UniFi Protect, the surveillance platform from UniFi, on this system. Given the similarities in design and hardware of the UniFi UNAS Pro versus the UNVR system, as well as other systems from UniFi like the UDM series, allowing a deployable app of UniFi Protect, it seems kind of odd that you’re not able to use this bulk storage for a surveillance deployment on this system. There is the counterargument that this does not have enough Ethernet ports or PoE support for cameras, but that doesn’t mean that integrating UniFi Protect would be redundant.
Moving to something a little bit more positive, UniFi is not too restrictive on if you want to access the system locally, even if you have already bound a UI.com account. For example, if you are over the internet via a UI.com account, but the system is also recognized to be within your existing network environment, the system will tell you that you can get better performance if you access the system on a local IP and will conveniently provide you with the necessary local 192.x.x.x IP to switch over to immediately. It’s a small thing, but I don’t know many web GUIs on NAS devices that will take the time to offer a convenient path back to local access when the need arises.
Additionally, for those that want to get their hands dirty and establish control over SSH, this option (disabled by default – good!) is available here and has 2 steps are warning and protection in front of it. Poor handling of this AND enabling ‘admin’ accounts has been the downfall of several brands in recent years, so it is good that UniFi are taking this seriously on Day 1.
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Equally, for notifications and messages from the system in the event of low, medium, or high importance, there is a very well-laid-out notifications management panel that provides human-understandable alerts in a way that most other NAS brands have a tendency to be overtly technical towards. It’s a little thing, but it’s another one of the continued examples of how you can definitely feel that UniFi has gone the extra mile in spending more on the UX and design of their new NAS portfolio expansion.
Overall, I think the main takeaway when reviewing the UniFi NAS software is to do with nailing the fundamentals. Some people may think it’s quite unfair that I’ve compared several times the UniFi NAS software with the likes of Synology and QNAP, who have been in the market for more than two decades and therefore have had plenty of time to learn from their mistakes. Maybe there’s a thread of truth to this, but UniFi is by no means a small company, and some of the omissions in this software do feel a little more obvious in some places than others. One vibe I definitely get is that Ubiquiti wants to nail down the fundamentals of a NAS server within their ecosystem as smoothly as possible without breaking their existing UX, as well as ensuring that this is a system that is in alignment with how the rest of the UniFi networking equipment operates.
If you don’t get those right, everything you build on top of it is destined to fail. UniFi could definitely stand to be a little bit more feature-rich in both the business and the enthusiast arena when it comes to the software they are rolling out with this system, but I can’t really fault the quality of the work they’ve done, and I can’t really claim that they haven’t focused on the most important parts of a storage system.
The software still does feel a little bit “version one,” and hopefully we will see further evolution of this software as the roadmap sprawls out over the months and years to come. But right now, the UniFi NAS does feel a little feature-light, and existing NAS owners might not be as keen to integrate this first-party solution into their existing UniFi networks yet in its current shape. But if what you want is easy-to-use, robust, and smooth NAS software, this is where the UniFi NAS software excels.
UniFi UNAS Pro Review – Performance
Trying to nail down the performance benchmarks of the UniFi UNAS Pro is not a tremendously easy process. Like any other NAS system, the system is purchased without storage media pre-bundled, and therefore the main performance numbers you are going to hit are heavily dependent on the storage media you choose to use. The larger the hard drive, for example, the higher the performance per drive you are going to hit (generally maxing out at around 280 MB on a traditional hard drive), which then scales up over time. However, as the system only has seven SATA drives, that means that you’re only really just about going to be able to potentially fill the full 10GbE network connection that this system arrives with.
Even then, this would require a pretty favorable RAID configuration. I decided to keep this as fair as possible, so I went ahead and populated the system with seven 8TB Toshiba hard drives. Four of these are the drives provided by UniFi and are their chosen recommended UI-labeled hard drives; the other three drives were comparable 8TB hard drives. I could have opted to populate the device with SATA SSDs in order to see if I could fully leverage the performance here, but realistically, this is a system that is seemingly designed for hard drive deployment, and as there are only seven bays of storage, capacity is going to be king. So I decided to stick with the hard drive RAID deployment and gauge the performance in both synthetic and real-world tests.
UniFi UNAS Pro Setup
- 8TB Toshiba MG08 (UniFi Official Drives) x7
- RAID 5 environment
- 10GbE Connection over SFP+
Test Machine
- Minisforum MS-01
- Windows 10 Professional
- Intel 13th Gen i9-13900H
- 32GB DDR5 Memory
- PCIe Gen4 NVMe OS Drive
- 10G SFP+
All tests were conducted over 10GbE SFP+ using a DAC cable 3m in length between the UniFi UNAS Pro System and a SFP+ 10G equipped PC. Here are the results.
- AJA 1GB 1080i Test File – 410-430MB/s Write | 393-440MB/s Read
- ATTO Disk Benchmark 1GB Test File – Peak 484MB/s Write | 477MB/s Read
- 1GB Crystal Disk Read, Write and Mixed Test – 496MB/s Read, 392MB/s Write, 434MB/s Mixed
- 100GB Windows Mixed File Read Speed Test – 472MB/s Max/Peak
- 100GB Windows Mixed File Write Speed Test – 427MB/s Max/Peak
Putting things into perspective, these are pretty much the performance numbers I was anticipating. By perspective, I mean that this is still a seven-drive NAS system that is running on an ARM processor with 8GB of memory. Realistically, I expected this system to hit around 600 MB per second maximum on synthetic testing IF I had played around with the block sizes, opened up the jumbo frames, and effectively rigged the test in a way that would not have represented real-world deployment. I’m sure there are some users in their own network deployments that would be able to get a lot closer to that number, but at the very least in the deployments that I focused on for this review, the numbers I saw were not bad but they weren’t groundbreaking. I reckon we would have seen higher numbers than these. That said, the numbers were tremendously consistent! What I mean by that is that most NAS systems that I benchmark tend to have a very high peak performance number, but are not able to maintain that number consistently or for very long. They might seem like high performance, but once you balance it out over the entire data transfer, it actually ends up working out much lower on average. Whereas the UniFi UNAS Pro was able to consistently maintain the performance numbers stated above, and this applied to both synthetic and real-world tests.
This is the PEAK CPU/Memory Use during the heaviest repeat tests
Additionally, as touched on earlier in this review, at no point did I see the system utilize the full CPU and memory resources during the course of my benchmarks. I would have comfortably and understandably expected an ARM-based system to max out these hardware resources during some of these tests, particularly the sustained performance tests of AJA and ATTO. Nevertheless, that little efficient ARM Cortex processor really did manage to hold its own, and although the performance numbers are not exactly going at BTTF DeLorean speeds, I was very impressed by the consistent and sustained numbers over time.
UniFi UNAS Pro Review – Verdict & Conclusion
I feel like a bit of a broken record in this review, and I keep repeating the same two words in conjunction with the UniFi UNAS Pro—fundamentals and consistency! It’s pretty clear that UniFi has prioritized the need for this system to perfectly complement their existing UniFi ecosystem and make it a true part of their hardware portfolio. In doing so, it has resulted in them focusing considerably on the fundamental storage requirements of a NAS system and making sure that these are as good as they possibly can be out of the gate. To this end, I would say that UniFi has unquestionably succeeded. The cracks in the surface begin once you start comparing this system with other offerings in the market right now—which is inevitably what users are going to do and have been doing since the first indications of a UniFi NAS system were being rumored. It may seem tremendously unfair to compare the newly released UniFi NAS with solutions from vendors that have had more than 20 years of experience in this field, but for a business that wants to fully detach themselves from the cloud and wants true user-friendly but highly featured control of their network operations, comparison is inevitable!
