I've always used ZFS because it's vastly superior to other options. When I see storage companies building without fault tolerance, or without a merkle tree (so that you can backup deltas efficiently without having to recompute them) it's a sign their marketing team has more influence over the company than their engineers.
Sadly, the few ZFS COTS options have been somewhat underpowered. QNAP supports ZFS filesystems, but their backup configuration won't let you arrange for a nas to pull from the source (instead of the source doing a push.) You can still pull it off by scheduling your own cron job, but this somewhat defeats the purpose of paying extra for a vendor solution.
UBNT is still supporting my 15 year old edgerouters with security updates, and their interface is clean and usable for anyone with basic network experience. And their video surveillance solutions are unusual in that they allow you to keep your footage entirely onsite and offline, an uncommon level of privacy. If they can bring the same polish to their storage solutions, I'll be using these new products for a long time.
QNAP unforgivably uses a proprietary version of ZFS with their own extensions that are not compatible with mainline OpenZFS.
It can only zfs send/receive to other QNAP devices. While your data is protected like any other ZFS system, it is _NOT_ interoperable. You can not take a zpool out of a QNAP system and access it on another system with ZFS.
I discovered this painfully the hard way, and won't buy from them again, unless I plan to wipe the software and run something open.
I think the ZFS changes were due to needing a way to allow qnap systems to expand zfs pools. The raidz expansion features in openzfs probably took too long for qnap to wait.
The same is true for our AI processing on the cameras. This is entirely local and private. You can even air gap the UniFi Protect system from the Internet and it'll operate fine.
> This is entirely local and private. You can even air gap the UniFi Protect system from the Internet and it'll operate fine.
One week ago 3 guys broke into my shop while I was traveling. They had sense enough to power down the starlink that was providing internet which would have taken out all of the remote camera options.
They did not realize that almost everything they were doing was being recorded via the unifi system. In the end about the only thing of value left in the building was the hard drive with all of their pictures on it.
The police have used the footage to identify all of them and it will be pretty open and shut when they see a court room. Offline and air gapped the whole time they were there but did exactly what it was installed to do.
I am unable to accept that it is fully local, since you have to bind your network to their cloud just to accept the EULA. [0] I have 0% trust that a subsequent unbind truly severs the link, because this is such a shady thing to require in the first place.
I've been so impressed with Ubiquiti that I've decided to target FreeBSD for my current side project. Their camera system is wonderful. Their DreamMachine is a massive upgrade for my home network. Their APs are rock solid, no hassle, just work, and it integrates so well. I have my work / home on different subnets. I have the kids on a different subnet and behind a firewall providing some protection against ads.
The processing can happen within the camera, and it's nice when it does...but that doesn't mean that the only other option is something cloud-based, like some might assume.
Open-source NVR software like Frigate can do things like the object-detection/license plate/face recognition game on local hardware, with the cheapest available IP cameras. It's just a program that runs on a computer with a network and some storage and some processing ability like a GPU.
Those cheap cameras don't have to be trusted; with things like VLANs, they can hang out on the Group W bench where they have no access to anything important or the outside world. :)
(But yeah, it does represent much more of a DIY effort than something from UBNT does.)
I do like the onboard AI, and it works well for entity detection (like people). We haven't found the face detection to be very reliable in outdoor security applications. There doesn't seem to be a way to correct/combine classes if someone's detected as multiple individuals on different occasions, so we end up with the same person detected as 5 "unknown"s. This is not a hard problem to solve. You'd just allow embedding matching to different face groups, but it's annoying as a user.
ECC support depends on the processors that the NAS uses. A few of their NASes allow you to use ECC memory but you'd need to swap the memory installed to ECC memory. A lot of their systems use Intel cpus that don't support ECC at all so you need to carefully pick and choose.
Some do. I got the TS-873A a few years back, it works. Their software is kind of weird, and I wouldn't connect it to their cloud offering, but it does work.
Ubiquiti's biggest feature is no monthly recurring cost. I really hope they continue the streak on products like this. Seems like anything else bought up these days is switched to an MRR model with no vision into the long term viability.
The founders being the erstwhile Apple routers team, I believe they are playing the Apple game — sell good quality hardware; free the software that runs the hardware.
It says 8 Arm Neoverse N2 cores in the blog post. So not directly ARM Cortex, derived from ARM Cortex-X3 but same family as NVIDIA Grace, Google Axion and AWS Graviton4.
It's based on Neoverse N2 which in our other platforms (e.g., ENVR Core, UDM Beast, EF Core) has contributed to vast improvements in performance versus ARM Cortex.
This is how they make their money. They put out underpowered crap and constantly churn them so you have to pay them regularly. If something isn't profitable to maintain it just goes EoL.
They've been at this for a while. They do have offerings you subscribe for and pay monthly. They have also consistently offered an option for each of those offerings to bring your own or self host. They've earned my trust.
I don't believe this. They've been around since 2003, and the Unifi line started in 2010. If they were going to enshittify it would have happened by now. Cynicism is not always warranted.
That’s just patently not true for Ubiquiti. You enter the Enterprise space with them and you are paying monthly. Their very expensive Identity Enterprise monthly per user subscription and their per site support charges to be able to get help with their latest rushed release. Paying extra for Apple wallet support. And you don’t even get complete APIs in return, or proper SCIM integrations. Can’t even pull access logs via API. Infuriating company that just do not function at scale.
1. Your use case falls squarely into "you should be paying for support" territory.
2. You're setting things up incorrectly. You should be shipping logs, not scraping them when you think you need them.
The biggest concern about Ubiquiti to me is still its software/infrastructure quality.
Off top of my head, besides all the UI/UX glitches:
- They once allowed a human employee to access static AWS root access key.
- Their employee once claimed "remote access" was end to end encrypted, but later people figured out they probably just meant TLS in transit.
- They had a configuration error that allowed some users to access other users' camera feeds. They corrected the error, but never explained how the hell was it even possible or if they made any architecture design change to prevent that from happening again.
Now, ZFS is nice. But even after years of iterations, I still need to do 50% of my operations via SSH on my Truenas system. I can't imagine Ubiquiti to do any better
What did you replace them with? I am starting to look into alternatives my self as I can see the noose they have around their user's neck's slowly starting to close.
> "Dual 25 Gigabit SFP28 ports and redundant power supplies for resilience"
Can you actually saturate the links with the spinning drives?
I've had the hardest time making my TrueNAS ZFS server fast when it was filled with HDD spinning disks. I initially also had 12 of them trying to get maximum speed. I have 128GB RAM and a 10G ethernet connection. I tried all types of optimizations like L2ARC via NVMe, etc, and it wasn't very effective and just too much time spent tweaking and testing.
Instead I just threw up my hands and replaced all the spinning disks with NVMe drives for the data I actually shared (8x 4TB NVMe drives.) And now it very usable and no need for LRArc, etc. Random or streaming access is equally fast.
Best choice I made. Now I did do this over a year ago so I skipped the NVMe price inflation.
I still keep 4 spinning disks but it is for archival data that I expect to never access unless something bad happens. It is slow and I use it like a tape drive.
It does have a dual NVMe cache; those in RAID-0 will saturate (e.g. I believe just one Samsung 990 Pro can write at just over 50Gbps).
The bigger risk is the CPU. This is an issue with the Ubiquiti UNAS Pro 8, their ~$800 USD 8 bay NAS. In theory it has 10gig networking. In practice the CPU physically cannot transfer bits fast enough, because its a dinky underpowered ARM CPU that they clearly chose to hit that quite affordable price point. Its a decent trade-off, because similar units from Synology are more like $1600, and you can meaningfully hit somewhere between 2.5gig and 10gig; but saturating 10gig is out of the question.
The ENAS has a beefier CPU so it might keep up with 25gig (could this do 50gig bonded?). But only testing will tell.
