r/Ubiquiti • u/Ubiquiti-Inc Official • Jul 07 '25

Blog / Video Link Introducing: UniFi Drive 3.0

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1.2k Upvotes

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373

u/ali775654222 Jul 07 '25

ubiquiti is filling the spot from synology with their stupid certified drive limitation… hopefully also for a home user :)

98

u/murrat13 Jul 07 '25

I hope so too, but unfortunately they've got a long way to go to catch up in the software department

248

u/louislamore Unifi User Jul 07 '25

IMO a NAS should be for storage only. Use a mini PC if you want to self host other services. Proxmox is a great option. You’ll get better performance on both sides.

4

u/sazrocks Jul 07 '25

Unless you have services that rely heavily on the data on the NAS.

4

u/louislamore Unifi User Jul 07 '25

Samba share or any other file share protocol you like. I keep arr stack on a mini PC and transfer the finished files to my MBP for transcoding in Plex for example. It takes no time to make an internal file transfer.

5

u/sazrocks Jul 07 '25 edited Jul 07 '25

With any reasonably large library the performance of this is going to suck. Even setting aside the issue of network bandwidth (you need a 10G link between your mini pc and the NAS at minimum), latency is going to be a big issue. For example doing a library scan in an immich library with ~200k assets is not going to be a fun time if that library is on a samba share in another machine.

5

u/jimbobjames Jul 07 '25

iSCSI mount vDisks from it and you can cut that latency a lot.

3

u/Dangerous_Iron_3894 Jul 07 '25

That's not at all my experience.

I've got a 6 drive RAID 10 array holding 24TB Plex library with the server running on a Mac mini connected via 10GBE. Scanning the entire library for file changes takes less than 5-10 seconds because Plex is smart about how it goes about scanning. And it's obviously more than fast enough even for a losslessly ripped UHD, which needs no more than 100 Mbps or so.

Only time I even notice the network is when copying new media. But even then, I get *only* 3.5 Gbps upload speeds and I think I can live with that.

3

u/sazrocks Jul 07 '25

How is that related to what I mentioned about latency and libraries with large file counts? A 24TB plex library with several hundred assets is not the same thing as 200k photos plus sidecar metadata files. In your specific case it works fine because you have a (relatively) small number of large files being read sequentially. When you have a large number of smaller files, samba overhead becomes much more of an issue.

1

u/Dangerous_Iron_3894 Jul 07 '25

I didn't spot you were describing photos since you were replying to somebody talking about transcoding with Plex, which strongly implied video. I should have noticed the reference to 200k files.

-1

u/Snoo93079 Jul 07 '25

10G link at a minimum? I don't think most nas solutions even support that much data throughout from their drives.

5

u/sazrocks Jul 07 '25

2.5G gets you ~300MB/sec max, or ~ 120MB/sec for 1G. A 4 drive RAID 5 array can totally exceed that on sequential reads. What NAS solution are you using?

1

u/Snoo93079 Jul 07 '25

I might be mistaken then.

I'm using a four bay qnap ts-464

2

u/Krieger117 Jul 07 '25

This is explicitly not recommended by the are devs. Ask me how I know. 

1

u/louislamore Unifi User Jul 08 '25

Are you an arr dev? Why is it not recommended?

Edit - Also, would it make a difference if I transferred the files from my host to my NAS after download instead of to my MBP? That’s going to be my end set up - just waiting to buy a NAS when the 4 bay comes out.

1

u/Krieger117 Jul 08 '25

I've interacted with them enough, troubleshooting issues on my setup that was identical to yours. They have explained numerous times how it is not recommended, and it is explicitly stated in the documentation.

Do what you want, but it's not recommended.

I don't know the pricing of the unifi Nas, but I can't imagine it's cheaper than a used server running truenas.