Solid, reliable, and stable system that will inevitably grow into a significant part of most UniFi network users. The problem for many, however, is going to be how long it takes UniFi to reach that point where this system can be software competitive with its rivals. If you are a die-hard UniFi ecosystem user and you are looking for stable, familiar, easy-to-use, and single ecosystem personal/business storage, you are going to love everything about the UniFi UNAS Pro. But just be aware that this is a system that prioritizes storage and is seemingly at its best within an existing UniFi network architecture, and if removed from that network, you are going to find a system that at launch feels quite feature-light compared with alternatives in the market. Pricing for the system is surprisingly competitive, given its position as the launch NAS—unusual when you look at the pricing philosophy of numerous larger-scale systems like the UniFi Dream Machine and UNVR from the brand. Hopefully, over time we are going to see UniFi build upon the solid fundamentals that they have designed here and create a more competitive solution on top of this. I have no doubt that UniFi will commit to software and security updates for this system, but it would be remiss of me to say that this is the best NAS solution for your network. Right now, it just happens to be the most user-friendly and most UniFi-ready one. Bottom line: this will probably tick a lot of boxes.
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| UniFi UNAS Professional PROs | UniFi UNAS Professional CONs |
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This is first gen. Give time and they will get up to speed.
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Non-starter for me without an SHR type option. Too bad.
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Thecus 7700 pro was a seven drive nas
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The lack of a professional cloud backup with „time travel“ and restore options are stopping me from using this device
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What a long way to say what a disappointment this is.
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I just need a nas for file and picture storage
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Great review! Thank you.
Just to clarify… I cannot have 2x 16TB disk in here without RAID, together with 4x 4TB disks in RAID10 right? Because the two 16TB ones would be consumed by the RAID as well (as 4TB disks).
Is that correct?
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Unifi has a few great lines: wifi, switching, maybe power.
Then they have some weird stuff:
– Security cameras, where users can’t add cameras in the phone app unless they are given admin rights.
– Signage product that plays content on a TV. Nice idea, lousy software. Transitions between pictures are not suitable for public use.
I didn’t try access control yet.
I wonder how will the NAS turn out.
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My other brand nas come with only single psu, 2 or 4 1gbe ports and cost more, so this is still way better value.
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Say you had an Android phone and wanted to transfer videos to your NAS.
Is the software robust enough to simply ‘send to NAS’ with a couple taps on your phone?
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Not being able to stack these or expand to more bays is such a deal breaker 🙁
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Fantastic in depth review man! I just got the Minisforum MS-01 to replace my DS918+ in terms of server needs, so my Synology is just acting as storage now, so this would be the perfect unit for me to upgrade to 10Gbe to go with the rest of my UniFi stuff besides that it doesn’t have NFS yet :/ quick question, when you say reactive storage, do you mean you can add drives to the pool without wiping and just increase pool size?
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They have already said it will have NFS, it just didn’t meet their standards to be part of the launch release.
Can not wait until they add this.
Thanks for the review!
If it had NFS, I’d be down. Without, not so much. Possibly also a radius server or something reliant for auth.
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How does this unit handle drive expansion? Say I have all 7 bays filled and I need more storage…Can I swap a drive or two with higher capacities in place and it dynamically adjust the array to make that space available?
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Good stuff thanks for making this video
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Would be awesome if they released the nas SW as an app for the NVR lineup.
Can’t hurt to dream…
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16 bay version will be here soon and it’s also already at a cheaper price than Synology. They do have stacking but I would assume that’s also possible
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You give UI too much of a pass for being an ecosystem and as such they don’t have to play nice with others. You also mention the word “Enterprise” numerous times. So does UI whenever it can. These two add up to missing one big fundamental, as you put it, which is directory integration and I’d argue licensing bc it’s a huge part of the marketing. Everything “Enterprise” must have directory integration, that’s what pretty much the term really means. UI in its AzureAD/Keycloak/Okta/ADFS/etc knockoff — none of which ALSO requires specialized branded hardware BTW — put LDAP/AD integration behind a per-user per-month subscription, despite the fact that unlike the aforementioned, they aren’t providing any service at all, only the permission to connect your own hardware to your own systems, AKA: licensing.
This storage thingy is worthless is you need to keep separate accounts for it. It opens doors for so many problems. If you want to use the Enterprise moniker you need to integrate or have a system so well thought out that you can cover any need, absolutely any need even if it’s convoluted, perhaps egregious, like Cisco’s. This ecosystem thing is cute until it starts being a headache, the pretty dashboards in day-to-day are rarely useful, and the push for a cloud dependency, the fact that your network devices tasked to guard your data are exfiltrating it from your network, the fact that UI relentlessly pushed for mobile app-based mgmt revokable at any point leaving gear unmanageable (like UniFi Video did) are headaches waiting to happen.
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It’s underpowered, given that it has a 10gb interface , fully saturated with ssd would generate 3500 mbs yet the controller I will be only half the hd capacity transfer rate
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I’m curious if the RAM it does have is even ECC. For me, ECC is a requirement for a NAS.
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Hi there, thanks for the video.
I am looking to see the following:
1. iPhone and Android Applications to backup the pictures from the phone into the UNAS.
2. something similar to google documents to create office documents directly on the UNAS.
3. backup up one entire windows computer to the UNAS, similar to synology backup for business. .
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I will get one because I have a ton of UNIFI in my house (Personally, I would not use Ubiquiti at work. Not Ent enough for that). But what I love about Synology is all the apps you have access to, and the more significant benefit to me is upgradability. On my 1821+, I tossed in a 10G card, two 2TB NVME caches, and 32 GB RAM.
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Thanks.. good review. I have converted all my networking to Unifi and am considering while building a new house whether I want to use Unifi cameras. If this could have replaced the UDM it would have been a no brainer, but as a satisfied UnRaid user of 20 years, the lack of some networking and apparent inability to mix/match drive sizes may make me just get a UDM and keep my existing UnRaid. Definitely something to keep my eyes on though.
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I disagree that this is not an exciting product. I think it is exciting to see such an intuitive user interface, a focus on the basics, and very capable hardware for such an unheard of low price. I don’t use the snazzy bits of my Synology NAS and would prefer the 10Gb/s connection and the intuitive interface of the UniFi NAS. UniFi don’t unecessarily prescribe any UniFi-branded hardware and are yet to remove features that one paid for, like Synology. Can’t wait to see RAID 6 support and perhaps a future model with support for media-transcoding and a USB port.
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for me at thos time That NAS is only for hosting backup of my data and config of Synology nas becouse I need runn all my services from nas. I actuaky run old websites on my nas and run docker on my main Synology. But Synology pice me of when I see deleted apps – webstation plugin deleted from DSM 7.2 – old PHP (Update php code for that sites is not cost effective in terms of time or money to rewrite them to the latest php) and I mast be on DSM 7.1 – deleting support too apps fron old dsm on new version pice me of but I intrested to have uptodate nas.
UNAS for me is also to big and have too big energy consumption and 7 HDDs is not form me.
If UNAS will be based on 4 HDDs UNVR and have webstation like on Synology and docker support (to install DNS Server on difrent docker apps).
About Unifi apps for me will be good Use UNAS as unifi backup target storage for auto backup network or protect or UnifiOS on UNAS – If I see that things on Unifi devices as UNAS I probably will swich from Synology.. – I’m a homrlaber have a unifi network on my home.
I think UNAS Pro ss for me for a bog misness or enterprise where data access tiime or suoort alot users too data on drives, on home is too big and bare additional functions as for energy consumption.
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no advertised hardware specs can fuck off
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Ummm what is a ‘knicker’ ?
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Have they changed shipping date; I saw Oct 25th. Now it says Nov 4th!