This says the UNAS Pro 8 can saturate 20gbe with reads. It won't with just a single user, though, so for homelab enthusiasts it's less attractive even though the price is appealing. But for an actual small business using it to serve a handful of people? The 10gbe isn't a waste
You can hit 10 gig aggregate on an A57 quite easily, given standard memory bandwidth (I've done it). They must be doing something stupid on the software side, like too many copies. Or if you're trying to shove 10 gig in one flow at 1500 mtu yeah that might be painful.
I have a backup node with a 40G NIC & a ZFS pool of just 8x HDDs set up as a pool of two RAIDZ1 vdevs striped together (i.e. 4x drives in raidz1-0 & 4x drives in raidz1-1 make up the "backup" pool). Restoring full backup images to another server I usually get ~11-12 Gbps over NFS, no flash cache or anything involved.
Honestly, outside of random access/small file access, my primary NVMe ZFS server isn't all that much faster in raw throughput - despite being 22x NVMe drives going direct to the CPU instead of 8 HDDs going through a SATA controller. I think it's easier to hit other bottlenecks with ZFS/network transfers well before the disk throughput itself. E.g., enabling jumbo frames for NFS did still give me a decent perf/efficiency bonus.
> Can you actually saturate the links with the spinning drives?
I can mostly saturate my toy 100gbit link with it on read (to memory, since the other side also needs to not be the problem). Just for as long as it's already in the ZFS cache (which can be huge with in the hundreds GB of ram in servers in general). Not in practice since when you hit the disks you take a massive penalty, but then again, it can be done.
> Can you actually saturate the links with the spinning drives?
There can easily be a bottleneck depending on how the setup the sata/sas, but if you can get sustained sequential reads or writes, 16x drives at 6 Gbps sata should be able to saturate 2x 25 Gbps ethernet. The store link shows two expansion ports as well which should help get bandwidth to the point where 25 Gbps is useful.
Less likely with random reads/writes or mixed use.
I got a 10G ethernet network card for my NAS only to realize it has to overlap with my modem's supported bandwidths (IIRC 2.5G, 5G).
Knowing nothing about the space, I had assumed it would use max(node1, node2), but instead it negotiated a 1G link. So it was faster to use the mobo's built-in 2.5G port.
with the zil/slog on nvme yes -- you would want redundant power, UPS and a raid of nvme drives but with all that in place the data would get securely written to flash media before being flushed to spinning rust.
That seems reasonable, I don't buy NAS for datacenters (just run a modest 80tb one for my home lab) but equivalent rackmount 16-bay ones from other vendors would be more expensive (maybe $5k-6k?) and with less polish.
I paid ~$4900 in October 2021 for a TrueNAS MiniXL+ with 8x14TB, 2x480G SSD (L2ARC/ZIL) and 64GB RAM, 2x10Gbps, with 3 year support direct from IxSystems. The CPU is an 8 core Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU C3758 @ 2.20GHzStill going strong. I had drive failure and they replaced it. I had a fan failure and they replaced the fans. The price of the UI kit in 2026 seems to be reasonable.
That's without storage. They are charging $750 each for 24tb HDD's, so filling it up brings that cost to $16k. Only need to run it for 13+ years and have zero HDD failures in that time, and then pay for all the media you are going to load it up with. Not exactly sure this would be cheaper or easier than just paying for streaming services and cancelling them when you don't need them.
Isn't this the name of some other company or something already? Come on you can throw together letters randomly and come up with something original. Get AI to help maybe?
First hand experience many times over: there is little more regrettable than placing Ubiquitis latest test-it-in-prod release in to an Enterprise setting.
Proxmox's record in 2025 wasn't particularly great but it's a hell of a lot better than Ubiquiti's. And before someone starts complaining that it's not a fair comparison because Ubiquiti has so many more products: they have a unified OS and management tools. They also have orders of magnitude more revenue and can afford far more in engineering resources.
Ubiquiti has another cool device: a little travel router that you can configure with WireGuard to VPN into your home network and make yourself safer while on coffee shop and airport wifi.
It is nice to be able to access your local NAS and LLMs while away from home too.
It is indeed nice to be able to access local things while away from home but a VPN isn’t making you meaningfully safer on public WiFi networks. They’re all using proper encryption over the air now, I can count on one hand how many coffee shop networks I’ve seen without client isolation, and anything that matters should be happening over TLS regardless which means at worst the network operator sees your DNS requests.
I was literally looking today to see if there was any news on this, because it’s been widely assumed that they’d release it.
$4000 is… a lot. I can buy a used CSE-846 for about 1/4 of that, an X10–era mobo for a few hundred bucks, and have 1.5x the bays (tbf, also 4U instead of 3U). Managing ZFS is just not that hard; it’s not Ceph. If you want easy mode, throw TrueNAS on it, and you’ll get an awesome UX that abstracts away everything difficult.
If this were < $3000, I’d probably buy it. I’ve been holding off on replacing my two CSE-826 because I’ve been waiting for this to come out. Disappointing.
This is not a homelab replacement part. It’s enterprise with all the positive and negatives that come with that phrase. The second you start talking about old X hardware, it’s a different product class.
For that use case I recommend UNas from ugreen or the minis forum ryzen Ai stuff.
Think about the competitors - they're aiming at the Synology RackStations and similar, which are $3-5k without drives.
The segment UI and Synology are in are 10x more than the minisforum, beelink, qnap, cwwk type devices, but still 1/10 of the price of getting started in enterprise gear from HPe, Dell, Pure, etc.
Is this some xBSD or UniFi OS (debian) with ZFSoL? Can't tell from what they've written. 8C+64GB: enough for essential block+file service, but not for dedup and other demanding ZFS features. Also, doesn't appear the controller is redundant; just the power supplies. iSCSI is headlined; nice they didn't limit this to file. No mention of object store, or NVMe-oF.
Seems like a nice, basic, affordable platform for workgroup/SME stuff. Not NetApp/Pure Storage "enterprise" grade though.
They seem to follow the anti-corruption layer model for most of their offerings, so I would expect they use what ever OS is best supported by the upstream.
It is a large reason they can mitigate vendor risk IMHO, offering different tiers of switches as an example without being held hostage by on particular switch IC vendor like many brands.
I do wish someone would take up comstar though, netapp bought and killed several jbod lines etc… to kill it before Oracle bought Sun and also killed it to protect their enterprise storage offerings.
NVMe-oF may be a possibility because there are FPGA IP vendors but without comstar there are some challenges IMHO.
It's nice that they're doing this, but don't bet the farm on this product until they release a second version. Not saying I've been burned by them pulling a product and then memory-holing its existence, but, um.
Been a long time fan of Ubiquiti, and I think this product will do particularly well in small-medium businesses. Think of the local marketing firm with 40 employees. They likely have an office with Unifi networking, and they LIKELY hire an MSP to do their IT work. An MSP will easily try to sell this as their storage solution since they can manage the infrastructure with one login to the UBNT dashboard.
This is interesting, I'm not sure I fully understand how this compares to their UNAS offerings. I can't remember off the top of my head if UNAS does m.2 cache drives.
I bought the 8-bay UNAS ($799.00) but have yet to put a drive in it yet since the costs are out of control for hard drives currently. I'm still using my 2x 12-bay Synology for now.
I hope they don't abandon or lose focus of their UNAS offerings (and/or they get better) since I had planned to buy 2-3 more 8-bay UNAS units once I can afford the drives for them.
The price looks kinda rough. I built a server that stomps this for under a grand (vs their 4k). Stronger CPU, likely faster ram, optane zfs cache instead of nvme...
Admittedly my 1 grand is referenced off pre AI insanity pricing. Call it 1.5 today
Point is someone willing to roll the dicey on AMD consumer CPUs doing ECC can beat everything else out there
[for those contemplating...asus crosshair viii dark hero is where you want to start looking ) And reminder that these boards take UDIMMs not RDIMMs...do not assume suppliers understand the difference
I always forget that these things aren't for me. My immediate thought is always immediately "just build your own NAS with a vanilla Linux box and set up Samba or something because then you can make it however you want".
But of course, if I'm someone who knows how to build a NAS and is inclined to do such a thing, then I'm sort of inherently not the kind of person that would be interested in such things and not the audience they're marketing towards, which is obviously fine.
