 Tommy here from Lauren Systems. This is the Unify Protect NVR. I really like this product So it's gonna be a positive review So save you a click if this is all you want to know is do does Tom like it or does he think it's a good product? Yes, they do. We'll get into the details shortly. It does have the four dry charade, which is awesome It runs the Unify Protect software I want to answer two questions up front and get them right out of the way because this is frequently asked What other cameras in this port besides Unify? None. I do not expect in right now in June 2020 I do not expect them to ever support more than just unified cameras as part of keeping everything within their ecosystem So that is something to take note of whether that makes you like or dislike the product at least, you know up front Second what about running the protect on my own hardware not Supported not officially could you figure out some work around maybe way out of scope of this video? Not something I plan to spend time exploring the Unify Protect software is designed to work on the Unify hardware That was designed to run protect. So it's a essentially a closed ecosystem where this device supports the Unify cameras And that's it and you don't run the software anywhere else So if that has either made you want to watch the rest of the video or stop right here at least I saved you a few clicks and Let's get started on the video But first if you'd like to learn more about me or my company head over to Lawrence systems comm if you like to hire Short project there's a hires button right at the top if you want to support this channel in other ways There's affiliate links down below to get you deals and discounts on products and services We talk about on this channel including a link to our patreon if you'd like to become a patreon supporter We also have a swag store where you can get shirts and other items that are for sale and that changes from time to time What's available and what's not so go ahead and check that out frequently and Finally our forums if you'd like to have a more in-depth discussion about this video suggestions for new videos or just reach out Say hi and talk tech our forums are a great place for that. All right now back to the content So right here from Unify's website. This is the Unify protect network video recorder and Sq. Number is UN VR I've seen called the UN VR for because it does have four drives in there, but it's not part of the official skew right here and It's 299 right now as MSRP on here on Dolly be able to find it cheaper at some point in time But 299 is actually pretty reasonable for the capabilities of this device It has four supports soon a half or three nanchard drives one to gig SFP port one one gig port It's one you rack monable kit included hardware included for the Mac the rack ears and everything so that All included in there plug-and-play Unify system. I will actually say yes They did a good job of making it really simple to set up Automated secure raid one or raid five configuration and supports USP RPS Pete for PSU failover I actually when I did my review of the USP RPS I tested it with this particular device and just like it says it fails over if you're interested in what that means Or how that works look up the USP dash RPS and I have a video on that and showing it work But let's take a look inside and then we'll show off the software now despite it having these three fans It's actually really really quiet. I never seen this and we've only got four cameras on it So I know I know we're not loading it up too much. I didn't hear it get loud I do like that the fans are standard four-pan fans So I can just pull these off if I need to replace them So we have one fan connector here and the other two right here So if you ever have a fangal bad, they're pretty normal fans. There's your 10 gig That's the port for plugging in the USP RPS One simple heatsink no plumb or anything on here nothing in the case So it just pulls air and goes this way power supply here and this over here is not much to look at It's just the cover for the Drives we'll get to those in a second here The other thing that's interesting though and of note is this right here if you can't tell it's just a USB plug with a USB thumb drive that has been Glued in so thought that was a little interesting so instead of you know system on a chip with some type of solder on drive I'm assuming they've just decided to use this instead or maybe it's for reloading But it's glued on to there It's not something user serviceable user replaceable and came exactly like this. I thought that was a surprise I should say when I opened it up now Let's talk about the drives themselves and the sleds that they have now you have these four drives right here in the front and It's all tool is there's also no lock So I'll mention that so they don't lock closed they just clip in and out so yes Someone could just go hey we on notes of the drive itself though Or a sled I should say one they have a little unified logo on them. They have a little light in front. They are this is metal This is not cheap chin see It's got a plastic cover a metal bracket right here and the way they're loaded So I'm gonna pull it it's kind of tight, but This is two lists and what we do is we have a couple little Nubs right here and then a little flexible part. It's kind of hard to look at the overhead again This is flexible right here to lock in the drive now We have if we're putting it in with a