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With the limited amount of drives we need stacking
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Does it come with any sync app for windows?
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can you run duel network/gateways with the two nics?
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LOL I’m currently getting away from Unifi. Sick of their “ecosystem.” Sick of their crap. Having to use HTTPS and 2FA for my UDM that’s local.
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The Mac of NAS. Ecosystem is Apple-like
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I haven’t had a “modern” NAS, I have a bit of a basic question. Can I buy this NAS, throw in two 20TB drives in RAID5, and then expand and switch it over to RAID6?
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Its their NVR with different software… I think for MOST. Home users and even small businesses it is a great design!
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Not really a fair comparison to compare to Synology really as Synology are not just a NAS, they have an app ecosystem too, where as the Unifi NAS is just a NAS and no extra crap.
I think the hardware is identical to the UNVR Pro, except the UNAS is 8gb RAM. Price is identical as UNVR, and I feel the price point is pretty good for a 10gbp link, Directory Service integration. UI have advised they are adding Raid 6 in a firmware update, so they do listen to the users. I don’t think M.2 is really a big deal, you can get adaptors from M.2 to 2.5″ 2.5″ SATA will max out a 10gbps connection anyway. The single PSU is not an issue as it supports the Unifi USP device as well when you want redundant power supplies. It would add cost if you had a redundant PSU and this is NOT an enterprise version of the device.
I have seen several reviews of this unit and the speed tends to be consistent. Again, remember this is not an Enterprise version of the device. This is a Pro version, which is in between standard and enterprise. A lot of Synology devices at similar price point only have 2 x 1gbp NIC’s
I feel if this sells well, UI will likely release an Enterprise and standard version, based around the other UNVR form factors they have.
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Is it true it doesn’t do iSCSI or NFS?
If so it should be called the “UniFi NAS Home”, or “UniFi NAS SMB”
I am fine with it not doing containers or VM’s, but not doing NAS features such as iSCSI or NFS, and then calling it a “PRO” NAS is ridiculous
I am even fine with the price point, but the NAS PRO name without iSCSI or NFS is ridiculous
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No USB ports useful for local Backups and also no UPS support due to the lack of a USB port. Major failure if you ask me …
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this iust a simple and very basic NAS / filer but lacks « business » features specially for the number of drives that it holds:
* NVMe Cache
* Better and more capable processor
* More RAM!!
* Dual 10GbE RJ45/SFP+ for LACP & redundancy
* Dual PSU for power resilience
* AD Authentication integration
* FIPS 140-2 compliance for business that is required
* No SCSI or NFS support
Wouldn’t recommend this unit for professional use.
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Raid 6 is a curious omission, with raid 10 you have to rely on luck for more than one drive failure especially here with an odd number of drives. So three options, basic protection(raid 1), advanced protection raid 6) and performance (raid 10 would have been ideal. Perhaps a max version with raid 6 and zfs/NFS is in their future. I don’t see the point personally of adding docker etc when most will use another more powerful scalable server for virtualization (proxmox etc)
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It is “cheap”, short depth, quiet, and Unifi. Those are the selling points. Everything else goes hard to the other guys by all appearances. Qnap has a few very short depth (13cm) NAS as well, but the price point speaks for itself.
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But can it run Plex or Jellyfin?
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its has ssd cache support?
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Look Unifi is a cult like Synology BUT ….a NAS that doesn’t have docker, apps, rubbish ,,,a NAS that actually prioritizes local Network attached storage? …Well that is very interesting to me.
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Huge question for using this at work: What is the Active Directory integration like? I saw the checkbox option being moused over many times, but it was never explored on the video. Can I manage access to shares based on group rights, and apply group rights to a share, or a folder within a share?
From a business perspective, the lack of a second PSU is definitely problematic… they really want to push their weird outboard PSU, I know, but that just doesn’t fly if you’re trying to play with the big boys. For small environments and homes, however, it seems pretty great… as long as what you want is STORAGE and not all the extra stuff Synology and the like have grown into becoming.
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I would love this plus something like the Synology Drive software.
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could i put my backup copies of movies on this and run plex from a computer and access from any tv?
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Excellent review. Thank you. I would really be interesting to knowing what drive setup with RAID5 would be needed to saturate the 10b both for reads and writes. Your numbers are not that great with the drives you used. Could faster hard drives do it? Would SATA SSD’s do it and how many would be needed? I am not buying another NAS with 10g that will only do less than half the network capabilities. With this unit in particular, it really needs to have 10g file transfer capabilities.
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Be nice if they allowed for backups to AWS or Backblaze via their AWS api thing.
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So no PLEX available?
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can i ask what hdd temperature at full load all 7bay?
and the cpu is too weak,that power only enough at 2 bay
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can it present iscsi LUNs at all ?
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How you add Reolink Cams to the unifi protect?????
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A teeny tiny bit frustrated that I ordered a backplane mini-ITX case from AliExpress last month (and am still waiting on delivery) intending to build my homelab server/NAS for my Unifi stack then they announce this thing. Chances are it’ll be like the 2U PDU they make & stay out of stock for 10 months…
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I might’ve missed it, but does it really not have NFS or iSCSI support?
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A NAS that’s not trying to be a golden goose-do-it-all homeserver where you run everything but the kitchen sink on.
Take my money
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Waiting for the NAS pro MAX if it has docker/vm support.
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499?! Holy crap. If this does RELIABLE storage, I cannot care less about Qnap and Synology bloatware!
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GREAT video and I love that they have nailed the fundamentals. In your comparative videos, I suspect it’s going to be REALLY hard to find something in this price range that can even come close. (Find an off the shelf 7 bay NAS for $500?)
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7:26 There is a secondary PSU. Uni does it using the Unifi RPS… That is Unifi’s redundant power supply device. Also if you are worried about noise then RACK MOUNT HARDWARE ISN’T FOR YOU! Only a little over 7 minutes and I already dislike this review.
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Everybody is going nuts over the price but that’s by design. V2 will charge extra for redundant power supply and other status quo features.
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Is there currently a feature where you can backup pc clients like active backup for business on synology?
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♥♥
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Wonder why this isn’t just available as an app for other Unifi devices with disk storage?
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Can this replace Synology Drive?
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But can it run plex?…
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Great comprehensive video. I absolutely love all things Ubiquity but I feel like I want to wait for another version or at least more apps. I have a Synology now and don’t even scratch the surface of the features available (including things like running docker images) but the one thing your video suggested is given the lack of use of file metadata I would certainly be missing some app features like the Synology photo app at least and probably video as well so I could look up pictures by person (facial recognition) or geo (show me my Aruba vacation pictures)
I have wanted all things Uniquity on my network and maybe I just need to wait a few software and maybe even a hardware revision or 2. I feel like it may need more memory and CPU once and IF they start to add more app features.
Also, I wish they would have done an M.2 drive slot at least for caching.
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What is your opinion regarding UNIfI selecting BTRFS for their filesystem? I see many video stating that BTRFS with RAID is not ready for production. This is a topic that I would love for you to expand in one of your future videos for the UNIFI nas.
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Does it have Docker?
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@NASCompares Can you test throughput with SATA SSD setup? Like Samsung EVO drives?
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If the unit included NFS, multiple volumes and mixed hard drive sizes . . . that would be then end of Synology for me.
A luxury version with larger screen – summarising all the data at a glance would be a nice option.
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I’m running a bare metal k8s cluster, so I really don’t need to be able to run docker containers on a nas. This is exactly what I wanted and at a great price. Ubiquiti nailed their first NAS outing
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Great video, this is almost exactly what I have been looking for, just need the ability to make immutable backups (WORM) which it sounds like you are expecting from them in the near future. Will be looking forward to your future videos.