I've been a sysadmin for decades, dealt with *nix based servers since the late 90s, yet for the most part I've used devices like Synology servers, simply because I don't want to have to manage technology to that degree at home.
I've built my own NAS when my last synology died, and I'm not sure I'll build one again. I've dealt with all sorts of issues that I just haven't had to deal with with a packaged solution, and I really just want to not think about that stuff when I'm not working.
Yes, I can absolutely do it for cheaper, better, and with more flexibility myself. Doesn't mean I actually want to.
> I really just want to not think about that stuff when I'm not working.
This is my exact attitude but I don't have decades of sysadmin experience to lean on so I'm completely lost on what approach to take setting up my first NAS.
My requirements are simple: (1) Should be plug and play (hardware + software) (2) Must support ZFS since I already set up a pool in my beefy desktop PC.
What would you recommend? I've looked into Synology's offerings and they look perfect except for the fact that they don't support ZFS only Btrfs. I clicked into this thread expecting Ubiquiti's offering would be what I want, but all I see here is hardcore enterprise gear for the prosumer crowd.
What kind of issues? I just set up a very home tier NAS setup for my home server.
Got a 4 bay usb hard drive enclosure and then just set up a btrfs raid array since my drives are all different speeds and capacities. The thing is only about as fast as a single hard drive but it does pool all the storage in to one unified storage and is way faster than google drive.
Companies are also much more inclined to spend money to solve a problem while hobbyists are much more likely to get enjoyment out of the process of building. I'm firmly in the latter category, having built a rather robust ZFS array on NixOS with a pretty gnarly NVMe cache hierarchy built on LVM. It was fun to do.
I don't have the NVMe cache but I too have quite a robost ZFS array on NixOS. I feel less guilty about running it now since it is powered almost exclusively off solar in my backyard :)
i like their gear, I bought a whole bunch, but I couldn't and can't figure out how to give my wife access to their Protect app as well. It's absurd to the point where their MFA sent doesn't work when trying to authorize her - and judging by reddit posts etc I'm not the only one. Such mundane things are where UI falls apart, wrong details. Instead of giving elves resources to pack each individual rackmount screw, if they spent some more time on workflows and software, they'd be a truly great company.
I haven’t encountered this bug, but I have been frustrated that there’s no way to give a babysitter temporary access to the cameras in the kids’ rooms.
I ended up hosting a local site that embeds the RTSP feeds, which works pretty well, but I was surprised that there’s no native way to do it
They still require you to buy their overpriced (even by AI bubble standards) NVMe drives with zero third-party support. There is a project that adds third-party SSD support for newer Synology devices, but you need to redo it every time your NAS updates, so it's very much unsupported. Would definitely not say that they "recanted immediately".
Synology also don't (didn't?) offer a ZFS product, which is why I bought a QNAP. Restriction-free and ZFS storage. Apparently you can also completely replace the OS if you want, although I haven't tried it.
What is the current state of ZFS? I know it had some licensing issues traditionally, despite it being a delight to use every time I've tried it. Is it back?
Never went away, Linux is now the primary target platform for OpenZFS (which is basically synonymous with ZFS these days). TrueNAS/iXSystems (probably the main commercial company using ZFS) moved from FreeBSD to Linux. Major new features like pool expansion have been added after years of requests. Etc., it's a good time for ZFS on Linux.
There ARE licensing issues related to shipping it compiled into the kernel, but you can install it as a kernel module on every mainline distro nowadays which is functionally the same from a user perspective.
ZFS on Linux works great, but with most distributions, it will compile the kernel module on device upon installation. Only Ubuntu distributes binaries.
As a consequence, you don't necessarily want a rolling distro, as the ZFS module can get out of sync with the kernel.
ZFS itself is build for both BSD and Linux from the same source, so there's feature parity there.
I've been using ZFS on linux for like... 14 years now? I've migrated through centos, ubuntu, and debian during that time and the zpools never had any issues that weren't hardware related.
ZFS is my favorite filesystem. I even use it on single drives because its snapshots and online data integrity checking are so great.
I even use it on single spinning rust USB drives. Zero problems.
Ubiquiti bubble is so tiring, it is like AI bubble and Apple bubble. These people live within a bubble.
Overpriced piece of hardware that you will never own because it runs proprietary firmware, you are forced to install apps to take full advantage from those devices.
I guess routers and access points are easy to replace with a normal OS but I’m yet to see a managed l2 or l3 switch that runs user provider OS. I’d ditch anything in an eye blink if there was some kind of fully open source network stack that can be controlled through infrastructure code. Affordable that is, not including that Nvidia thingie.
Business: aruba instant-on. They cost more and updates are much less frequent. They are also more reliable and the support experience is far superior even though it is HP.
I am highly interested in this, especially if it works well with Time Machine to do backups over the network. I've got a fully 10GbE + WiFi 7 network w/ Ubiquiti gear already, would love to ditch my janky DIY NAS setup for something that is integrated with the rest and could potentially give me a better backup setup for my photography as well as enough storage to act as a media server.
I have a UNAS-Pro, which runs the same Unifi Drive software as this, and it works great for Time Machine backups. Dead simple.
I also have tons of other Ubiquiti gear, and honestly there's not a ton of synergy between the NAS and everything else. It's a great NAS though. And also, it's only a NAS. It's not an application server like a Synology NAS.
Wireless Time Machine backup works until one day, Time Machine decides to shit the bed. Do not trust it. Invest in a different backup solution if your data is at all important to you. Something like Arq or Backblaze or tarsnap.
I hear this sentiment a lot, but I've not had a problem with Time Machine in years across multiple MacBooks in my household. Backing up to TrueNAS. Unifi networking. It Just Works.
I just checked any my oldest TM backup for the MacBook from which I'm typing is 2023-09-14. This MacBook has a 2 TB SSD and I have the TM volume quota set to 3 TB. TM culls old backups as needed.
The TM GUI is still terrible, but you can use `tmutil listbackups` to easily access backups from the command line.
I use the 3-2-1 strategy for backups. I keep one copy off-site by using cloud backups, currently I primarily use Backblaze for that purpose but am considering alternatives for several reasons. I keep a second copy on an external SSD via Time Machine, and I keep one copy on-device. I'd like to use network Time Machine to get rid of the inconvenience of having a bunch of USB external SSDs floating around, especially since none of them are large enough to backup my entire drive if I get close to filling it.
I appreciate the perspective, I definitely take backups seriously for my photography.
Can’t wrap my head around how their firewall rules work. Default rule and there is no way to change it.
And lately the interface has been so convoluted and nonsensical. DNS records sure now “policies”, you can only assign very essential rules like setting routing rules to known objects based on MAC address - the ui doesn’t allow you to pick an IP address.
I wanted to create a special routing rules to allow a container using macvlans to always leave through ISP2. Since this is a macvlan the interface MAC address was different every time the system started. Mind you “ip x.x.x.x goes through link 2” is one of those basic things firewalls and routers do since forever but if the object doesn’t exist on their automated inventory then forget it.
This is a marketing announcement about a new enterprise NAS product+product line.
The UNAS line from 2024 was targeted for smaller/simpler prosumer type setups (2-8 drives, no ECC, often no power redundancy, weaker CPUs, & 2.5G-10G networking) and still uses Btrfs on top of traditional RAID.
My experience of Ubiquiti is through their Dream Router 7. What a piece of crap that is. Can't even get good WiFi in adjacent rooms where same ancient Asus router wasn't breaking a sweat. Connection drop outs are a nice bonus. Don't forget booting for ages, fan noise etc.
If other products are so bad like that one, I don't know what is the hype for this company.
Then-still-independent Sun sold storage appliances, and during their development and debugging it was noticed that vibrations effected performance… by yelling at the drives:
I have enough dollars and hours invested with Ubiquiti to have an opinion here.
They manage to make performant, capable hardware for a decent price. Then they give you shit configuration tools, a shit configuration experience, vendor lock in, and forced to the cloud. So on balance no thank you per my personal priorities.
