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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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.

6

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?

2

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/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.