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wow imagine releasing a “pro” NAS that is 100% SATA and not being able to have redundant 10 Gb uplinks…. Ubiquiti has no idea what they are doing
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When the UniFi Pro NAS dies, can you take the drives and plop it into a new UniFi Pro NAS and carry on like Synology NAS’s ?
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Will this run Plex so I can ditch my Synology?
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10:01 you’re forgetting that this is unifi’s “pro” line not “pro max”. “Pro” really just means rack mount entry level SMB for unifi devices. I wouldn’t expect dual 10Gb on the regular “pro” model.
Now a “pro max” NAS I would expect to have NVME, more bays, dual 10Gb and a single 25Gb.
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I would be interested to know how the hardware compares to the Protect UNVRPro? But none of the reviews peek under the lid. Is it the same hardware but with more memory or is the more to it?
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Thanks!
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no x86, no good…
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So, can you designate drives? Maybe use 5 of them for raid and 2x as backup?
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Thinking if these do well they will come out with a ‘Max’ and ‘Enterprise’ editions.
I’ve been looking at getting a Synology or building my own TrueNAS system for home. Now this came out, I have more research to do to see this will work for my home and families needs.
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Does it support NFS ISCSI?
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Having already invested in Unifi gear (including a Pro switch with a spare SFP+ port) and already having a fairly beefy Proxmox host in play to host applications this seems like a great option!
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It’s pretty clear their goal for this device is having basic file storage for users of a home/small business that are going to connect to shared folders on mac and windows systems. What a NAS by definition really is… I see a lot of people complaining about lack of redundant network ports, NFS, iSCSI, etc. IMO, I think all those features they’re wanting are things needed when you are building enterprise infrastructure and Ubiquiti knows that’s really best handled by a proper SAN product from the likes of Dell, HP, IBM, NetApp, etc.
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Can an existing UNVR-Pro be turned into a UNAS Pro? Is the hardware identical? Is the software the only difference?
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How can some spend nearly an hour reviewing a NAS and not address file systems?
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Will this support SATA and SAS drives? Haven’t been able to find this anywhere.
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11:30 on my Synology rs3614rpxs, those read and write speeds are what I was getting with five hard drives, over a SPF+ DAC cable. When I switched to a LC om4 fiber SPF+ cable, I was achieving 750MBps or 7Gbps.
Not sure why I’m getting better numbers from fiber cable over the copper cable. Both cables are rated 10gigabits per second
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Can hardly wait for the Enterprise NVR to be released as a NAS WOW
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How about power consumption? Did I miss that part?
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Where is the non-pro version?
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wudnt piss on this crap if it was on fire
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This is just a NAS network attached storage only. Not able to complete to Synology, QNAP, UGreen, etc. at this time. Is this NAS going to support docker, plex, etc
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Is it possible to use 1-2 HDD as a nvr Storage?
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If this is “Pro,” I wonder about their name for the (maybe) upcoming, more powerful version of this. UNAS MegaUltraProMaxSE
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I smell a Ultra Pro version with NVEM Cache Slot, which will be announced in 3-6 months.
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Have you actually logged in via SSH and poked around the system? I’m curious what filesystem its running on those drives; given the feature set, it sounds like they are using btrfs.
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Does this have a media server capability or a way to link up to Plex server??
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VMs are heavy on the ressources, I could understand why it ain’t there, but missing Docker support is a no-go. I remain on TrueNAS for the time being.
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What kind of raid protection is it using? What about the data if the unit fails? Are able to mix different hdds size like Sinolgy shr does?
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Maybe I missed but is there any thermal test for this machine? The front design of those drive bay let me suspect it might have thermal issue once you use it for some years later.
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ZZZzzzz they should enable this feature for UDM PRO MAX , it has 2 disk slots
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SAS support or just SATA?
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Some what disappointed, this is just a software patch of the UNVR with a slightly more RAM. I’m sorry to say this but I’m not going to buy it, well not until an NVME slot, 1x 2.5 gbe lans and 2x 10 gbe SFP+
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Me still waiting for a EU version of Unifi Cable Modem…
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Dude this is amazing how many people are now entering the consumer space. honestly if the software is stable and good like synologys and as a storage server this seems like a no brainer for a home user who doesn’t want to configure a lot.
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Now put in 4TB NAS based SSDs!
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A product like this is for a specific market and it’s not me. I prefer DIY… A used 12bay 2U server is about the same price but way more powerful and more versatile. I do like and use their networking hardware though.
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would love to see a 1u 4 bay version based on unvr as well.
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Such a detailed review, thank you ???? It is a pity about Docker/VM/Plex support (or lack of!), but I understand why Ubi have focused on making just a NAS right now.
Also re reply you made to another comment, I would love to watch the story of how you had to reshoot this video multiple times. Fair play to you on the patience.
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disappointed in the power consumption. Granted being 7 bays at 500$ seems decent but my AIO server is a much better fit long term. I hope they continue to add to their offering.
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Can you have a few drives in raid and a few as seperate single storage?
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Finally someone is throwing a bomb in the NAS market, $500 is CHEAP for a proper built system with solid software and hardware support from a company that is represented in the whole world.
And those that shout “software”, that is something completely different, it takes way more resources to come up with comparable features that Synology has. If that is the need Synology have you covered at a high price with weak specs.
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How about noise ? Is UNAS Pro quiet ?
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I think it’s very nice to have a system that’s actually ONLY a NAS. I do use docker on my Synology devices at home and in the office. And the Synology backup between these two sites is so great that I wouldn’t be without it.
But for something like an actual online disk system in the office, this fits the bill nicely at a much lower price. Also, as an on-site backup for the backup, this would do well.
The only reason why this is the case is the price, of course. If it had been comparable to Synology, why would you ever get it? It’s nice to see someone hitting Synology with a price hammer, though. They’ve been getting a bit pricey over the years.
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this is 99% what I need… I just now need docker so I can run off site backups to b2
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is there a way to gracefully shut down the nas in case of power outage (with a ups of course) maybe with NUT?
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I know you are looking for proxmox setups with the GMKtecK8 mini PC. Do one with the mini running proxmox and a vm like home assistance os (needs a vm) and another vm or proxmox container to run docker containers. The data or docker volumes are atore in the new Unifi nas using SMB (I hope one day it gets NFS)
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I did have a question, understand you were able to put a large seagate hdd without issues. But don’t you usually need more ram when total storage size is much larger? If so is there a limit? For instance, if I fill all 7 bats with 24tb drives let’s say, is it capable of that? Or will the 8gb ram be an issue?
Also if I put 3 drives inside, does it have the ability to add more drives as you go and expand your storage without wiping data from existing raid array?
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Now I need ubiquity to make a 1U server that can run media apps like plex or any of its alternatives and make it for about $200 since rackmount chassis are about $200 on their own which is insane
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70 c temp ? ????????????????????????
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Can you play 360 video within Unifi Drive?
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Need a SAS model!
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Time to ditch Synology. Had enough.
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No redundant replaceable power supplies or network , awful network options in general … sure feels like they left to much out for a Pro max / SE model later
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Can you mix and match drives? On the nvr pro it made me use old 2tb drives because when I tried to put in 2x 10tb, 2x 8tb, and 2x 4tb, it wanted to only use 4tb of d ery drive.
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My entire feed is now just tech tubers reviewing this device. I’m guessing they must have all been waiting for an embargo to end. I am, of course, watching this guys review because he’s THE MAN.
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Would using SSD’s reduce the top end power consumption and idle power consumption?
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I love your review. No shade on any of the other reviewers, but your review is geared more towards how “I” am looking to use a NAS for my work loads.