two and a half inch drive You're gonna have to use some screws and there's the screw holes for a two and a half inch drive He's a three and a half inch drive. It has a little nubs or You can put at least one screw here and a screw in the bottom that will line up for the two and a half inch drive I didn't use any and taking the drives out is a little hard but taking putting them in that's it the drives in so Satisfying click and very secure to drive doesn't wobble. It's not Manufacturers no play at all once those little nubs lock in like I said We can put a screw here and screw here to lock the hard drive to the sled They give you the screws to do that. I found them completely unnecessary in terms of Doing this though It just works it it slides in it's fit and finish like this being metal here All the slides are not like some type of plastic. I just think they really did a nice job for something Like this here. I kind of expected usually you see those cheaper plasticky sled trays Maybe you got a wiggle a little bit and they slide in this is just straight up Well made and it's not like even when you slide them in it pulls the drive the rest of the way in there So I just think they did a nice job engineering. I don't want to dwell on it too much But at least I think that's important when I see a nice design work or quality workmanship put into something It's worth mentioning other than that. Let's look at the back of the system So looking at the back. There's that rps plug. There's your 10 gig that comes with a cover in it You're one gig three fans Power cord down here now of note and I like that they've come with a cover in there and cool Unify you have stuck your little logo on there, but unless you got some fingernails That doesn't come out easy. So I like the there's a reason there's pull tabs on most of these little 10 gig ports So they're easy to pull out, but I mean Not impossible, but just a little side note If you have to get that out make sure you either you have some fingernails that you don't trim short like I do Or ability to get that out in minor detail Front oh, you've seen it just the four drives nothing nothing really to look at on the front of this thing It's pretty plain, but that's actually nice. It all fits in a nice one you package now Let's get into softwares. That's the important part uh showing it working It will mention really quick though something you didn't see and it's not an oversight There's no power on button for this and I bring that up. It does power on automatically when you plug it in But when you go to power it off There is a power off shutdown option in the menu On the only way to get it to come back on is to unplug it plug it back in And you're like, oh, that sounds like not a big deal tom until you do a review with the uspr ps And you have to unplug it plug it back in with both devices in order to get it So uh once it's kind of like in shutdown mode until it sees a power cycle It will not uh, it will not come back on So you have to if you have that if you are using that uspr ps system get the power cycle both just a side note All right, let's get the cover back on and log into the software So first thing you do is you're presented with the setup options You go through and you either have to create or log into your existing unify account Now something of note. I have not tested if there's any work around so you don't tie it to a unify account It will prompt you for the your two-factor authentication And it ties it to your unify account where it shows up in the protect app automatically So these are nice features of it. And if you ever want to detach it, yes, there is a way to reset it Once you've done all that we're presented with this right here The unify protect app is the only app that you see once you log in And it's interesting because it feels like they could put more icons there And maybe they will in the future This will not run the standard unify software to find networking controller Or any other software as of right now in june of 2020 maybe in the futures are going to do some More things with it, but for now, that's what it does. You have a manage users over here and in settings Now settings you have check for update and it does this automatically This is a nice feature of protect the fact that it has, you know auto updating features automatically updates the hardware It's extremely automatic and we've been using protect for a little while Which I will be doing a separate review on it. I've been really happy with it Hardware is listed down here. It gives you some stats about cpu load cpu type of memory The raid the raid is just automatic Good and bad It's kind of one of those things where it just works that makes me really happy The downside is it just works and you don't get any control over anything You can't like play around with settings. You basically get raid five when you throw the drives in and it does expand I started with three drives and I added one more drive and then it expanded added one more I've also ejected the drive So it you know simulated fail and it had no problem Let me know there was a failure and rebuilding another drive that I put in so all the rate testing went perfectly fine I found it very easy to use. I have not tested this I was told by many people on twitter and some forums that you can actually swap them up for bigger drives And it'll auto expand have not tested it, but that might be a feature That it supports now. What exactly is it using