Do you ever feel like you just don't have enough storage? Of course you do. Everyone has this problem. Whether it's your iPhone or your Android going, "Oh, you can't take any more photos." Or maybe it's iCloud. Please pay for a subscription so you can back up your device now. No, I'm not doing that. And you know me, I'm usually like building a NAS, but today we're doing something a little bit different. BECAUSE MY FRIENDS, OH MY GOD.

WOO! THIS IS the big daddy top dog, at least for now, of the Ubiquiti NAS lineup. They have had the U NAS Pro, which was the precursor to this one for quite a while. I think it's been It's been a little bit. It's the same form factor as this. Oh my god, this thing is heavy. It's It's a 2U guy. Oh, you can see the stuff at the front there. Wow. All right, I'm just going to Now, what does that mean for the uninitiated?

Well, a NAS, or network attached storage, is exactly what it sounds like. It's a big box that you fill with storage that you attach to your network. So, instead of using like an external hard drive or SSD, you can use this over the network. So, maybe you have multiple computers you want to access your data from. Or maybe you want to, I don't know, share files to your friends. Or maybe you want to back up your computer to something without having to like go plug a hard drive in.

That's what this does. And it's not the only one they sell. They're also launching with this new U NAS Pro 8, a U NAS 2, U NAS 4. Is that it? Pro 4, which are nothing like this at all, other than that they are also NASs, but they have less drive spaces and they look more like towers. I'm going to try to get one of those in to check out. But we're not talking about those today. Today we're talking about the big papi U NAS Pro 8 right here.

Now, in the front we've got eight 3 and 1/2 inch hard drive bays. These are where you're going to put hard drives. Now, this thing doesn't come with hard drives, but you can buy hard drives from Ubiquiti, like this one they sent me here, which is an 8 terabyte. Look at that, I got a few of these. And you can also mount SSDs in these things if you want. They've got the instructions for either a 3.5 or a 2.5 inch. And what I do like about them is they're toolless for the 3 and 1/2 inch drives, at least.

Now, I haven't played with their NAS products, and I haven't actually played with Ubiquiti brand hard drives. I kind of wonder what vendor they are. Oh sick, they're WD hard drives. These are great drives. I've had like the best experience with WD drives across any of the hard drives. I've literally never had a WD drive die. And if you look at Backblaze, which is a big storage provider, they have thousands, tens of thousands of hard I think maybe even hundreds of thousands, WD drives are like the lowest failure ones they have.

It's actually like honestly really cool. Put the hard drive in the tray, and just go like that, and pop it down. Now it's locked in, not going anywhere. And then if you want to take it out, you just pull on the side here. Ah. And it pops out. Easy peasy. Now, something I just realized about these drive slides, you'll notice that there's a pin right there, and then you've got the two pins from the little toolless mechanism.

So, you have to stick this side in first and close it down. But then you just have to put one screw in here, and then that secures the whole thing down so it doesn't pop out. Then, once you've got your hard drives in, or hard drive, I guess you could put just one like I have, then you can start to look where the fun stuff is, the back. It comes with hot swap redundant power supplies, which is super cool. Now, it only includes the one by default, and we got right here, but you totally can order two when you buy the thing.

And it looks to be a 550 watt unit. And to buy another one of those is 159 USD. So, it's not crazy expensive, but that is That is a cost to be aware of if you want redundant power. But what's even cooler about the back is this is not one, not two, but three 10 gigabit networking ports. One of which is RJ45, so if you're at home and you only have Ethernet, you can do that. Or if you're in your rack, at your server room, at your business, your data center, whatever, you can plug in two SFP+ ports.

So, if you have one of Ubiquiti's like crazy balling campus aggregation switches, you can actually M leg to this thing to have a redundant network connection, at least. And last but not least is the little flappy boy here, which if you open up, these are actually SSD trays. They use the same SSD trays that you would find in a Cloud Gateway Fiber or Cloud Gateway Max. So, they're a $19 tray that you can buy separately, or they do sell SSDs.

These 2 terabyte ones are what they sent me. And these SSDs, woo! And I say SSDs cuz there's two slots. Whoop whoop. Are supposedly for caching to accelerate your hard drives and make them go faster. Let me just slot that guy in there. Clicks right in. And number two. But other than that, it's just those big honking I mean, they look like 80 mm fans on the back. I wonder how loud this thing is. We'll find out in a sec, but I got to install the rest of the hard drives first.

Oh, so satisfying. Now, I was just looking at Ubiquiti's website, their pricing for hard drives is not ridiculous. The 8 terabytes are 250, the 16 terabytes are 350, and then the 24, yeah, 24 terabytes are 500. So, that's like It's basically market standard pricing. And I almost forgot about the rails. Now, I don't I don't intend to rack mount this thing yet, but I am curious what kind of rails they are. Oh, gross. Ubiquiti, what are those?