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It’s all a bit bizarre. Let me check…. yes, it’s definitely 2024. As always, beautiful interface, Ikea-style Unify minimalism, but NIC redundancy, no NVMe, single PSU, it’s all a bit drab. Can you run TrueNas on it ????
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Can be cool if those who dont have a server rack to be able to have Unifi Drive on a cloudkey g2 to have a small file storage without redundancy. Or even on the drive of a UDM.
As they keep the UNVR frame, im assuming they will have a UNAS Enterprise as well with the UNVR Enterprise frame 🙂
And no need apps on a NAS… its a NAS and not a server… I have Plex on my truenas and I regret not having it on my proxmox instead.
I will for sure ditch my TrueNAS for UNAS and migrate my Plex on a VM
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THANK YOU UBIQUITI…. Finally….
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This is the “beta” product. They will cut production quickly and check how many buyers, then renew the team that made it to continue with next unit. New unit will have slot-in PSU (regular server style) but still no backup, as they want to encourage purchase of the Ubiquiti UPS battery. Two SFP ports (depending on cost and users making use of 10G speed, could be one 10G and one 2.5G) and two RJ45 ports (probably regular 1Gbps or using the new 2.5G that throttles when hot). Likely one fewer drive bay. Newer CPU. More RAM. Double the price.
Pro: all driver ports will be SATA/U.2 compatible, much more expensive CPU, possible socketed RAM slot (onboard or soldered 4GB or 8GB). Pro will be around 10x the price.
Ubiquiti developer team isn’t huge, they will not support apps or VM until far future. Best you can hope is to SSH and attempt to install your own OS.
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its their 1st iteration, give them a break?
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Hey Ubiquiti, how about putting Drive on the UDM and NVRs? I want to learn the software while you are working out the bugs.
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The only thing I would have liked was for them to drop the RPS connection and put in dual hot-swappable power supplies. But I get it, they are using the existing hardware from the UNVR Pro so it takes much less effort to make one of these. I plan on getting two of these. One for my primary backups and then the second one for backups of my backups. I will use my current Synology NAS that I am currently using for backups as a Docker system running HA and Plex and move my backups from Synology to the Ubiquiti NAS.
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@nascompares, Robbie, I don’t think you mentioned the file system. Any idea what’s being used?
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no NFS either?
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I would buy this without hesitation if I could split data pools to have a 4 drive raid 1 nas as a data replication for my Synology, and a 3 bay raid 0 for unifi protect. To add to that, I would love love LOVE to also be able to use the drive bay in my UDM SE as an additional storage option for unifi protect. (I don’t need redundancy for my home cameras Ubiquiti, I just want as many days recorded as drives I have available).
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No SAS drive support either, that backplane SATA only 🙁
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This will save me a ton on having a NAS to backup my 1821+. My old 4 bay Synology died. So, I’m backing up one volume on my 1821+ to another volume on the same NAS, which obviously worries me. I can’t justify buying another 8 bay Synology, but I can justify this easily. As soon as it’s proven itself in production environments, I’m getting one.
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I quite like the NAS and just NAS approach they took. I have separate machines for hypervisors to run VMs and containers on and like the separation. Two of these in a shadow mode active-passive fail over setup would be tits.
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I feel like you miss the point of the single PSU. Unifi devices all ahve a single PSU and they have a solution for it that connects to multiple devices and acts as a secondary psu for them. I do not know of any NAS or computer/server that people typically use at home that have duel psu’s.
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It looked fantastic until I saw the weak CPU it has. It worse than my old 5bay QNAP.
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Great introduction and descriptive video to this NAS. Thanks for your efforts!
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Hopefully the firmware up-downgrade will be even easier than their other network devices, as they do sometimes release stinker of updates. Currently they broke many widely used IoT devices like shelly. It would probably be good for install-and-forget areas though.
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This as a no-frill local data replication of the Unraid and TrueNAS systems I already own. Absolutely perfect.
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This is basically a router cpu with storage attached ????
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Any piece of hardware that requires me to create an account just to be able to is it, goes into the trash.
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can you try via ssh `apt update && apt install unifi-protect unifi-talk` and see what happens? (on an EFG it installs both even though its not supported…)
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They are definitely after the home lab market, not commercial. Ticks all the boxes for me!
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WOW, excellent review, I have Unify network setup at home along with a QNAP NAS and heard on the grape vine that there may be a Unifi NAS released soon, and that price, you can’t go wrong… Can’t wait for future updates to see whether they include docker etc as I do like having the utils that QNAP provide. ????
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For my Home Lab this is almost what I need. I have QNAP 8 bay ARM (~1000€) but it’s not rack mounted. But I also use ssd in raid 0 as a cache. And I have about double the ram. I really use it as SMB store so thats fine. I wanted so bad to replace my QNAP with this but it seems, it will just be a backup for QANP storage with speeds I see. UNAS Pro MAX would just need to have 2 NVME bays for CACHE, double SFP+ and give us the 12 bays and 3U. But who knows, maybe the UNAS Pro is enough for raw video editing of SMB and playing games with Steam?
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Those poor hard drives will have no airflow.
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What rack is that?
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All I need is my private dropbox, ability to back up family phones and view uploaded and edited videos from hols on TV and phone. Dont care about plex or dockers (what are these?:)Is that going to cut the mustard?
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Hey there! Finally it came to life, so many years! Now I’m glad I never did spend time on switching OS on a UNVR, that time is now _saved_.
thoughts: It’s good that there’s no concept of pools. keep it this simple or it will just not fit into its very limited scope anymore.
If I could, and if it would already support the right bits, I would put one in each access switch cabinet and use them as archival storage or similar. Not as team folder or anything they would suck at. but as a way to spread out tertiary storage. The price is right, the URPS connector is suitable, don’t need a second 10g port for that either. Integrate moosefs or similar at the same level of hands-off-no-choices setup and this would be nice[tm].
I also would say the lack of WORM features is a pity. how well do they have that down in UNVR? it’s not a trivial feature to implement to any non-laughable level of reliability.
Given the price point, I’d even ejnoy a toggle switch that makes the whole device read-only and can only be cancelled at the front panel. Fill it, lock it.
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Kinda a bummer, i was holding out building something for myself. Sure Not having plex is a bummer butttttttt…. Not allowing Unifi Protect to be used on the NAS is a deal breaker….
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So 4-5 more years and (if they don’t abandon the idea) it actually might be a nice NAS brand 🙂
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Great review. Could you please also test performance with SSD drives? Would like to see how close to 10 Gbps those transfer speeds can be.
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I still have stuff on a DROBO-FS. So, this might be a great upgrade for me. ????
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hardware raid or softwear ?
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I saw this release announcement and instantly search your channel knowing you HAD to have been right on top of it!
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I guess they had a few nvrs laying artound nobody bought ????
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Good review.
I’ve a question about user management and “directory integration”. Does it mean that instead of creating local users in this NAS, if I’ve a MS AD server on ny network, I can assign rights for some network users on some directories ?
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Great video. Soon as they get Docker; I am in.
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Thanks for really nice video!
When sharing a folder, you can add a user. What user is this? Is this something that you create on your machine?
And how does the remote login for it look?
I’m currently using Nextcloud on Truenas to share large video files. All my friends and clients have a personal login where they view/download/reshare the media. I’m curious if I can replicate this with the UNAS.
Also, when you preview/stream remotely a video file does it transcode? If yes, does it also do h265? Sorry for the interrogation 😛 It’s just it can be a dealbreaker or dream for me depending on the answer.
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I wish you would slow down the screen caps.
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For the price, this is great! I usually have my Plex server and VMs and stuff on another machine anyway. Seems pretty desirable to split the two so you have some redundancy.
