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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