These rails, I don't know about this, chief. Before I judge, let me check. Let me check. So, in here we've got the nice sleeved power cable. Looks to be a 2 meter power cable. It's just a standard C13. It's not their fancy locking kind, but it does include a little guy for locking onto the back of the power supply. Why is there eight individual baggies? They just give me a baggy of screws. I guess this is like portionable, but like the environment, you know, that's a thing.

Then we've got cage nuts, what look to be screws for the rails, and then screws for the cage nuts themselves. So, that's for mounting to the rack. And then of course you got the the usual Ubiquiti rack ear thingy things here. Let's RTFM for once in my life. Read the manual. 100% you put the rack ear at the front. This guy goes in the back of your rack. I don't even know what you call this. I guess this is the Then you put the slider thing on here.

So, it it's going to be kind of hanging off the back a little janky like, but that's what the front thing is for. It's not my favorite, but at least it's not as bad as spending hours reviewing code, which you can avoid by trying out our sponsor Code Rabbit. If you like to code like me, you know that while AI has us writing code faster than ever, the one thing that hasn't sped up is reviewing it. Whether it's your own code or pull requests for work, Code Rabbit's brand new CLI tool is designed to help you cut review time and bugs in half, near instantly.

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So, see for yourself why Code Rabbit is the most downloaded AI-powered app on GitHub Marketplace by checking it out at jakub.com/coderabbit, or at the link in the description. And thanks to them for supporting the channel. Okay, all right, enough teasing. I'll plug the thing in now. We'll see how loud it is. Hoy! Okay, that's just the power supply like ramping up. It's pretty reasonably quiet. These are data center drives, so they're on the noisier side.

But I would take slightly noisier data center drives over um crappier drives that are quieter and aren't as reliable. I also don't have long enough Ethernet cables. The The longest ones I have are 2 meters, so we're daisy chaining some. Man, look at how cursed this is. Ugh. I hate this. I hate it so much. Look at that, they're blinking. You know what I genuinely don't know, does this need a Cloud Key? That's actually a really good question, because at $199, the U NAS 2, which is the small tower version, the U NAS 4, which is 379, or the U NAS Pro 4, which is 499, those are all great price points.

But if you have to buy a $250 Cloud Key, that's that's a way less good price point. Okay. Oh, crisis averted. I I called the big man himself, Daddy Daddy Ubiquiti. None of these require a Cloud Gateway to function. The reason it's in the installation guide is just like, yeah, don't plug this thing in without a router, that's not safe. Don't plug it into the bare internet. Now, while that finishes the setup, let's talk about the specs inside this thing.

Inside is a quad-core ARM Cortex-A57 processor. It has a max power consumption of 250 watts for the whole unit, 225 watts of which is capacity for the hard drives, even though it's a 550 watt power supply. Ugh. It's got 16 GB RAM, the two SSDs, ports in the back, a reset button in the front. And other than that, it's it's basically just a big box for hard drives. Okay, I got our two SSDs formatted, so they're good to go.

And while I could add them as a cache, either a read-only cache, which gives me 4 terabytes of capacity, because it's just a RAID 0. Uh we don't really worry about the data that's in a read cache. It's just It's just data you already have stored on the hard drives. Or you can set it up in a read-write cache, which operates in a RAID 1, because if you have a write cache and you write files to this and they're on that SSD, and you only had one SSD, that SSD dies, you lose that data.

It doesn't matter if you have parity on your hard drives if the data is not on the hard drives yet. Now, it's time for us to create a storage pool, and we have a few options on how we can go about doing that. RAID 5, RAID 6, and RAID 10. Now, RAID 5 gives us one disk worth of failure protection. So, if we lose one hard drive, we're not going to lose our data. RAID 6 gives us two disks worth of protection, and RAID 10 allows us to lose half of the hard drives without losing data, kind of.

Now, I could spend 10 minutes explaining how these different RAID types work, but basically, in RAID 5 and RAID 6, it calculates one or two extra pieces of every file you write to it, so it has a piece to replace the piece that's missing if you lose a drive. Now, I'm going to pick RAID 10 because it's supposed to be the most performant. However, you do lose half of your storage capacity because every drive has to have a mirror of itself.

And actually, the storage pool wizard makes it very clear how much space you'll have, uh and even shows you the capacity after. So, let's let's start with a RAID 10. Now, while that's setting up, I did want to mention the extra set of drives Ubiquiti sent me are Toshiba instead of WD, which is interesting. So, just be aware of that you might end up with mixed manufacturer drives. And hey, look, there's our storage pool, fully operational.

And while that did go really fast, if you're making a RAID 5 or a RAID 6, it has to do an initial sync to like make sure it knows what state each disk is in, like down to the ones and zeros, exactly. And that takes like eight or nine hours for 8 TB drives like this. And if it's bigger drives, it might take even longer. I don't actually have a shared drive yet, so I guess let me make one of those. Boom, we'll call it test.

There we go, cool. Now, I can make a snapshot. Right off the bat, I can already say I would love if this would be able to be scheduled down to the minute. Um that might sound excessive, but imagine this. You copy a file to your NAS, and then you accidentally delete it or accidentally overwrite it within a few minutes. Well, you don't have a copy of that anymore, right? This way, you have a snapshot at like regular intervals.