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If you are going to say G U I instead of gooey, you really need to say N A S instead of nas as a word 😉 – (nice video BTW, really liked your analysis)
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Is this a VCR?
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So nice seagul shirt ????
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Please can you pop the cover off and show us it’s guts? I’m keen to see if the RAM is upgradable
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Needs iSCSI, NFS and SSD caching. Maybe Pro Max next year will have those.
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Nice start, but not a homerun.
Give it:
More cores/threads (n305)
Replacable RAM
NVME storage
Usb ports
Alligned front drives, not this masonry pattern
I’d like to run docker and apps like photobackup, torrent, jellyfin, home assistant.
Happy to pay twice the price
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Got it, this is intended to be mostly a pure NAS not a compute and app platform. For the cost that is a great value prop for SMB. They currently seem to have more interest in nailing the NAS basics rather than trying to run any and all docker apps. This seems ok. woah, directory integration, hope they extend that to the whole control plane and not charge a subscription for that.
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So, did I understood correctly, that with one drive you cannot set this nas up? It requires at least three hard disks, to set up required redundancy level?
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Given Ubiquiti’s history of never delivering promised features on new devices before they reach EOL, I’ll wait to see if they actually deliver the app that simplifies mounting of drives for end users before I decided to make a purchase… I’m over here having “Security Scanning Radio, SHD-AP” flashbacks…
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So Like it but I think you mentioned that Plex does not work on it at the moment? is there any ETA on that (Getting Plex on the the unit)
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Surprised they don’t sell the drive caddies separately haha
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Ubiquiti systems already run docker under the hood. So, it would be very easy for them to make a “hosting” app available under UniFi OS.
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Great video, lots of details thanks! One question, can you mix and match different HDD sizes? As someone who hacked unvr to NAS, I have installed 4 disks which automatically turned on raid 5. Is this the same case with UNAS PRO?
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Hi there,
Can files on this system be shared using Microsoft DFS?
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Buy yourself some new teeth, please.
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Kind of limited to me but I can see this being great for a lot of people, especially those already using Ubiquity equipment and/or who might be on the fence about buying Synology. Kind of refreshing to see a ‘pure’ NAS though as someone who still believes in separating storage and compute.
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Great video! will be using your link to purchase one.
I currently have a TrueNAS box that has 9 drives in it but going to scale down to 7 drives anyways to save power consumption (yes for me it does make that big of a difference). That is the biggest thing for me… when my NAS is at idle it is 90-100w and reading/ writing heavy it is 160-200 w. I don’t do docker or anything like that on my NAS, I have another machine for that. I just need something efficient and that will do the storage thing well, and it will match my other Unifi equipment…. lol
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I actually like that it’s not a Synology or QNAP. I can’t stand how those brands are trying to turn their NAS into a Swiss army knife. I don’t need my NAS to be a VM host, run Docker containers, host OpenOffice, Nextcloud, Home Assistant, act as a DNS or DHCP server, or provide LDAP, etc. I hve proxmox clusters, DC servers, and Routers that already do all of that. I need my NAS to do one thing, and one thing only—store stuff. And that’s exactly what this does. It’s a no-frills solution for straightforward storage.
That said, Ubiquiti has a bad reputation for exciting the world with new products then abandoning thrm 9 months to a year after release and leaving a bunch of early adopters with useless doorstops after they stop supporting it (ask me how i know), so I think I’ll hold off buying one until its been around for a while but it looks like a great jumping point for a platform. as it seems to be based off the UNVR Pro, I imagine the UNVR and UNVR Enterprise will eventually join the ecosystem as the UNAS and UNAS Enterprise so well see. lot of potential here.
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For simple business NAS this is probably more than adequate but anyone who wants a server like Synology/QNAP or something more advanced like Unraid won’t be interested in this at all. What would be cool is if they launched a 4U rack mount case with tons of hot swappable drive bays so we could build what the client (or Prosumers) wants.
I have a 90TB Unraid server in a desktop style ATX case. There are not many rack mount cases that work great imo other than those massive LTT style servers they build (forgot the companys name) but they don’t just sell the case.
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If it can do storage and permissions better then unraid/truenas then I could care less about vm/docker support. Proxmox does vms better and docker is just better on a dedicated machine
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I’ve got multiple Synology’s in my house, and I love them. I also have a full Unifi setup. I’d love to try transitioning to one of these in the future, but I’m going to wait until the software gets a little more polished, and some more features get added. But $500 for a 7 bay rack mountable NAS is a great price!
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ZFS? If not, I’m not interested
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What’s under the hood? TrueNAS Scale?
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I would want this but it’s lacks Docker and VM support. Without docker this is a deal breaker
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Hi, I like rack unit on wheels. Can you please share the link where you bought it from
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It’s surprising to see the same hardware as the NVR Pro, running Drive but doesn’t support Protect. If you combined the NVR and NAS into a single product line, eliminating the need to purchase and manage two separate sets of drives, I’d be ready to purchase it, even with the current software limitations. Over the past few years, Synology has been scaling back on features while continuing to charge a premium for hardware that is outdated. It’s hard to justify paying top dollar for a NAS that still ships with generations old CPU and 1Gb Ethernet. Unfortunately, UniFi’s solution doesn’t seem to be quite there yet either. I had high hopes that UniFi was going to get me out of the Synology downward spiral.
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What’s the underlying file system, BTRFS? No NFS 3 or NFS 4.1? No iSCSI LUN and target support? Upgradeable memory? Does it deliver data fast enough for 4K streaming (Plex) running on a connected device? Does seem disappointing compared to Synology.
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Question: Does it works with mixed size disks? For example like the SHR in Synology
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I don’t understand the connectivity/single PSU complaints. The thing’s 500 bucks. It’s got SFP+. This is 100% a repurposed NVR, and fit for purpose at a frankly insane price. Great for storing your jellyfin library and similar workloads. Don’t ask it to do stuff it wasn’t designed for.
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Hopefully seperate pools setup will be added in the near future 🙂
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I really like this product. Most home users these days want a “NAS” but really they want a home server that runs a lot of different services and stores files for their network and they think their NAS is supposed be that device. I appreciate that this device goes back to being what a NAS was originally intended to be and seems targeted perfectly to the small business and home business market.
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I’m not sure if it supports dynamic expansion, such as adding more hard drives later like SHR, or flexibly expanding by replacing one hard drive with a larger capacity. After all, not everyone is a professional who would spend a large amount of money to buy all the hard drives at once.
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A true lean, clean STORING machine. WONDERFUL!
UNIFI should pay you a comission. Your excellent thorough review just sold one device to me.
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You mentioned it’s quiet and I’ve heard the same from other reviewers. What HDDs were you using when you put the mic on it? It sounded just like my UNVR, which is very quiet. I can’t get over how quiet these Unifi devices are compared to my Synology with Ironwolf drives, which I can hear 2 rooms away.
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I’m not terribly impressed with the documentation on the website as it doesn’t cover what the back plane and system support. is it all SATA3 6Gb or does it also support SAS 12Gb? yes there’s only one 10Gb port BUT the fewer drives you need to saturate that bandwidth the more drives you can allocate for redundancy if you aren’t just looking to maximize storage volume. Despite my grump there, the price alone makes this device appealing and thanks for the video!
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UNIFI, take my money!!!
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Not sure how they can call this a “pro” device… Great review Rob
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Can you create an NFS share on a folder.
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@liamfoneill We have to wait for the UNAS Pro Max for NVME M.2 drive support!! 😛 😀 🙂
It’s also worth noting 1 PSU isn’t a big deal, it has a connection (from what I see from your pictures) for an RPS.