If you expect cloud and vendor lock in is a plus that you’re accustomed to with other maybe enterprise vendors, by all means.
Are Ubiquiti products commonplace for companies that contract with the US government outside of the DoD/DoW?
Since DoD/DoW generally requires STIG compliance, and none authored are for any specific Ubiquiti product, we can cross that off the list. Sure they can get exceptions or use a more generalized STIG but stakeholders generally have pre-defined limitations on what they will and will not allow on networks they sponsor.
The Defense Industrial Base is 10s of thousands of companies. May are small businesses. Many need to obtain CMMC Level 2, which has requirements for FIPS certified encryption. Our systems do not directly connect to Government systems and those STIGs may not apply directly. So, could I use Ubiquiti in some places? Maybe, not to store controlled information in this case. I could probably store previously fips encrypted files there. Would I want to use Ubiquiti cloud services? No.
I built a 12-bay NAS recently. I snagged a 5900X/Supermicro server board/128GB DDR4 ECC combo for only $680 on eBay right before memory prices went apeshit. It has IPMI and 2x10g. Suffice to say I belive you can roll your own appliance like this for considerably less money, and have far more control over it. I say this as a Unifi fanboi.
Nice that it's plain OpenZFS, no paid license layer, yay! Ubiquiti sometimes ships v1 hardware and ghosts their own roadmap, but this kinda neuters the downside. If they lose interest, you just pull the disks and zpool import on any box (assuming feature flag parity). That's a saner path than Synology, with their "unauthorized" drive warnings.
I love by Dream Machine Pro. Seems to just work and keep everything up to date. I have it running my security cameras as well and it has been pretty much bullet proof.
What needs do you have for a router that the Cloud Gateway is missing or is bad at? A PiHole equivalent is about all I can think I'm missing.
I went with eero and really wish I'd gone with unifi
Apart from the shitty software and basic features either missing or locked behind a monthly cost, the network itself is not bad at all, I get 600-700mbps on wifi throughout the house and have my servers wired on 2.5gbe
But the one thing I really thought I was buying into by choosing an amazon brand was ease when it came to buying upgrades, and yet I ended up having to buy extra hardware (like the wired gateway) from ebay and sellers in the US as amazon does not sell their own hardware everywhere
Who said it was bad? I thought we were all pretty much in agreement that it was good, and the only thing holding it back from wider adoption into e.g. the Linux kernel was the poison-pill of Oracle's ownership and licensing.
Some years ago, there were mud-slinging myths being thrown around about ZFS.
Things like "ZFS needs 1GB of RAM per 1TB of storage" and "it requires that RAM to be ECC" were once common to find online.
These sort of thing seemed to lead to widespread beliefs that it was inefficient, expensive, and fragile. None of that is true, of course, but folks might remember and believe these myths and conclude that it is (or was) bad.
(But it's pretty excellent. I've been using it for about a decade, now. It'd be nice if it fit into the Linux kernel better, but I manage anyway.)
Actually the licensing issues were from Linux developers' side - Oracle has nothing to say (as the license to the code and patents was given before Oracle got their grubby hands), and Sun IIRC expected CDDL to work similar to the AFS precedent where non-derivative, non-GPL code was allowed into kernel.
The only lawsuit specifically about licensing was from few Linux developers through SFC who disagree with common consensus on how GPL applies in that case and sued Ubuntu for shipping ZFS as a module.
another thing holding it back is the threat of a lawsuit from Netapp.
source: used to work for a storage vendor that was marketing a NAS based on ZFS and got credible threats from Netapp to the point that we sought a partnership with Oracle that included indemnification under Oracles settlement with Netapp.
I'm glad to see UBNT in this space.
I've always used ZFS because it's vastly superior to other options. When I see storage companies building without fault tolerance, or without a merkle tree (so that you can backup deltas efficiently without having to recompute them) it's a sign their marketing team has more influence over the company than their engineers.
Sadly, the few ZFS COTS options have been somewhat underpowered. QNAP supports ZFS filesystems, but their backup configuration won't let you arrange for a nas to pull from the source (instead of the source doing a push.) You can still pull it off by scheduling your own cron job, but this somewhat defeats the purpose of paying extra for a vendor solution.
UBNT is still supporting my 15 year old edgerouters with security updates, and their interface is clean and usable for anyone with basic network experience. And their video surveillance solutions are unusual in that they allow you to keep your footage entirely onsite and offline, an uncommon level of privacy. If they can bring the same polish to their storage solutions, I'll be using these new products for a long time.
QNAP unforgivably uses a proprietary version of ZFS with their own extensions that are not compatible with mainline OpenZFS. It can only zfs send/receive to other QNAP devices. While your data is protected like any other ZFS system, it is _NOT_ interoperable. You can not take a zpool out of a QNAP system and access it on another system with ZFS. I discovered this painfully the hard way, and won't buy from them again, unless I plan to wipe the software and run something open.
I think the ZFS changes were due to needing a way to allow qnap systems to expand zfs pools. The raidz expansion features in openzfs probably took too long for qnap to wait.
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Amusingly, most of my old qnap hardware ran Ubuntu pretty well
The same is true for our AI processing on the cameras. This is entirely local and private. You can even air gap the UniFi Protect system from the Internet and it'll operate fine.
> This is entirely local and private. You can even air gap the UniFi Protect system from the Internet and it'll operate fine.
One week ago 3 guys broke into my shop while I was traveling. They had sense enough to power down the starlink that was providing internet which would have taken out all of the remote camera options.
They did not realize that almost everything they were doing was being recorded via the unifi system. In the end about the only thing of value left in the building was the hard drive with all of their pictures on it.
The police have used the footage to identify all of them and it will be pretty open and shut when they see a court room. Offline and air gapped the whole time they were there but did exactly what it was installed to do.
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I am unable to accept that it is fully local, since you have to bind your network to their cloud just to accept the EULA. [0] I have 0% trust that a subsequent unbind truly severs the link, because this is such a shady thing to require in the first place.
[0] https://community.ui.com/questions/e3d50641-5c00-4607-9723-4...
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I've been so impressed with Ubiquiti that I've decided to target FreeBSD for my current side project. Their camera system is wonderful. Their DreamMachine is a massive upgrade for my home network. Their APs are rock solid, no hassle, just work, and it integrates so well. I have my work / home on different subnets. I have the kids on a different subnet and behind a firewall providing some protection against ads.
Very happy customer here.
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Any way to get Protect iOS notifications if using local mode only? Eg, using local local login but away from home.
The processing can happen within the camera, and it's nice when it does...but that doesn't mean that the only other option is something cloud-based, like some might assume.
Open-source NVR software like Frigate can do things like the object-detection/license plate/face recognition game on local hardware, with the cheapest available IP cameras. It's just a program that runs on a computer with a network and some storage and some processing ability like a GPU.
Those cheap cameras don't have to be trusted; with things like VLANs, they can hang out on the Group W bench where they have no access to anything important or the outside world. :)
(But yeah, it does represent much more of a DIY effort than something from UBNT does.)
I do like the onboard AI, and it works well for entity detection (like people). We haven't found the face detection to be very reliable in outdoor security applications. There doesn't seem to be a way to correct/combine classes if someone's detected as multiple individuals on different occasions, so we end up with the same person detected as 5 "unknown"s. This is not a hard problem to solve. You'd just allow embedding matching to different face groups, but it's annoying as a user.
Hey, why can't I get full-resolution 4k snapshots off my G5 Pro bullet?
Can I use it without running some inane management VM?
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The cost is just insane though. $4-$500 for a camera that I can get equivalent specs for $50-100.
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> QNAP supports ZFS filesystems
Do they have ecc on those models? Do you have an example model on hand?
ECC support depends on the processors that the NAS uses. A few of their NASes allow you to use ECC memory but you'd need to swap the memory installed to ECC memory. A lot of their systems use Intel cpus that don't support ECC at all so you need to carefully pick and choose.
Don't buy a QNAP if you care about real ZFS. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48593360
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Some do. I got the TS-873A a few years back, it works. Their software is kind of weird, and I wouldn't connect it to their cloud offering, but it does work.
