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Posted by ksec 5 hours ago

Ubiquiti: Enterprise NAS, Built on ZFS(blog.ui.com)
149 points | 132 commentspage 2
bakies 4 hours ago|
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.

SideburnsOfDoom 4 hours ago||
> 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.

wccrawford 4 hours ago||
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.

luma 3 hours ago|||
Kinda, NVME devices still need to be on their HCL and are priced about what you would expect.
layer8 2 hours ago||||
Not immediately, it took about half a year of watching sales numbers drop, and they still have restrictions.
SideburnsOfDoom 2 hours ago||||
> 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.

Hamuko 1 hour ago||
It's true for HDDs. They don't maintain a list of compatible third-party HDDs, but you use them perfectly fine. No errors, drive health monitoring works, etc.

https://www.guru3d.com/story/synology-reverses-policy-bannin...

>Now, with the release of DSM 7.3, Synology has quietly walked the policy back. Third-party hard drives and 2.5-inch SATA SSDs can once again be used without triggering warning messages or reduced functionality. Drives from Seagate, WD, and others will work exactly as they did before—complete with full monitoring, alerts, and storage features.

NVMe SSDs are different.

Hamuko 3 hours ago|||
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".
chrisweekly 4 hours ago||
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tristor 5 hours ago||
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.
varenc 4 hours ago||
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.

ksec 3 hours ago||
I only wish UNAS support ZFS.
fragmede 4 hours ago||
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.
js2 2 hours ago|||
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.

FireBeyond 49 minutes ago||
I've had all manner of issues, backing up via Ethernet and Wifi to FreeNAS and then to Synology. The only backups with Time Machine I had no issue with were to local USB drives.

Time Machine would work and work and work until one day... "Cannot write to your backup" and the whole thing would be corrupt and not even readable.

Flirted with Acronis TrueImage which was worse. Hell, even before catastrophic corruption, attempting to restore a file from a decent size catalog even over 10gbE would generally cause a beachball for minutes and then you had to be very careful to browse exactly to the location and file you wanted to restore (poking around trying to find it would inevitably totally crash the client, and even being careful sometimes would).

I ended up moving to Carbon Copy Cloner to Synology, with the Synology taking a snapshot 10 minutes before CCC starts its nightly run.

A few months in and it has been rock solid. If I want to restore I can just browse the snapshot in Synology and either copy a file directly from the Snapshot browser or mount the entire snapshot as a shared folder.

tristor 4 hours ago|||
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.

oarsinsync 4 hours ago|||
I think a combination of:

1/ ZFS datasets with hourly (or daily) snapshots

2/ Samba with vfs_fruit

Gives the peace of mind that even when the sparsebundle shits the bed, you can rollback to a suitable snapshot and only lose a small period of backups, rather than having to lose the entire history and start again from scratch.

(I say when, not if, through considerable experience over the last 15 years that it will always, inevitably, shit the bed.)

tedd4u 3 hours ago|||
A 2-drive Synology (e.g. DS225+) in RAID 0 or RAID 1 works fine for this, for 90% less than this beast. Synology documented their optimal settings for Time Machine a couple years ago, too. Hope this is helpful. [1]

[1] https://kb.synology.com/en-us/DSM/tutorial/How_to_back_up_fi...

InTheArena 2 hours ago|||
Or if you want something from a vendor butting running decade old hardware configs and trying to lock people into their drive ecosystem, UNas or many other options.

Stay away from synology.

tristor 43 minutes ago|||
I already have a DIY NAS w/ 14x 14TB drives in it running ZFS on FreeBSD. It does not play nicely with Time Machine over the network though, and has some other bugbears that I've resolved to fix by migrating to Linux and running ZFS on Linux, but have never got around to doing.

A 2 drive anything is not replacing my existing NAS + solving my backup use case, although I appreciate the sentiment of saving money.

speed_spread 4 hours ago||
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
iluvcommunism 2 hours ago||
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AceJohnny2 4 hours ago||
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hexajon 4 hours ago||
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annoyingnoob 4 hours ago|
Looks interesting, but likely lacks FIPS support which makes it an issue for companies that work with the government.
orthogonal_cube 3 hours ago||
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.

annoyingnoob 51 minutes ago||
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.
throw0101c 4 hours ago|||
Maybe worth noting that TrueNAS added FIPS in 2024:

* https://www.truenas.com/blog/truenas-security-in-2024/

stableappendix 4 hours ago||
FIPS mode is the greatest
greggsy 4 hours ago||
Not really deal breaker for most customers
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