Or, like video editing, and you change the project between snapshots, and you want to go back to an old version, that way you have it. Um it does look like they have a trash system, so that might store old versions of files, but I'm not 100% sure. There is also a backup feature in here, which is pretty cool. You can select down to individual folders within your shared drives and back them up to another UNAS or an SMB server, which would be like another NAS if you're running TrueNAS on something, or a cloud service, like Google Drive or Backblaze.

Backblaze is a great option because it's like $6 a month a terabyte. And this way, you can only back up specific things if you want to save like special stuff, like your family photos or whatever. We've got shared links, which allows you to share files remotely, kind of like Google Drive, which is cool, through Ubiquiti's own proxy. We can see our services page. Okay. Yeah. So, it supports SMB, which is the main file transfer protocol.

We've got Apple Time Machine, yes, that still exists. And then NFS, which is like kind of like the Linux version of SMB, um which would be good if you're using it for like VM backups or just, I mean, really any Linux connection, NFS is going to be what you want to use. After you're done mucking about with the settings and making your pool, you're going to want to head into the admin and user page. Inside here is where you're going to set a password for your user, which you're going to need if you want to be able to access your files.

On the main page, we can see all of our drive temperatures. It looks like 40-ish degrees on those, 30-ish degrees on the second set. Now, there is a fan mode where you can change how loud the fans are. I'm not going to do it right now because it like stays loud for a while while it recalibrates the like point it should be at because it's like a temperature target, it seems like. Um but you can set it to be like quieter if you want, um and have higher temperatures, which is not great for the lifespan of your drives, but it is what it is.

But what we really need to do is mount the drive on my computer, so we can copy some dang files to it. I honestly don't know what to expect because the thing has three 10 gigabit ports, but honestly, with like eight hard drives, I would expect to get around a gigabyte a second on the hard drives, and we don't have the SSD caching enabled yet. Let's try 8 gig file. Yeah, see, like I'm copying this file off of the NAS with a 10 gig dongle on my laptop, and it's like 6 gigabit, maybe?

Like, that's not that fast. I mean, it's not slow, but that's not even 10 gig. And this is supposed to be the fastest RAID configuration this thing could do, right? It's at least consistently that fast, it's around 5 to 6 gigabit. But let's see, maybe if we had the SSD cache, it'll be able to saturate our 10 gigabit. Now, one thing to mention is right now, if you install SSDs, I mean, you could put 8 TB M.2s in there, you can't create a storage pool out of them, you can only use them as a cache.

That's something I would love to see because maybe you're using it for like VM storage, or like you want to have some fast storage for like, what, you video edit off of, for instance, and then the rest of it's just archival, that would be great, but you can't do that right now. Why is it only 40 megabytes a second? What is going on? That's weird. That's got to be a bug, man. That does not make any sense. What the heck?

You know what? While that super slow transfer is trying to complete, why don't we do like a speed test directly on the NAS itself? You know, I'm already SSH'd in here, so if we use FIO or Flexible IO Tester, which is kind of the industry standard uh disk benchmarking tool, we'll set it to eight jobs at a one meg block size write test, let's see. Okay, it's clearly not the array that's the problem. With the SSD cache enabled, I can write to the storage pool at like 12 to 1400 megabytes a second from the NAS itself.

And then if we disable the cache, you can see the overall average was 699 megabytes a second. It physically can do 10 gigabit, but I think the problem here is the CPU inside this thing. It's only a four-core ARM Cortex-A57. It's a pretty low-end CPU for like a pro 10 gigabit NAS product. I mean, it has limited PCIe lanes. Each of those SSDs is only getting PCIe Gen 3 by 2. So, even in best-case scenario, you're talking 2 GB a second.

Now, I did go ahead and try RAID 5 and RAID 6. I gave it a whole day to do a resync on both of them. I tried it with and without the SSD cache. And in best-case scenario, with the SSD cache enabled, I was maybe hitting 8, 900 megabytes a second read, but the write speed was pretty much the same as the RAID 10. But for the layman just looking for an 8-bay NAS, well, this thing is priced very aggressively. At $799, it's pretty hard to find anything else that is even the same price, let alone cheaper, especially something that's rack mount.

I mean, you can get a five-bay Synology, I wouldn't recommend a Synology, and to get something that has like a substantially faster CPU, you're talking about spending four or five hundred dollars more. Like, so I don't know, man. It's not what I hoped for. To be clear, it's not that slow. It's just not 10 gigabit. It is a nice interface. It is like the cheapest option for an 8-bay NAS, and it does rack mount, which is sick.

So, even though it bothers me that they call it pro and 10 gigabit, like so does everybody else. And it's so cheap that I just honestly, I I I can't I can't really talk I can't. But let me know what you think down in the description. Do you think the UNAS Pro 8 is cool? I just I feel like it's so close. It's so close to being like sick. It's just not quite there for me. But hey, get subscribed and hit the like button because maybe I'll build uh a DIY version of this that's cheaper and faster.

That'd be fun, right?