What's UBNT?
Obviously it's the singular form of Ubuntu. Like, one "ubunt", two "ubuntu", etc.
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Stock symbol for Ubquiti, the company being discussed.
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Ubiquity Networks Inc.
Ubiquiti's biggest feature is no monthly recurring cost. I really hope they continue the streak on products like this. Seems like anything else bought up these days is switched to an MRR model with no vision into the long term viability.
The founders being the erstwhile Apple routers team, I believe they are playing the Apple game — sell good quality hardware; free the software that runs the hardware.
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I just wish they would put better processors in their stuff. Is this yet another NAS powered by an ARM Cortex?
I have heard others say the same as you about Ubiquiti devices. I genuinely curious what bottlenecks you've hit.
I've only been using Ubiquiti as a pro-sumer, but it has held up well for my use case of Plex and little game servers.
I use a Synology NAS for my storage though, which is a slightly beefier mobile AMD chipset.
I'd be very interested to know what I should and shouldn't expect from my ARM based network stack though!
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It says 8 Arm Neoverse N2 cores in the blog post. So not directly ARM Cortex, derived from ARM Cortex-X3 but same family as NVIDIA Grace, Google Axion and AWS Graviton4.
It's based on Neoverse N2 which in our other platforms (e.g., ENVR Core, UDM Beast, EF Core) has contributed to vast improvements in performance versus ARM Cortex.
This is how they make their money. They put out underpowered crap and constantly churn them so you have to pay them regularly. If something isn't profitable to maintain it just goes EoL.
*yet
They will at some point just cash out.
They've been at this for a while. They do have offerings you subscribe for and pay monthly. They have also consistently offered an option for each of those offerings to bring your own or self host. They've earned my trust.
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They are already a public company.
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I don't believe this. They've been around since 2003, and the Unifi line started in 2010. If they were going to enshittify it would have happened by now. Cynicism is not always warranted.
That’s just patently not true for Ubiquiti. You enter the Enterprise space with them and you are paying monthly. Their very expensive Identity Enterprise monthly per user subscription and their per site support charges to be able to get help with their latest rushed release. Paying extra for Apple wallet support. And you don’t even get complete APIs in return, or proper SCIM integrations. Can’t even pull access logs via API. Infuriating company that just do not function at scale.
Quite honestly it sounds like:
1. Your use case falls squarely into "you should be paying for support" territory. 2. You're setting things up incorrectly. You should be shipping logs, not scraping them when you think you need them.
The biggest concern about Ubiquiti to me is still its software/infrastructure quality.
Off top of my head, besides all the UI/UX glitches:
- They once allowed a human employee to access static AWS root access key.
- Their employee once claimed "remote access" was end to end encrypted, but later people figured out they probably just meant TLS in transit.
- They had a configuration error that allowed some users to access other users' camera feeds. They corrected the error, but never explained how the hell was it even possible or if they made any architecture design change to prevent that from happening again.
Now, ZFS is nice. But even after years of iterations, I still need to do 50% of my operations via SSH on my Truenas system. I can't imagine Ubiquiti to do any better
Also a lot of vulnerabilities: https://app.opencve.io/cve/?vendor=ubiquiti
Yeah this is why I disable remote access and setup tailscale.
Its annoying but with Claude and a little knowledge you can make it persistent. By default it got wiped every update which was annoying.
I sold my Unifi APs, they broke DHCP over wifi multiple times. If you can't QA/Test basic 101 features like that, I have zero trust in your security.
What did you replace them with? I am starting to look into alternatives my self as I can see the noose they have around their user's neck's slowly starting to close.
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They’ve had router firmware updates that have borked networks a few years ago. Software QA processes weren’t up to snuff.
> "Dual 25 Gigabit SFP28 ports and redundant power supplies for resilience"
Can you actually saturate the links with the spinning drives?
I've had the hardest time making my TrueNAS ZFS server fast when it was filled with HDD spinning disks. I initially also had 12 of them trying to get maximum speed. I have 128GB RAM and a 10G ethernet connection. I tried all types of optimizations like L2ARC via NVMe, etc, and it wasn't very effective and just too much time spent tweaking and testing.
Instead I just threw up my hands and replaced all the spinning disks with NVMe drives for the data I actually shared (8x 4TB NVMe drives.) And now it very usable and no need for LRArc, etc. Random or streaming access is equally fast.
Best choice I made. Now I did do this over a year ago so I skipped the NVMe price inflation.
I still keep 4 spinning disks but it is for archival data that I expect to never access unless something bad happens. It is slow and I use it like a tape drive.
It does have a dual NVMe cache; those in RAID-0 will saturate (e.g. I believe just one Samsung 990 Pro can write at just over 50Gbps).
The bigger risk is the CPU. This is an issue with the Ubiquiti UNAS Pro 8, their ~$800 USD 8 bay NAS. In theory it has 10gig networking. In practice the CPU physically cannot transfer bits fast enough, because its a dinky underpowered ARM CPU that they clearly chose to hit that quite affordable price point. Its a decent trade-off, because similar units from Synology are more like $1600, and you can meaningfully hit somewhere between 2.5gig and 10gig; but saturating 10gig is out of the question.
The ENAS has a beefier CPU so it might keep up with 25gig (could this do 50gig bonded?). But only testing will tell.
https://www.storagereview.com/review/ubiquiti-unas-pro-8-rev...
This says the UNAS Pro 8 can saturate 20gbe with reads. It won't with just a single user, though, so for homelab enthusiasts it's less attractive even though the price is appealing. But for an actual small business using it to serve a handful of people? The 10gbe isn't a waste
You can hit 10 gig aggregate on an A57 quite easily, given standard memory bandwidth (I've done it). They must be doing something stupid on the software side, like too many copies. Or if you're trying to shove 10 gig in one flow at 1500 mtu yeah that might be painful.
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I have a backup node with a 40G NIC & a ZFS pool of just 8x HDDs set up as a pool of two RAIDZ1 vdevs striped together (i.e. 4x drives in raidz1-0 & 4x drives in raidz1-1 make up the "backup" pool). Restoring full backup images to another server I usually get ~11-12 Gbps over NFS, no flash cache or anything involved.
Honestly, outside of random access/small file access, my primary NVMe ZFS server isn't all that much faster in raw throughput - despite being 22x NVMe drives going direct to the CPU instead of 8 HDDs going through a SATA controller. I think it's easier to hit other bottlenecks with ZFS/network transfers well before the disk throughput itself. E.g., enabling jumbo frames for NFS did still give me a decent perf/efficiency bonus.
> Can you actually saturate the links with the spinning drives?
I can mostly saturate my toy 100gbit link with it on read (to memory, since the other side also needs to not be the problem). Just for as long as it's already in the ZFS cache (which can be huge with in the hundreds GB of ram in servers in general). Not in practice since when you hit the disks you take a massive penalty, but then again, it can be done.
> Can you actually saturate the links with the spinning drives?
There can easily be a bottleneck depending on how the setup the sata/sas, but if you can get sustained sequential reads or writes, 16x drives at 6 Gbps sata should be able to saturate 2x 25 Gbps ethernet. The store link shows two expansion ports as well which should help get bandwidth to the point where 25 Gbps is useful.
Less likely with random reads/writes or mixed use.
I must have had a bottle neck somewhere.
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Made me think of this:
I got a 10G ethernet network card for my NAS only to realize it has to overlap with my modem's supported bandwidths (IIRC 2.5G, 5G).
Knowing nothing about the space, I had assumed it would use max(node1, node2), but instead it negotiated a 1G link. So it was faster to use the mobo's built-in 2.5G port.
The 2.5g/5g 'multigig' standard came out a million years after 10g-baseT. Cheap ex-enterprise 10g cards don't know how to do the middle speeds.
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You can fill it with SSDs, and SFP28 is so common the prices are cheap:
https://www.fs.com/c/25g-sfp28-3215
But no, spinning disks won't saturate it, even if you were doing 100% sequential reads.
