If you've been following along with the homelab series, you know we've already tackled the gateway and the switch. The rack is starting to come together, and now it's time to address the one thing every home lab eventually needs: a proper storage solution.
I had a two-bay NAS that was doing fine as my primary storage, but I wanted to repurpose it as a dedicated backup system and bring in something else as the main storage. After some deliberation, I landed on the UNAS Pro, and today we're going to walk through everything, the hardware, the software, how to get your storage pool configured, and how to start sharing data across your network.
The Hardware
The UNAS Pro is a two-unit rack-mountable NAS with seven drive bays that support both 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch drives, meaning you can run SSDs, HDDs, or a mix depending on your needs. Aesthetically, it carries over the clean and minimal look you'd expect from Unifi. Nothing flashy, nothing that looks out of place in the rack.
The front panel gives you the seven bays with easy-to-remove trays, two network ports (one RJ45 for 1 Gbps and one SFP+ for 10 Gbps, and a small touchscreen that shows you drive health and basic system status at a glance. Around back, you have the power input with a safety latch to prevent accidental disconnects a small detail, but one that matters when you're managing cables in a rack.
For cooling, the device uses two large fans. At normal settings, the fan noise is barely noticeable. There are multiple fan profiles you can adjust from the software, though expect it to get louder during initial formatting and sync operations before settling back down. Internally, the device runs on a quad-core processor that clocks up to 1.7 GHz with 8 GB of memory, and it even supports Bluetooth. One heads-up: this thing is heavy, and it gets heavier once you load it with drives. That's standard for NAS hardware.
For the drives, I went with seven 8 TB HDDs from the Unifi to keep things simple. You're absolutely free to source drives elsewhere.
Why This Device?
Before we get into the setup, it's worth having an honest conversation about who this device is for, because it's not for everyone.
If you're someone who wants full control over your storage block storage support, iSCSI, the ability to run containers directly off your NAS, that level of control something like TrueNAS or Unraid is going to serve you better. Those platforms are more complex to set up, but they give you significantly more flexibility.
The Ubiquiti UNAS Pro is built around simplicity. It supports the two file sharing protocols most people actually need: SMB (for Windows and cross-platform file sharing) and NFS (for Linux and Unix environments). For the average user, or even for someone running a home lab who just wants reliable, managed storage without a lot of overhead, that's genuinely enough.
For my setup specifically, it works well because I have other storage systems in the environment that handle more advanced use cases like block storage. The UNAS Pro handles day-to-day file storage and sharing, and my older NAS handles backups. If this would be your only storage system and you know you'll want to dig deeper into advanced features down the road, think carefully before committing to this device. But if you want something that works, integrates cleanly with Ubiquiti ecosystem, and doesn't require you to maintain a custom OS, this is a solid choice.
Getting Started: First Login
Once you connect the UNAS Pro to your network, it gets an IP address but you can't just adopt it into your network like the other Unifi devices we have looked at . Instead, you grab the IP address directly and access the device through its own dedicated web interface.
Creating a Storage Pool and Choosing Your RAID Type
This is probably the most important decision you'll make during setup, so it's worth taking your time here.
Navigate to the storage pool section in settings, and you'll see all your drives listed and ready. The UNAS Pro offers three RAID configurations: RAID 5, RAID 6, and RAID 10. Here's what each one actually means for how you use your storage.
RAID 5 stripes data across all your drives with a single parity block. You lose the equivalent of one drive's worth of capacity for protection, and you can survive one drive failure. It's a solid balance of usable storage, performance, and fault tolerance and it's what most people with a moderate number of drives will choose. Just keep in mind you need a minimum of three drives to run it.
RAID 6 works like RAID 5 but with two parity blocks. Write performance takes a small hit compared to RAID 5, but you can survive two simultaneous drive failures. If you're storing data you really can't afford to lose and you have enough drives, this is the more conservative choice. Minimum four drives required.
RAID 10 mirrors drives in pairs and then stripes across those pairs. The result is excellent read and write performance, but it costs you 50% of your total capacity. If you have four drives, you only get the usable space of two. In exchange, you can survive one failure per mirror pair. Minimum four drives, and they need to be selected in even numbers.
One thing worth repeating and I can't stress this enough RAID is not a backup. RAID protects you from hardware failure. It does not protect you from accidental deletion, ransomware, or a fire that takes out the whole rack. You still need a proper backup strategy on top of whatever RAID configuration you choose.
In my case, I went with RAID 5 across all seven drives. That gives me 48 TB of usable space (down from the raw 56 TB across all drives), and if any single drive fails, I can swap it out without losing data. Combined with the backup system I have running separately, that feels like the right tradeoff for this environment.
Once you've made your selection, click create, confirm that you're okay with formatting the drives (this will erase everything on them), and let it run. The sync process takes a while, and you'll hear the drives working through it that's normal.
What You Can Do With Your Storage
With the storage pool created, you're ready to start carving it up into usable drives. The UNAS Pro gives you two types of storage: shared drives and personal drives. Let's start with shared drives, which are the ones you'll mount on other machines across your network.
Shared drives: are network-accessible drives you mount on other machines via SMB or NFS. You create them through the all files section, set a storage limit, and assign users with either edit or read-only access. These are your main workhorses for anything shared across the network.
Personal drives: are tied to individual users and isolated from everything else. Each person gets their own space with its own storage limit, and you control whether they can also access any shared drives on top of that. It's a clean way to give everyone in a household or small team their own corner of the NAS without things bleeding into each other.
Snapshots and encryption: are available on both drive types. Snapshots let you set automatic recovery points on a schedule, so if something gets deleted or corrupted you have a recent state to roll back to. Encryption lets you password-protect a drive's contents, which is worth enabling for anything sensitive.
Shared links: let you generate a shareable URL for any file, with optional controls like an expiration date, an access limit (the link becomes invalid after a set number of uses), and a password requirement. It's a genuinely useful way to share files with people outside your network without giving them any broader access. The system also notifies you when someone uses a link or hits a limit, so you're never in the dark about who accessed what.
SMB and NFS: are the two file service protocols the device supports. SMB covers Windows and cross-platform access, NFS covers Linux and Unix environments. You enable them from the services section, and once active the interface gives you the exact mount path for each. For NFS specifically, you also need to whitelist the IP addresses of any servers allowed to connect, which is a sensible security measure. One thing to keep in mind across both: the machine you're mounting from needs actual network access to the NAS. Different VLANs with no routing between them will block the connection regardless of how things are configured on the NAS side.
Where Things Stand
The UNAS Pro isn't trying to compete with TrueNAS on features, and it doesn't need to. It's a well-built device that handles the most common storage use cases cleanly and without a lot of friction. For a home lab setup where simplicity matters as much as capability, it earns its place in the rack.
Next up, I'll be working on getting the wireless access points installed and wired in, and then we can start properly segmenting the network. A lot more still to come stay curious, and I'll catch you in the next one.