behind the scenes? This is still running linux and it's using md adm your standard linux raid manager software raid Seems to work quite fine and it's very responsive Here's your options for the ip configuration dhcp fallback ip address Fallback netmass and then go down here. That's where your sfp is Now I realize it says sfp And it is an sfp plus port, but I did notice they maybe it's just a typo here that it just says that so No big deal, but just so you know that if you're setting up the sfp It's a separate configuration so you can use either or but it does not have any speed options on it It's labeled sfp, but it appears to be an sfp plus Applications this goes back to me thinking maybe they'll add something more later But yeah, they have unified protect here and no other application options location Uh, it does have the option set location This is part of a geo fencing option built into the unified protect software So you can have alerts sent to your phone based on Your proximity to the device and then your phone app can look at that Now we have ssh turned on we have remote access turned on so we can ssh into it And uh restart the device power off and like I said with the power off Option that the only way to power it back on is to power cycle it Download support file offer a factory reset Now like I said really straightforward in terms of options There's not too many other things you can do with it But it works and that's actually kind of the beauty of it. Uh, there's very very little setup work And once you get into the actual system right here, this is the unified protect software It's different than prior where you loaded it off a specific port I'm doing this locally, but it does work through their cloud interface as well But when you go into it, it's slash protect and if you notice right here It's slash settings versus when you go all the way back here That's where you get this main landing page for the system Uh, we still have and I did a review on this the ufp viewport works perfectly fine on here Uh, we have view time lapse or any of these and one thing about this particular system It is really responsive. There is definitely no lag. No speed issues When we jump to cameras or anything like that, it's Noticeably faster using standard. I have four one terabyte spinning rust hard drives in there nothing Uh high-end matter of fact, they're west a couple of more western digital blues and one owns a seagate. They're mixed Drives so it's kind of a mix of hard drives in there nothing real impressive and no problems Like uh, this is the uh 4k camera right here the teslan anti cam as we call it And uh, it's instant. So if I want to watch something on there Well, let's switch it to 4k actually For the view here. There's no delays. It works great. Uh, no issues. So overall I've been Really impressed with it. Uh, it's here's an event from the other day Move myself down to make it easier to see the same options with unify protect If you're not familiar with it, you can just download the file watch the video that way Also, the time lapse feature works really well by comparison So this was always a lot laggy when I was using a cloud key for this This just works fast to be able to roll through all the events on a particular camera and go All right, you know, let's time lapse this particular camera take a look at it and jump around It's just slick I was like I said it pulls the video really fast and is able to you know jump through these events which is Just I don't know. It's a really slick feature on here. I really am liking to protect and I guess I'll do a separate review on there So my overall thoughts on the device though, it's worked great We've only had it for about a week that we've been using it. I got messages from other people Have said they've been using it for a while. They really like it apparently probably since it was in beta My overall feelings though a solid device the Upsides to it are the ease of use the ease of use for a client And this is something I can't emphasize enough the unified software for protect is just Way nicer than even some of the more expensive ones we buy in terms of ease of use And this is really important because it's not about having just a recorder that you can use as a more technical person But also that your clients can use so I think this is an interesting way forward the downsides It's proprietary. You're locked into the unified ecosystem when you do it, but then again for some of the Uh people that's going to be perfectly fine And that's not uncommon for them to have you know companies that have kind of a lock-in ecosystem There are no license fees for it. So there's another upside to it. So once you buy it, you own it You're not continuously paying some renewal fees on it. Um, the protect software over time has actually done really well Back to the site downside though, um, as long as they produce it and they make it it's great But if uh these devices ever go out of style or whatever Obviously, um, there's not any easy way to get the videos or any of the details off of here And easily onto another system. You can export them all individually But I didn't see any way to easily mass escort escort the videos out. Um, but overall it's it's been a solid system I've done a bunch of random unplugging it a bunch of times I wanted to see if I could break it and it didn't I will note when you're setting up the rate and I did format And reset the rate a couple times just like it has on