(I originally said fill it with NVMe - I was wrong)
It looks like you can put 2 nvme drives in it, for caching.
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With NVMe-oF and RDMA I can saturate a 25G link with spinning disks easiliy with around 16 drives.
with the zil/slog on nvme yes -- you would want redundant power, UPS and a raid of nvme drives but with all that in place the data would get securely written to flash media before being flushed to spinning rust.
Store page: https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/network-storage/products...
$3999
That seems reasonable, I don't buy NAS for datacenters (just run a modest 80tb one for my home lab) but equivalent rackmount 16-bay ones from other vendors would be more expensive (maybe $5k-6k?) and with less polish.
> a modest 80tb one for my home lab
I laughed.
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Yeah, I'd certainly take it over this:
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1618911-REG/synology_...
I paid ~$4900 in October 2021 for a TrueNAS MiniXL+ with 8x14TB, 2x480G SSD (L2ARC/ZIL) and 64GB RAM, 2x10Gbps, with 3 year support direct from IxSystems. The CPU is an 8 core Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU C3758 @ 2.20GHzStill going strong. I had drive failure and they replaced it. I had a fan failure and they replaced the fans. The price of the UI kit in 2026 seems to be reasonable.
Pays for itself in ~40 months of not paying $100/month for streaming services.
Edit: Drives are not included :(
That's without storage. They are charging $750 each for 24tb HDD's, so filling it up brings that cost to $16k. Only need to run it for 13+ years and have zero HDD failures in that time, and then pay for all the media you are going to load it up with. Not exactly sure this would be cheaper or easier than just paying for streaming services and cancelling them when you don't need them.
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Yes piracy costs less than paying for content. You could also just use a standard usb HDD to torrent to, or even stream torrents for free.
A more fair comparison is this nas vs another brands nas. Or compared to S3 if you just need a place to dump files.
The drives are the expensive part, though - 16x24TB HDDs adds another $11k.
(Not that you need that much for canceling streaming, I’d get a home Synology or diy TrueNAS for that anyway)
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Isn't this the name of some other company or something already? Come on you can throw together letters randomly and come up with something original. Get AI to help maybe?
“Enterprise”
First hand experience many times over: there is little more regrettable than placing Ubiquitis latest test-it-in-prod release in to an Enterprise setting.
https://app.opencve.io/cve/?vendor=ubiquiti
Yeah, that's the kind of people you want to be running your company's storage appliance.
Tons of those are pretty basic web security stuff. Nearly as bad as TP-Link, a bargain-basement brand.
Compare and contrast:
https://app.opencve.io/cve/?vendor=freenas
https://app.opencve.io/cve/?q=vendor%3Aproxmox
Proxmox's record in 2025 wasn't particularly great but it's a hell of a lot better than Ubiquiti's. And before someone starts complaining that it's not a fair comparison because Ubiquiti has so many more products: they have a unified OS and management tools. They also have orders of magnitude more revenue and can afford far more in engineering resources.
https://app.opencve.io/cve/?q=vendor%3Acisco
What about Cisco?
UI is so overrated.
Ubiquiti has another cool device: a little travel router that you can configure with WireGuard to VPN into your home network and make yourself safer while on coffee shop and airport wifi.
It is nice to be able to access your local NAS and LLMs while away from home too.
It is indeed nice to be able to access local things while away from home but a VPN isn’t making you meaningfully safer on public WiFi networks. They’re all using proper encryption over the air now, I can count on one hand how many coffee shop networks I’ve seen without client isolation, and anything that matters should be happening over TLS regardless which means at worst the network operator sees your DNS requests.
I was literally looking today to see if there was any news on this, because it’s been widely assumed that they’d release it.
$4000 is… a lot. I can buy a used CSE-846 for about 1/4 of that, an X10–era mobo for a few hundred bucks, and have 1.5x the bays (tbf, also 4U instead of 3U). Managing ZFS is just not that hard; it’s not Ceph. If you want easy mode, throw TrueNAS on it, and you’ll get an awesome UX that abstracts away everything difficult.
If this were < $3000, I’d probably buy it. I’ve been holding off on replacing my two CSE-826 because I’ve been waiting for this to come out. Disappointing.
This is not a homelab replacement part. It’s enterprise with all the positive and negatives that come with that phrase. The second you start talking about old X hardware, it’s a different product class.
For that use case I recommend UNas from ugreen or the minis forum ryzen Ai stuff.
Think about the competitors - they're aiming at the Synology RackStations and similar, which are $3-5k without drives.
The segment UI and Synology are in are 10x more than the minisforum, beelink, qnap, cwwk type devices, but still 1/10 of the price of getting started in enterprise gear from HPe, Dell, Pure, etc.
I recently bought a used Dell R240 and 4x 20TB for less than this. From TechmikeNY if anyone's interested.
Ubiquiti is an interesting company. It seems to be well-managed
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/08/tech-firm-ubiquiti-suffe...
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/06/crooks-use-hacked-router...
https://www.bankinfosecurity.com/ubiquiti-insider-hacker-sen...
https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/31/22360409/ubiquiti-network...
https://www.bankinfosecurity.com/ubiquiti-insider-hacker-sen...
https://www.theregister.com/security/2022/03/30/ubiquiti-sue...
In the case of the fake whistleblower, it sued a journalist for defamation but its counsel could not spell the word "damning"
Was it meritless. Would it have been dismissed for failure to state a claim
If yes, this might explain why Ubiquiti agreed to a stipulated dismissal
https://dn721900.ca.archive.org/0/items/gov.uscourts.vaed.52...
2,-1,2
this company is doing amazing things with their products
Is this some xBSD or UniFi OS (debian) with ZFSoL? Can't tell from what they've written. 8C+64GB: enough for essential block+file service, but not for dedup and other demanding ZFS features. Also, doesn't appear the controller is redundant; just the power supplies. iSCSI is headlined; nice they didn't limit this to file. No mention of object store, or NVMe-oF.
Seems like a nice, basic, affordable platform for workgroup/SME stuff. Not NetApp/Pure Storage "enterprise" grade though.
They seem to follow the anti-corruption layer model for most of their offerings, so I would expect they use what ever OS is best supported by the upstream.
It is a large reason they can mitigate vendor risk IMHO, offering different tiers of switches as an example without being held hostage by on particular switch IC vendor like many brands.
I do wish someone would take up comstar though, netapp bought and killed several jbod lines etc… to kill it before Oracle bought Sun and also killed it to protect their enterprise storage offerings.
NVMe-oF may be a possibility because there are FPGA IP vendors but without comstar there are some challenges IMHO.
Their other UNAS devices are based on debian11. I'm curious what the bootdrive on the ENAS runs since ZFS is dkms on debian
Could be Linux as well since ZFS on Linux is pretty good now. It would fit in with their other devices which are also Linux based AFAIK.
It's nice that they're doing this, but don't bet the farm on this product until they release a second version. Not saying I've been burned by them pulling a product and then memory-holing its existence, but, um.
Been a long time fan of Ubiquiti, and I think this product will do particularly well in small-medium businesses. Think of the local marketing firm with 40 employees. They likely have an office with Unifi networking, and they LIKELY hire an MSP to do their IT work. An MSP will easily try to sell this as their storage solution since they can manage the infrastructure with one login to the UBNT dashboard.
This is interesting, I'm not sure I fully understand how this compares to their UNAS offerings. I can't remember off the top of my head if UNAS does m.2 cache drives.
I bought the 8-bay UNAS ($799.00) but have yet to put a drive in it yet since the costs are out of control for hard drives currently. I'm still using my 2x 12-bay Synology for now.
I hope they don't abandon or lose focus of their UNAS offerings (and/or they get better) since I had planned to buy 2-3 more 8-bay UNAS units once I can afford the drives for them.
The price looks kinda rough. I built a server that stomps this for under a grand (vs their 4k). Stronger CPU, likely faster ram, optane zfs cache instead of nvme...
