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Ubiquiti: Enterprise NAS, Built on ZFS
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The 5-second version
- Ubiquiti's enterprise NAS is built on ZFS and emphasizes no mandatory monthly recurring costs, distinguishing it from competitors moving to subscription models.
- The company has historically offered self-hosting or bring-your-own options alongside subscription services, maintaining trust with privacy-conscious users.
- Recent changes like removing local backup options for the Network app have raised concerns about potential future vendor lock-in and cloud dependency.
- Ubiquiti is publicly traded but founder/CEO majority ownership insulates it from shareholder pressure to maximize recurring revenue at customer expense.
- Developers evaluating the platform should weigh the current self-hosting benefits against cautious optimism due to subtle shifts toward cloud-reliant features.
Top voices
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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 ge…Read on HN ↗
> "Dual 25 Gigabit SFP28 ports and redundant power supplies for resilience" Can you actually saturate the links with the spinning drives? I've had the hardest time making my TrueNAS ZFS server fast when it was filled with HDD spinning disks. I initially also had 12 of them trying to get maximum speed. I have 128GB RAM and a 10G ethernet connection. I tried all types of optimizations like L2ARC via NVMe, etc, and it wasn't very effective and just too much time spent tweaking and testing. In…Read on HN ↗
TrueNAS is an OS with management bells and whistles. I'd say yeah you'd want 16GB for TrueNAS to work well, ie roughly 8GB for TrueNAS and roughly 8GB for ZFS cache. No you do not need 16GB simply for a 12TB ZFS array on a plain Linux/FreeBSD box. It'll be faster, but you don't need it.Read on HN ↗
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…Read on HN ↗