there It probably does take about 10 to 15 minutes to get rebuilt and start doing its thing again with unify protect I bring it up because at first I thought I had broke it and was going to have to do a factor reset And I wandered away for a few minutes because it's after about five minutes I lost patience after about 10 minutes. I noticed it just started working again So it doesn't really when you're rebuilding it doesn't have like a little progress bar telling you So, um, it's not probably something you're going to do often now when you just eject a drive as in I didn't erase in format, but just do a drive rebuild it just keeps working That did not cause a fail on it. So if I were to reach over and eject a drive, which We'll do is a demo real quick here. Uh, we'll pull it up on live view here We'll stitch it to all cameras and I'm gonna Reach where you can see it actually behind me And we've now removed a drive from the system And I'll show you the the message that you'll get for this So we've removed the drive which doesn't protect doesn't make that message. It's going to go here to settings You notice and I'm doing this all in real time. What the wait a few minutes and then it'll give out the error It doesn't do it. Absolutely immediately. Um, but it will a little error out here and we'll figure out exactly how long that takes All right, I did fast forward just a little bit It's about one minute that it took if you see it was 941 and now it's like 942 So there's probably a 60 second delay and uh, you can see your array is in a degraded state But all this works perfectly fine. I can still go through the events I can still go through and Playback videos Plays back perfectly fine. There's me coming into the office carrying some junk Uh, so no issues there and as far as rebuilding the array pretty simple too. We're just going to go ahead and put this drive back in And after a few minutes it'll start rebuilding the array. So, uh, there's a watching it on video of me testing the failover Actually, last time I tested I swapped it with a different drive. So it would rebuild from a clean drive on there Um, that's about it I will note when you put drives in rate arrays, uh, if you well, if you're like me and you get a lot of drives laying around You're testing things do make sure to erase them in case it has a problem I don't know of any issues if you have data on the drive already But generally speaking as I've run into it before where some rate arrays if they see data already on the drive Or especially if it was a another project we were working at it also had raid You may end up with some issues if it sees a signature on there It may not want to delete it right away So save yourself in trouble always make sure the drives are erased before you're putting them in just to Save any issues with that but as far as raid rebuilding It doesn't take long it'll after a few minutes again It'll start rebuilding it and tell you once it's healthy And you can ssh into the system And get the status on the particular drive so you can see here it popped up healthy. We're going to go ahead and log in md3 that sounds right. Yep So it's actively recovering now. Please note. This is actively recovering down here It is a raised and integrated state still so it doesn't really give you any progress to what it's doing But it does here tell you if you go to the command line It tells you that spare rebuilding and you can get more detailed status I do like that. It's Linux and because we only eject it for a minute It's done rebuilding already so that went really relatively fast. So pretty straightforward there I do like so I do like that it's running Linux I do like that they let you ssh into it as well For those of us that want more technical details about what's going on and effort to goof around with it A little bit, but I don't guarantee that any changes you make in here will survive any type of updates to the system I don't know if it preserves Extra things that us people who like to play around do to it. So my final thoughts on the unify nvr does support it to 50 cameras Does have a lot of connectivity. I think it's a good product overall I love the ease of use of the protect software. I like to see where they're going with this Hopefully and I don't see any reason why they won't hopefully they do continue this product line And keep it updated and keep Enhancing features on it's probably one of the easiest ones I've seen though that you can hand to some of the small businesses or home users that go Hey, I want a nice nvr at home. I don't want to have recurring license fees And I want something with a pretty easy view center face I'm going to say the unify protect system combined with this particular device is solid all right and thanks And thank you for making it to the end of the video If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up If you'd like to see more content from the channel hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon If you like youtube to notify you when new videos come out If you'd like to hire us head over to laurance systems.com fill out our contact page And let us know what we can help you with and what projects you'd like us to work together on If you want to carry on the discussion head over to forums.laurance systems.com Where we can carry on the discussion about this video other videos or other tech topics in general Even suggestions for new videos. 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