Admittedly my 1 grand is referenced off pre AI insanity pricing. Call it 1.5 today
Point is someone willing to roll the dicey on AMD consumer CPUs doing ECC can beat everything else out there
[for those contemplating...asus crosshair viii dark hero is where you want to start looking ) And reminder that these boards take UDIMMs not RDIMMs...do not assume suppliers understand the difference
I always forget that these things aren't for me. My immediate thought is always immediately "just build your own NAS with a vanilla Linux box and set up Samba or something because then you can make it however you want".
But of course, if I'm someone who knows how to build a NAS and is inclined to do such a thing, then I'm sort of inherently not the kind of person that would be interested in such things and not the audience they're marketing towards, which is obviously fine.
I've been a sysadmin for decades, dealt with *nix based servers since the late 90s, yet for the most part I've used devices like Synology servers, simply because I don't want to have to manage technology to that degree at home.
I've built my own NAS when my last synology died, and I'm not sure I'll build one again. I've dealt with all sorts of issues that I just haven't had to deal with with a packaged solution, and I really just want to not think about that stuff when I'm not working.
Yes, I can absolutely do it for cheaper, better, and with more flexibility myself. Doesn't mean I actually want to.
> I really just want to not think about that stuff when I'm not working.
This is my exact attitude but I don't have decades of sysadmin experience to lean on so I'm completely lost on what approach to take setting up my first NAS.
My requirements are simple: (1) Should be plug and play (hardware + software) (2) Must support ZFS since I already set up a pool in my beefy desktop PC.
What would you recommend? I've looked into Synology's offerings and they look perfect except for the fact that they don't support ZFS only Btrfs. I clicked into this thread expecting Ubiquiti's offering would be what I want, but all I see here is hardcore enterprise gear for the prosumer crowd.
What kind of issues? I just set up a very home tier NAS setup for my home server.
Got a 4 bay usb hard drive enclosure and then just set up a btrfs raid array since my drives are all different speeds and capacities. The thing is only about as fast as a single hard drive but it does pool all the storage in to one unified storage and is way faster than google drive.
Companies are also much more inclined to spend money to solve a problem while hobbyists are much more likely to get enjoyment out of the process of building. I'm firmly in the latter category, having built a rather robust ZFS array on NixOS with a pretty gnarly NVMe cache hierarchy built on LVM. It was fun to do.
I don't have the NVMe cache but I too have quite a robost ZFS array on NixOS. I feel less guilty about running it now since it is powered almost exclusively off solar in my backyard :)
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Will this support expansion in the case of all bays being filled?
EDIT: Nevermind, the product page has an option to add up to 32 additional drives via expansion units. Nice!
i like their gear, I bought a whole bunch, but I couldn't and can't figure out how to give my wife access to their Protect app as well. It's absurd to the point where their MFA sent doesn't work when trying to authorize her - and judging by reddit posts etc I'm not the only one. Such mundane things are where UI falls apart, wrong details. Instead of giving elves resources to pack each individual rackmount screw, if they spent some more time on workflows and software, they'd be a truly great company.
I created a user for my wife, set up the Protect App on her phone and she has the same access to the cameras as me.
I haven’t encountered this bug, but I have been frustrated that there’s no way to give a babysitter temporary access to the cameras in the kids’ rooms.
I ended up hosting a local site that embeds the RTSP feeds, which works pretty well, but I was surprised that there’s no native way to do it
> with ... no firmware restrictions on drive models, organizations can scale capacity without being restricted by proprietary hardware ecosystems.
This looks like a dig at Synology, who do this.
They did it for a very short time. The community backlash was so bad that they recanted immediately.
I'm not at all surprised that Ubiquiti is getting ahead of that and promising it from the start.
Kinda, NVME devices still need to be on their HCL and are priced about what you would expect.
Not immediately, it took about half a year of watching sales numbers drop, and they still have restrictions.
> Synology recanted immediately
Is that correct? Looking at a common flagship model, the 4-Bay DS925+
and then the "Compatibility list" here https://www.synology.com/en-global/compatibility?search_by=d...
I see only Synology branded drives.
Synology do not make their own hard drives. They are rebadged.
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They still require you to buy their overpriced (even by AI bubble standards) NVMe drives with zero third-party support. There is a project that adds third-party SSD support for newer Synology devices, but you need to redo it every time your NAS updates, so it's very much unsupported. Would definitely not say that they "recanted immediately".
Synology also don't (didn't?) offer a ZFS product, which is why I bought a QNAP. Restriction-free and ZFS storage. Apparently you can also completely replace the OS if you want, although I haven't tried it.
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I really want a object store in my storage appliance :(
Would be nice to have a CSI, but I can probably just use democratic-csi like I already do on my homemade ZFS based storage appliance.
To be that person, trusting a vendor for an out-the-door NAS is nice from a usability perspective, but also:
https://www.ui.com/legal/privacypolicy/
Ubiquiti is famous for abandoning products and entire product lines, so I'm going to remain extremely skeptical.
What is the current state of ZFS? I know it had some licensing issues traditionally, despite it being a delight to use every time I've tried it. Is it back?
Never went away, Linux is now the primary target platform for OpenZFS (which is basically synonymous with ZFS these days). TrueNAS/iXSystems (probably the main commercial company using ZFS) moved from FreeBSD to Linux. Major new features like pool expansion have been added after years of requests. Etc., it's a good time for ZFS on Linux.
There ARE licensing issues related to shipping it compiled into the kernel, but you can install it as a kernel module on every mainline distro nowadays which is functionally the same from a user perspective.
Still sucks that you need to verify if your kernel update is compatible with the external module.
ZFS on Linux works great, but with most distributions, it will compile the kernel module on device upon installation. Only Ubuntu distributes binaries.
As a consequence, you don't necessarily want a rolling distro, as the ZFS module can get out of sync with the kernel.
ZFS itself is build for both BSD and Linux from the same source, so there's feature parity there.
I've been using ZFS on linux for like... 14 years now? I've migrated through centos, ubuntu, and debian during that time and the zpools never had any issues that weren't hardware related.
ZFS is my favorite filesystem. I even use it on single drives because its snapshots and online data integrity checking are so great.
I even use it on single spinning rust USB drives. Zero problems.
I still stick with btrfs for this reason
Ubiquiti bubble is so tiring, it is like AI bubble and Apple bubble. These people live within a bubble.
Overpriced piece of hardware that you will never own because it runs proprietary firmware, you are forced to install apps to take full advantage from those devices.
I guess routers and access points are easy to replace with a normal OS but I’m yet to see a managed l2 or l3 switch that runs user provider OS. I’d ditch anything in an eye blink if there was some kind of fully open source network stack that can be controlled through infrastructure code. Affordable that is, not including that Nvidia thingie.
I'm in the market for some wifi access points. If Ubiquiti is not so great can you name some alternatives?
Home: eero. they actually work really well.
Business: aruba instant-on. They cost more and updates are much less frequent. They are also more reliable and the support experience is far superior even though it is HP.
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I am highly interested in this, especially if it works well with Time Machine to do backups over the network. I've got a fully 10GbE + WiFi 7 network w/ Ubiquiti gear already, would love to ditch my janky DIY NAS setup for something that is integrated with the rest and could potentially give me a better backup setup for my photography as well as enough storage to act as a media server.
I have a UNAS-Pro, which runs the same Unifi Drive software as this, and it works great for Time Machine backups. Dead simple.
I also have tons of other Ubiquiti gear, and honestly there's not a ton of synergy between the NAS and everything else. It's a great NAS though. And also, it's only a NAS. It's not an application server like a Synology NAS.
I only wish UNAS support ZFS.
Wireless Time Machine backup works until one day, Time Machine decides to shit the bed. Do not trust it. Invest in a different backup solution if your data is at all important to you. Something like Arq or Backblaze or tarsnap.
I hear this sentiment a lot, but I've not had a problem with Time Machine in years across multiple MacBooks in my household. Backing up to TrueNAS. Unifi networking. It Just Works.
I just checked any my oldest TM backup for the MacBook from which I'm typing is 2023-09-14. This MacBook has a 2 TB SSD and I have the TM volume quota set to 3 TB. TM culls old backups as needed.
