I am leaning toward the Umbrella Home or Pro model, likely the Home version because it costs less, particularly when factoring in drive expenses. What deters me is that the NAS runs its own operating system. My initial idea was to obtain a similarly sized NAS (small is mandatory), power it up, plug in an Ethernet cable, and have the drive show up on the network as an SMB (version 3 required) shared drive. Umbrel includes an operating system and applications I barely understand. Given my age, I hesitate to master another system. Learning UniFi OS took the last six months, and that was sufficient. Could anyone propose a solution or alternative?
Hey! You don’t need to get into all the apps just to use it as a network drive. Any NAS will have an operating system underneath, but you can mostly leave that alone once you’ve set up file sharing.
Umbrel has SMB sharing built in, with SMB3 support. There is a little initial setup in your browser, and after that you just enable file sharing in Settings, choose the folders to share, and connect from your computer. Day to day, you can use those folders through Finder or Windows File Explorer without opening the Umbrel dashboard. Their guide shows the setup: Accessing your files from other devices | umbrelOS Support
For just that use, I’d lean toward the Home rather than paying extra for the Pro, assuming it has enough storage for you. The Pro’s multiple drive slots make more sense if you need room to expand. But if you need more than 4TB storage, you should go with the Pro.
Hey Aiden,
thank you for information, just one more detail. Is Black Friday coming?
No idea if they’re planning a Black Friday sale, so I can’t speak for the team on that. You could drop them an email at support@umbrel.com and ask!