This video provides an in-depth review and teardown of the Ubiquiti UNAS Pro 8, a new 2U rack-mounted, 8-bay Network Attached Storage (NAS) device. The UNAS Pro 8 features toolless drive bays for 3.5-inch drives (often supplied by WD and Toshiba), hot-swap redundant power supplies, and robust 10 Gigabit connectivity (one RJ45 and two SFP+ ports). The unit also includes dedicated hot-swap slots for M.2 SSD caching. Internally, it is powered by a quad-core ARM Cortex A57 processor and 16GB of RAM. While the NAS offers advanced software features like flexible RAID configurations (5, 6, 10), folder-level backups, and scheduled snapshots, performance testing revealed network bottlenecks. Internal disk benchmarking showed high speeds (up to 1400 MB/s with cache), but real-world network transfers failed to saturate the 10G connection (peaking around 5–6 Gbps), with the low-end ARM processor identified as the likely limiting factor for sustained high-speed SMB transfers. Despite the CPU bottleneck, the device is considered an extremely aggressive value proposition at $799 for a rack-mount, 8-bay, 10G-capable system.
Ubiquiti UNAS Pro 8: Review and Performance Analysis
0:26 Hardware Overview: The UNAS Pro 8 is Ubiquiti’s new 2U, rack-mounted, 8-bay NAS device, designed for high-capacity storage.
1:43 Drive Bays: The front features eight 3.5-inch drive bays with toolless installation. The supplied Ubiquiti hard drives were found to be reliable WD (Western Digital) units, though mixed vendors (WD and Toshiba) may be shipped.
3:17 Power and Redundancy: The unit supports hot-swap redundant power supplies (550W units). A second redundant PSU costs $159 USD.
3:45 10 Gigabit Connectivity: The back panel boasts three 10 Gigabit ports: one RJ45 (standard Ethernet) and two SFP+ ports, allowing for redundant network connections (Mlag).
4:15 SSD Caching: The UNAS Pro 8 includes two hot-swap trays for 2.5-inch SSDs (M.2 format) specifically for caching purposes to accelerate hard drive performance. They are tray compatible with Cloud Gateway devices.
8:36 Key Functionality Confirmed: The NAS does not require a separate Ubiquiti Cloud Gateway (Cloud Key) to function.
8:55 Internal Specs and Power: The unit is powered by a quad-core ARM Cortex A57 processor, has 16GB of RAM, and a maximum system power draw of 250W.
9:53 RAID Options: Supports RAID 5 (single disk failure protection), RAID 6 (two disk failure protection), and RAID 10 (high performance, 50% capacity loss). RAID 5/6 initial sync times can take eight to nine hours for 8TB drives.
11:46 Software Features: The NAS includes shared links (like Google Drive), backup features to external targets (other UNAS, SMB servers, or cloud services like Back Blaze), and supports standard protocols (SMB, Apple Time Machine, NFS).
14:00 Performance Bottleneck Identified: Real-world network testing struggled to saturate the 10 Gigabit connection, peaking around 5–6 Gbps transfer speed, even in the high-performance RAID 10 configuration.
15:25 Internal Benchmarking vs. Real World: Flexible I/O testing directly on the NAS showed high potential (up to 1400 MB/s sequential writes with cache), confirming the disks/array are fast enough. The bottleneck is likely the quad-core ARM Cortex A57 CPU struggling with the overhead of network transfers.
16:04 Final Verdict (Value): Despite the CPU limitation, the UNAS Pro 8 is extremely competitively priced at $799 for an 8-bay, rack-mount, 10G-capable solution, making it difficult to find alternatives at this cost.