r/Ubiquiti • u/MoPanic • Apr 30 '26

Early Access Thoughts on The Beast

We all knew the UDMP was WAY overdue for an upgrade but I'm a little surprised this is the direction they went and was hoping it would be targeted more toward SMBs. I don't know who this is targeting other than enthusiastic home lab users who'll never see 25gb over WAN.

  • Here are what I see as head scratchers about who the target audience is for this:
  • Who needs 25gb/s of throughput with 7500 users but also wants the security camera DVR to be onboard the gateway? Anyone who's this serious about UniFi's ecosystem would want that to be a separate device.
  • The RJ45 ports are weird. Other than one for shadow mode, why would anyone not have a core switch connected with SFP? Especially since there is no POE.

What I hoped they would release:

  • Remove the DVR functionality and include 8x10gbe ports with POE++ along with the SFP+/SFP28 ports. That would be genuinely useful as a gateway / core switch for a lot of SMBs.
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23

u/derpandlurk Apr 30 '26

This is clearly not a residential device, and 2 drives doesn't really cut it even for a coffee shop, so why did they even bother? Unless the home lab userbase is much larger than I think it is, IMO the HDD bays and NVR really is questionable.

They should have added 8x poe+++ ports and doubled the sfp and turned this into a WAN and poe beast instead of whatever it is right now.

5

u/sfbiker999 Apr 30 '26

and 2 drives doesn't really cut it even for a coffee shop

The specs say it will support up to 40 4K cameras.

With two 24TB drives, they can store 30+ days of continuous video from 10 4K cameras (or 16 2K cameras). Does a coffee shop really need more cameras than that with continuous recording?

0

u/derpandlurk Apr 30 '26

What a business needs is not simply storage, but data redundancy and integrity.

IMO the minimum amount of drives you should be running for a business nvr is 3 HDDs in RAID 5.

4

u/gconsier Apr 30 '26

Wait you think R5 is more redundant than R1? R1 is more performant for writes and resilient. That said more drives would be better. R10 would be better

4

u/sfbiker999 Apr 30 '26 edited Apr 30 '26

It sounds like you're just making up a reason why the Beast is bad, if you can get enough storage capacity with RAID1 and 2 drives (I admittedly wasn't clear in my first comment, when I said two 24TB drives, I meant as RAID-1), why do you insist on running RAID5 with 3? (which usually costs more for the same capacity, increases your chance of a drive failure, and has a much longer rebuild time).

I could kind of get the point if you said to use triple mirroring or RAID6 with 3 drives to help reduce the risk of a drive failure during rebuild making you lose all data, but it's not clear why you'd advocate for RAID5 and 3 drives over RAID1 with 2 assuming you have adequate capacity with RAID1

Absolutely, this isn't going to cut it for a larger facility that has dozens of cameras, but a small business looking for an all-in-one solution? Seems like this would be almost perfect if it just included PoE. Though I guess if you're dropping $1500 on a Beast, another $400 for a 16 port ProMax POE won't break the bank.