Ubiquiti UniFi Dream Machine Pro All-in-One Gateway
Question about Ubiquiti UniFi Dream Machine Pro All-in-One Gateway
What are the differences in all the Unifi Dream Machine Pro - at such different prices? The SE has PoE ports and a 2.5Gbps WAN port - but all these other Unifi with higher prices..... digitec please give clear differentiators in the description - thanks
The biggest difference is the confusion since digitec.ch has become an Amazon Marketplace clone. The model offered here corresponds exactly to the second link below, it is simply offered with a 250.- surcharge and an incorrect description.
There are exactly three Dream-Machine models:
UDM (Ubiquiti UniFi Dream Machine)
UDM Pro (https://www.digitec.ch/de/s1/product/ubiquiti-unifi-dream-machine-pro-router-12658976)
UDM Pro SE (Ubiquiti UniFi Dream Machine Special Edition)
The concept of all Dream Machine was to create an all-in-one appliance. The UDM is designed more for Home to SMB, it has the AccessPoint integrated. The two Pro models have an additional focus on video surveillance (3.5" HDD slot) and a rackmount chassis. Otherwise, all three are identical except for a few differences. This also applies to administration: all UDMs come with the Unifi Cloud Console and can only be administered with it. As long as you only manage one site, this is wonderful, but if you want to bring several sites together, USX-Pro with a cloud key would be the better choice.
The UDM-PRO models do not come with Wifi, but with the mentioned slot for a 2.5" or 3.5" SATA storage medium. (Sidenote: if you insert one, the very loud system fan is set to a minimum of 50%). In addition, the PRO models have two SFP+ slots that can be used either as an uplink for a switch or for WAN (e.g. Init7). In my tests, the maximum routing performance on the 10GB port is around 8GBit/s, with IDS/IPS around 3.5GBit/s, provided the CPU and RAM are not busy with other tasks. By the way, this hit also applies to WAN on the gigabit port.
In contrast to the Pro, the SE has the following upgrades:
- PoE on all 8 switch ports, 2 of them PoE+.
- Copper WAN port 2.5GBit/s (vs. 1GBits before)
- 128GB SSD on-board (only for video)
It is important to know that the switch has only a 1GBit/s backplane to the CPU (in newer HW revisions 2.5GBit/s). The ports themselves are 1GBit/s non-blocking. This means that all devices on the switch can communicate with each other at 1GBit/s, but from a 10Gbit/s WAN connection via SFP+ only 1GBit/s is available for ALL ports on the switch.
IMO, the UDM is very well suited if the intended use exactly matches the scope of performance. In my view, the biggest limitations are the switch backplane and the fixed cloud console.