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now Unifi needs to come out with a 24bay Disk Shelf. 😀
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this NAS is a good machine for back-ups over the network
the only think I want to know is what if the unit fails (mobo/PSU) can I remove the drives and move them to another unit and have the data?
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Amazing review, thanks mate.
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ARM. Not A R M.
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This needs ubiqitui dedicated app for creating backups from phones.
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The photo sharing and date sorting is something that I am glad is present.
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Needs to have SFP+ for me to leave synology 2.5Gbps. I am very happy with synology software ecosystem (drive, photos, audio, video, VM Manager). I can’t leave that either.
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Wheres the little one that was on the website ????
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I’m wondering if the storage can be increased by adding more drives without destroying the data already there. Say you set it up in RAID6 with 4 drives and then add 3 more, do you have to wipe the array and start over or is there a way to expand the storage without losing the data already there? 7 disk bays, 10 gig and an easy to manage interface for $500 seems like a crazy good deal if you don’t want to hassle with a DIY job (which I’ve done and hate).
Edit: LOL should have finished watching the vid first
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Good start with a nice price, but I’ll just wait for the next iteration, unless I get Terramaster or Synology (if they ever release anything) soon.
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Exciting! Can’t wait for the content
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SATA SSD’s are cheap
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Cheap is not good. There could have been a bit more hardware and software for a 20% higher price.
It’s just a data repository with a fancy interface, there’s still a lot to do. I have UGreen NAS as an EA, it could do more than NAS when it came out and it’s not more expensive. For the little that the UNAS can do (lack of synchronization between PC and MAC, no NFS and iSCSI, no M.2 NVMe) you don’t need a “special” interface. And the worst thing for me is that I have 7 disks and I can’t set them up in different storage pools.
Is the video also available in slow mode? Many of the interfaces are hard to recognize and the video is extremely hectic.
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Would rather have a 4 bay at $300 and get two for HA
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Great price imo
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Great Video thanks. I’ve been waiting for something like this since I turned off my Power hungry Apple 1U Servers and huge Apple RAIDs and bought a Qnap, which I have hated for years. All I want is mountable storage , easy to use, no faffing about, couldn’t care less about Apps and Containers and real hot swappable storage. Gonna get one for sure.
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What’s the experience like for an iPhone user accessing photos/videos? Can this replace iCloud?
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give us Max version: x86 platform at least 4/8 core, nfs+iscsi, 4x NICs /2+2 10G/, nvme storage, wasabi+backblaze backup target, native apps or dockers. will happily pay 899+ EUR any day.
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That asymmetry is triggering my OCD,…..
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Sorry if i missed it but do they have any SHR like system for mixed sized drives?
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I guess the price reflect the features. But you can use it for Protect archiving recently released. I guess you have UDMP with protect and archive to this or the cloud. The cpu and memory on this are slim because it can’t run any other apps but it’s good for shuffling files. Also the Microsoft / Google account integrations for identity enterprise could be a big feature for businesses.
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I was excited until I discovered it does not have NFS or iSCSI, as I consider those services a fundamental requirement for even an entry-level NAS. I’d also love to see an NVMe RW/RO cache option.
I’d have instantly given UI my money if it had iSCSI, NFS, NVMe cache, and dual 10GB SFP+.
I guess those will come as a PRO MAX version 😛
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The perfect NAS… a pure local storage device without any extras.
When you don’t want another server, you get a NAS.
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Thank you, thank you, thank you for a great video on this system. I felt your review was very honest and unbiased. I totally agree on your Pro’s and Con’s and for me, I think the ‘current state’ of this unit is underwhelming for my needs. Maybe if they release another unit that will allow third party software, unifi surveillance integration, a better CPU, and memory upgrades. BTW. I’m almost all in on the Unifi ecosystem although I do have a QNAP and Synology NAS.
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Oh, what a great NAS!
Will it be available in Japan?
I am very much looking forward to it!
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Can I have multiple UNAS-Pros? If I need two for more than 7 drives, will that work?
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Well there goes my hope of not having to wait for synology. So you think if we dont get a synology announcement by first week of Nov no release again this year? I dont see how they would miss the holiday buying period. Unless their plan is to sell old NAS on black friday and release the new one right after and really p everyone off.
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a couple of nvme slots just for the caching would have been really nice.
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Sounds like a very good system for a backup for other NAS Systems. The possibility of 7 * 24 TB HDD for 499€. Sounds fair.
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The “Create a UI account” really seems to be disingenuous on UniFi’s part. Not being at all familiar with Unify, I would just think that it’s the normal user name and password to login locally to the desktop *User Interface* and not an online account. Unify could have been far clearer about this but I suspect that a fair number of people would have blindly proceeded with setting up the UI account which is what they are counting on. And, to put that in perspective, think back to your review of HexOS and the really solid push back by those who did not want an online login. I don’t like to do business with anyone who runs their business like that. No thanks.
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Synology is the only NAS brand where I think their software adds value beyond being a storage server. But if I’m being honest, over time as I’ve migrated most of my docker/VM services over to Proxmox or XCP-ng and have very little running on the Synology hardware itself.
I could see myself being interested in exploring Unifi as a storage server in the future, but I’d need a higher performance version.
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I love all the competition that’s popping-up recently.
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What is the Power consumption?
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Defiantly going to pick one of these up. Don’t give a hoot about the docker side, that’s why I have servers. I want a storage NAS that does just that, store things and get data to the right users, I don’t want to host my docker apps from it as well. Great video thanks for the review!
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Terramaster in 2U would be perfect option with non locked bootloader.
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How fast is it with SSDs?
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Is it even possible to saturate a 10G connection with spinning disks? Other than that, i assume this is meant to be connected to an SFP+ aggregator (USW-Aggregation) switch to split between multiple storage units
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A silent rackmount NAS is what I was searching for! Other rack mount NAS are too loud! I do not need docker, because I have docker on my Proxmox computer.
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Basically this is the NVR reworked to see if the NAS will sell, I would wait to the next generation
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This device is the beginning . It’s affordable and it’s easy to use.
If it catches on, you bet you’re bippy, more will come.
I’ve got four Synology unit in use between my family members and they are great but … I would love something that just efficiently stores data.
It also appears that it may easily, allow safe direct remote access.
I’ll have to watch how things go before I would purchase.
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So I see some real good here; one, Unifi has a track record of software upgrades, so I fully expect items like NFS/ISCSI. I do not in any way expect Plex, Docker, etc. and I shouldn’t – that isn’t who this product is aimed at. Two, the remote management through the UI account management system is a potential IT godsend in comparison to the way that this works in Synology. Three, I do like the snapshop methodology in comparison to the way that this functions in synology. Now, the biggest items I see that will be big is that it fits directly into the UI ecosphere, and that is good. Now, I can see a lot of room for improvement, but I can see where this can have a big future with some of the integration options this is going to have. I do like how this is a business ready product that isn’t moving to drives that are made by them and nothing else (screw you Synology on that one)
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Just a correction, the Unifi Power Backup is a redundant power supply, not a battery backup.
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Thanks for the deep dive. Any news on the ability to mix drive capacities?
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Soooooo ugly. I like Unifi, have a lot of their hardware. But just can’t understand why 7 drives? Why layout is so strange? Just… why? Can’t they just stack two 4-drives cases?
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Thanks for the review, well done and thorough. Not surprised to see no availability for Docker at this point. At the price point, this is great for fire storage. It’s not HA or high-speed system, which is fine. There are other players for that type of equipment. It appears that UI gave us a purpose-built system that does one thing really well, at a price that is hard to not smile at.
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This looks like a decent start – funnily enough while eating my bacon, egg and black pudding (and watching this video), I got the email from Ubiquiti titled “Welcome to Unifi Drive and UNAS Pro” (1134hrs EDT). As others have commented though, I won’t be swapping my DS920+ for the UNAS Pro. I do have a Ubiquiti network setup, so was very excited when I saw your video this morning. As always – great video and thanks for taking the time to post!