The TM GUI is still terrible, but you can use `tmutil listbackups` to easily access backups from the command line.
I also use Arq to B2.
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I use the 3-2-1 strategy for backups. I keep one copy off-site by using cloud backups, currently I primarily use Backblaze for that purpose but am considering alternatives for several reasons. I keep a second copy on an external SSD via Time Machine, and I keep one copy on-device. I'd like to use network Time Machine to get rid of the inconvenience of having a bunch of USB external SSDs floating around, especially since none of them are large enough to backup my entire drive if I get close to filling it.
I appreciate the perspective, I definitely take backups seriously for my photography.
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Eh I gave up on ubiquiti (for home/small office).
Their UI is pretty (lmao ui.com) but their software is terrible, unreliable. Logs are filled with errors which is "normal" etc.
Can’t wrap my head around how their firewall rules work. Default rule and there is no way to change it.
And lately the interface has been so convoluted and nonsensical. DNS records sure now “policies”, you can only assign very essential rules like setting routing rules to known objects based on MAC address - the ui doesn’t allow you to pick an IP address.
I wanted to create a special routing rules to allow a container using macvlans to always leave through ISP2. Since this is a macvlan the interface MAC address was different every time the system started. Mind you “ip x.x.x.x goes through link 2” is one of those basic things firewalls and routers do since forever but if the object doesn’t exist on their automated inventory then forget it.
What am i missing here? They should have been using ZFS all along.
Sounds like a marketing piece frankly.
This is a marketing announcement about a new enterprise NAS product+product line.
The UNAS line from 2024 was targeted for smaller/simpler prosumer type setups (2-8 drives, no ECC, often no power redundancy, weaker CPUs, & 2.5G-10G networking) and still uses Btrfs on top of traditional RAID.
Isn't this massively overpriced? What does this buy you over a supermicro box running ubuntu?
Have you priced a Supermicro box with 16 bays and SAS running Ubuntu?
I have, in pre-COVID days, though. The total bill including a skylake xeon E3-1285 v6 CPU, 64 GB ECC RAM, and the supermicro X11 board + chassis (https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/archive/chassis/SC836...) was under $1k.
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My experience of Ubiquiti is through their Dream Router 7. What a piece of crap that is. Can't even get good WiFi in adjacent rooms where same ancient Asus router wasn't breaking a sweat. Connection drop outs are a nice bonus. Don't forget booting for ages, fan noise etc.
If other products are so bad like that one, I don't know what is the hype for this company.
I'm reminded of the Sun Fire X4500 "Thumper" for which ZFS was originally developed. 48 SATA drives packed in a slide-out rack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zQ5RLAyA7w
Then-still-independent Sun sold storage appliances, and during their development and debugging it was noticed that vibrations effected performance… by yelling at the drives:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4
I have enough dollars and hours invested with Ubiquiti to have an opinion here.
They manage to make performant, capable hardware for a decent price. Then they give you shit configuration tools, a shit configuration experience, vendor lock in, and forced to the cloud. So on balance no thank you per my personal priorities.
If you expect cloud and vendor lock in is a plus that you’re accustomed to with other maybe enterprise vendors, by all means.
Any alternatives to recommend?
This… this is just a low-content marketing page. Have we really sunk so low?
Anyone know what types of full disk encryption this will support?
Looks interesting, but likely lacks FIPS support which makes it an issue for companies that work with the government.
Maybe worth noting that TrueNAS added FIPS in 2024:
* https://www.truenas.com/blog/truenas-security-in-2024/
FIPS mode is the greatest
Are Ubiquiti products commonplace for companies that contract with the US government outside of the DoD/DoW?
Since DoD/DoW generally requires STIG compliance, and none authored are for any specific Ubiquiti product, we can cross that off the list. Sure they can get exceptions or use a more generalized STIG but stakeholders generally have pre-defined limitations on what they will and will not allow on networks they sponsor.
The Defense Industrial Base is 10s of thousands of companies. May are small businesses. Many need to obtain CMMC Level 2, which has requirements for FIPS certified encryption. Our systems do not directly connect to Government systems and those STIGs may not apply directly. So, could I use Ubiquiti in some places? Maybe, not to store controlled information in this case. I could probably store previously fips encrypted files there. Would I want to use Ubiquiti cloud services? No.
Not really deal breaker for most customers
I built a 12-bay NAS recently. I snagged a 5900X/Supermicro server board/128GB DDR4 ECC combo for only $680 on eBay right before memory prices went apeshit. It has IPMI and 2x10g. Suffice to say I belive you can roll your own appliance like this for considerably less money, and have far more control over it. I say this as a Unifi fanboi.
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Nice that it's plain OpenZFS, no paid license layer, yay! Ubiquiti sometimes ships v1 hardware and ghosts their own roadmap, but this kinda neuters the downside. If they lose interest, you just pull the disks and zpool import on any box (assuming feature flag parity). That's a saner path than Synology, with their "unauthorized" drive warnings.
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I've never been a fan of Ubiquiti's proprietary solutions, but this might actually be one product that I can be enthusiastic about.
They are getting better.
After a long time they introduced ONVIF into their camera products which basically opened it to everyone.
I've recently been convinced to implement a Unifi stack for my home network. I got a Cloud Gateway, a 10G switch and a couple WiFi APs.
The Cloud Gateway will be sold or given away. It's utter crap. I'm now building an OpenWRT container on IncusOS as my Internet gateway/router.
The switch is meh. It's easy to admin, which is nice - though I'm having to run UnifiOS on another container on said IncusOS.
The APs are fine. Decent power and the central administration with the switch is actually quite nice.
If I knew everything I know now, I wouldn't have bought any of those but they will do for now.
I love by Dream Machine Pro. Seems to just work and keep everything up to date. I have it running my security cameras as well and it has been pretty much bullet proof.
What needs do you have for a router that the Cloud Gateway is missing or is bad at? A PiHole equivalent is about all I can think I'm missing.
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I went with eero and really wish I'd gone with unifi
Apart from the shitty software and basic features either missing or locked behind a monthly cost, the network itself is not bad at all, I get 600-700mbps on wifi throughout the house and have my servers wired on 2.5gbe
But the one thing I really thought I was buying into by choosing an amazon brand was ease when it came to buying upgrades, and yet I ended up having to buy extra hardware (like the wired gateway) from ebay and sellers in the US as amazon does not sell their own hardware everywhere
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What were your constraints and how were they not met? Looking to buy the same, Dream Machine specifically.
What do you know now then?
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Did we decide ZFS is good after all this time?
Who said it was bad? I thought we were all pretty much in agreement that it was good, and the only thing holding it back from wider adoption into e.g. the Linux kernel was the poison-pill of Oracle's ownership and licensing.
Some years ago, there were mud-slinging myths being thrown around about ZFS.
Things like "ZFS needs 1GB of RAM per 1TB of storage" and "it requires that RAM to be ECC" were once common to find online.
These sort of thing seemed to lead to widespread beliefs that it was inefficient, expensive, and fragile. None of that is true, of course, but folks might remember and believe these myths and conclude that it is (or was) bad.
(But it's pretty excellent. I've been using it for about a decade, now. It'd be nice if it fit into the Linux kernel better, but I manage anyway.)
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Actually the licensing issues were from Linux developers' side - Oracle has nothing to say (as the license to the code and patents was given before Oracle got their grubby hands), and Sun IIRC expected CDDL to work similar to the AFS precedent where non-derivative, non-GPL code was allowed into kernel.
The only lawsuit specifically about licensing was from few Linux developers through SFC who disagree with common consensus on how GPL applies in that case and sued Ubuntu for shipping ZFS as a module.
another thing holding it back is the threat of a lawsuit from Netapp.
source: used to work for a storage vendor that was marketing a NAS based on ZFS and got credible threats from Netapp to the point that we sought a partnership with Oracle that included indemnification under Oracles settlement with Netapp.
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ZFS was always good. Linux support for ZFS was not so good for longer than you'd hope, but it's been reliable for some time now.
ZFS is amazing. It feels like magic.