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I am… underwhelmed.
I was not expecting perfection, but… it lacks so much to be an instant buy. But yeah, it’s truly cheap (especially for Unifi) for a 2U 7 drive bay (which is really something) and would play nice into the ecosystem. But… no ZFS, no NFS, no iSCSI, no docker (because let’s be honest, even if purists say that a NAS should be just a NAS, but… it makes sense to have those hosts a few docker).
I know Unifi makes update, albeit slowly.. but.. at the moment it’s not worth it. But 500 euros… it’s super interesting when they started adding features.
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Does it support Jumbo frames?
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First galance. Where does the air flow come from to cool the drives. As not much air is going to get around those solid caddie faces. As a rackmount. Its supposed to have front to back airflow. The almost solid front panel raises questions.
The network ports have one up and one pointing down is an odd design choice. Not to mention being in the front.
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Were read/write speeds over 10GbE covered in this video?
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Did he say what OS backend it uses and what file systems the HD can use?
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This is just a pure NAS. Nothing more. I mean, yea. But at the same time it does not go up against things like Unraid or Truenas. Even OMV has more functions. For what this is, it is about $200 more then it should be for what you get. I was really looking forward to this to replace my Unraid server, but damn.
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I’d consider going with a Unifi Nas, but I don’t want rack-mount (5 bays would be great) and I’d like to see more configuration options. Docker support would be (really) nice.
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I’m disappointed in the backup options on this nas. Let’s be honest, no one will be backing up their 7 drives of data to Google Drive. That would be a insane cost. So this device doesn’t have a real, usable cloud backup that you can use. It doesn’t also have USB backup, so to backup this device you need to… get another NAS. Because you haven’t payed enough just yet.
I do agree it’s a good value target for a synology backup.
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The device feels like the perfect unit for low cost offsite backup storage. Easy to lock away in a comms rack and you wont saturate the write speeds over the wire.
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Amazing review! Thank you!!! Excited to see Uniquiti launch a simple JBOD NAS and looking forward to the future of where they take it!
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This is an superb video !
You really know your stuff and you really gave us an insight into the product, what it can and can’t do with lots of visual showing of it
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Looks like a VCR lol
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This looks really interesting to me. My big question though, what if you get more than 1 of these? Say I expand and need more than 7 drives, could I buy a second unit and have the pools merge between the 2? Because that would be cool. Also seeing performance stats of SATA SSD’s would be nice too!
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people complaining about the features for a $499 NAS drive from Ubiquiti, common guys .wait for next more expensive version will probably have all those missing features.
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No tower or 10“ version. Not suitable for a small rack in confined spaces. So my choice will be still Synology.
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what a disappointment, only 1gib network port. I would have liked it to have another sturdy switch, depending on the equipment, at least 1/2.5/5gib network connector.
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The demand was a bit manic. I missed the official announcement but guess it was today. Interesting there is only 1 of each network connection but let me watch the video
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It’s an ARM device (no virtualization means it won’t replace a home server). NEXT! ????????
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This seems interesting and I might even pull the trigger. It would be nice to have a single pane of glass to manage everything and not to have to worry about Synology and the lack of 3rd party device support. I mean from a NAS perspective it literally does just that and anything else can be added later.
Also, do we know anything about the file system or did I miss it in the video? Is it BTRFS or EXT4?
Also, more information about the backups would be awesome! Like is this sort of like hyper backup?
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Great and very timely review Thanks! Did I understand you correctly, can you uses different sized drives in the raid array (like Synology Hybrid raid) or do all drives the array need to be the same size?
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Brilliant and Honest review as always, thanks. I don’t think I will dumping my TrueNAS Scale box anytime soon, but it’s one to keep an eye on ????
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So the non pro will be the 4 bay nvr?
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Isn’t there a NAS brand called U-NAS?
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Can this do Plex hardware transcoding? ????
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I have nevered owned a NAS…just an OWC Thunderbay 4 nut need a NAS u now. So now that this item is released I’m wondering whether for my first NAS I should still stick to getting the Synology DS1522+ as a SOLO videographer and editor using 10TB per year?
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???????????? and couldn’t even get a 2.5gig port on it jeez
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why only 7 drives, at least 8 properly aligned drives…
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i wonder if the software plays nice if you wanna add a 2nd unas pro to your network down the line.
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SATA 2.5 inch SSD compatibility?
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Funny how SpaceRex uploaded his video at the same time. I guess NDA?
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Genuinely worried about this as ive been using a UNVR Pro for a while as a nas using SSH to install samba. I hope they dont artificially block people using the UNVR Pro now that there is an official NAS offering
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They could’ve gone with an Intel N100 or N200 which would’ve been so much better, even if they tack on an added $100-200 dollars to the price tag, unfortunately I’ll not be considering it. It’s nice tho, maybe they’ll release something with an Intel/AMD chip in the future…
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Well Robbie, you said so many times that with synology you pay for the software more than the hardware. It’s painfully obvious looking at this device.
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It’s one strange NAS.
Strange layout. Strange software. Strange hardware. Thermals are dubious. Rackable but lacking features standard for rack hw such as modular redundant PSUs.
Good for undemanding brand fanboys only.
When b- and c-tier brands and even nonames have started pumping out decent NAS devices, seeing such a device from a respectable brand is utterly perplexing. I’d love to get into the product development team’s heads and learn their thought processes that led to the appearance of this bucktoothed inbred monstrosity…
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Phenomenal review and THANK YOU for the well labeled chapter marks in the video. Wanted to jump around to just my highest importance spots first in the video before watching end to end.
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Release date? The US Site still has zero information about its existence
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Can’t wait for UNAS Pro ‘Max’ which has Docker and VM support ????
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Meh, the hardware specs are weak…
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Seems a little underwhelming re-using the same hardware as the UNVR-Pro with a 2012 processor and no NVMe caching.
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I think you hit it on the head at the end Robbie. I’m defo going to be replacing my onsite backup ext. drives with one of these (going by how stuff sells out on their site though, that’s probably going to be around 4/3 2025!). But it won’t be replacing the Synology for day to day work stuff that’s for sure.
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This thing is like half the price of a 8 bay synology. I was getting ready to buy an 8 bay in a couple months, but I might get this now.
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I am Supriesed by the Price. Would have expected at least double that.
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Awesome review! Can you set disks to spindown for lower power consumption when not in use?
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553,20 € the price is not that bad , but I Don’t know what the software has , does it use btrfs or zfs ?
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So is this the unvr but with new software. How are the temps.. 70?? . Can it transcode .. sorry soo excited, disappointed and confused at the same time by this nas
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Still don’t like their io on the front
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Good start, but no NVME, NFS or iSCSI – meh
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Their thinking on the 1G port is probably to use that on a management network for config management and use the 10G for data only. At least that’s usually how appliances set up like that are intended to be used. Would be nice to have more ports for flexibility though if you’re trying to do something like directly attaching vm hosts.
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and they couldn’t manage to align the FRIGGING DRIVE BAYS !!!
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Looks like your last video comments for opening CCTV and NAS has been addressed? I have just purchased the UCG_Max (F*kn brilliant!) and adopted 2 ONVIF camera (out of 3 in my setup) Awesome! And now I can also bin my sh!ty Google Doorbell and get the G4 doorbell! Oh.. and a Unify NAS? I hope i can connect that extra storage to my UCG Max!
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The price tag surprisingly low for 7 bay and it looks so good at the front
????
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I’M SO EXCITED! Let’s see how it stands up to Synology!
– Jonathan
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finally
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