It's been about 4 years now. Same question I gave two years ago. I'm hoping for an update review.

not a dumb question - recordings live on the old drive, so they're effectively inaccessible. this is best done after a failure or during a boring time when you dont need footage. you will have to pull down and restore the configs.

@@OvalboreTech So the configs are gone too? That would have been a more helpful video. How to move configs from old to new drive.

nope! if you have managed devices, you should un manage them first and re adopt as the config will not transfer over. it will auto format a foreign drive though.

this was years and years ago, I don't know. sorry. Have since swapped several of these over though to 2TB and 4TB NAND SSDs and have not had an issue with protect, but I have had issues lately with network losing config.

@@OvalboreTech still with network losing config? First, I thought they fixed that. Second, that battery inside that dies and swells after a year of usse was supposed to provide proper shutdown and not lose config. Are your config losses after power outtages?

@@instuller Ive had close to 20 of these now - the HDDs last about 2 years. the batteries are hit or miss. somtimes they last years - sometimes pretty much bad out of the box. have not seen swelling yet, but they are li-ion, so could happen. as far as configs, it auto backs up but I did not lose my network config, just lost the protect config. this was years ago, and the OS has changed greatly.

the formatting is linux so that makes sense

you'll have to go USB raid for that capacity in solid state

Maybe check back in a year or two.

SDN you do have to forget all of your hardware then re provision it. no configuration change is needed, nothing needed on UniFi protect side. it maintains all of your site configuration automatically, you will lose old recordings. If you forget to 'forget' your devices before, you will have to re boot with the old drive and do so (I did this, oops)

This is an old post but for future reference: first backup the configuration from the UniFi controller and restore it after installing the new hard drive. That way you don't have to setup any of your devices again.

@@Arkku can confirm, its a bit of a pita to get the cloudkey to reset to defaults and setup the drive, but once it does the restore is easy and full, especially if you have cloud backups

just as long as it's new, anything should be fine. some older models are really, really slow and a bit less reliable for constant rewrite. this is a Microcenter inland drive and it's still chugging away no problem

@@OvalboreCars awesome. Thanks for the reply 👍

Ive bought, installed, run and dealt with the reliability of about 30 cloudkey gen2+ and cloud key plus as they now call it models. the hard drives last 2 years with 10 cameras, longer with fewer SSDs, the TBW matters. I have found Seagate IronWolf drives have treated me the best. modern firmware on the cloudkey does not maintain your firmware on a drive swap very well, so I would personally recommend offlining the cloud key with the failed drive, factory resetting it, installing the SSD and setting it up via the cloud config backup that ubiquiti offers now in console settings. I've had excellent luck with that, and so far, no IronWolf failures.

@@OvalboreTech thank you

I have this problem. I'm going to try to replace the hard drive and see if it works. I'm on this video to see which make/model of hard drive is compatible.

@@johnhernandez347 I was in contact with Ubiquiti Support and they had no solution but for me to buy a new UniFi Cloud Key Gen2+ device. But now I have a problem with restoring from the Cloud Backup of the "broken" UniFi Cloud Key Gen2+ to the new UniFi Cloud Key Gen2+. UniFi Support is investigating why. Will keep you posted.

i just got this error yesterday, replaced with crucial mx500 1gb and seems to work fine. i need to plug the old toshiba drive into my computer to see if i can pull any data from it. i had to re-adopt my devices because they showed "managed by other" and i needed things working asap. maybe i should just use a cheeper one like the bx series or an Inland? we'll see.

negative, first run, the device formats and allocates the new drive

@@OvalboreTech ok thanks! You mean while connected to the pc right? Cause i dont have access to the cloud and the backups anymore and it wont access via bluetooth either.

@@didnthurt4077 I've never used a 'used' drive before. new out of the box is unformatted which is ideal. if you have the new drive hooked to a PC, use disk management to delete the partition. if you run in to boot failure, there is a way to force the cloud key in to recovery mode and you can factory reset it. that's not typical, but in some drive failure events, I've had them brick and need the recovery mode. I can maybe do a video on that if needed. wasn't easy info to find lol

@@OvalboreTech well, i have a bad feeling the whole cloud key is messed up after a power outage. It doesnt even draw power via poe. I have it powered with usbc and a fresh ssd out of the box giving me hard disk error. Ive ordered a sata to usb cable today and will try to hook it to a pc and see if formating/deleting partition makes any difference. If not, might as well get a new cloud key to save further hassle and alternative surveilance station 9 needs a license and doesnt have a great ui. Just thought i could quickfix it as i had a new ssd laying around.. really miss my unifi protect setup.

@@didnthurt4077 yes you need a factory recovery for sure. had one of those do that once after a particularly bad drive failure

even the shitty dram SSD is still trucking just fine yes, but not really. that 5400rpm laptop drive isnt exactly stellar.

@@OvalboreTech it's been 3 years now, did you observe any issues with it? My concern is that I don't know how SSD performs on 24/7 write from cameras and whether TRIM call is supported by CK2+. If it isn't, the performance will degrade with time as the drive fills up, because SSD has no way to distinguish between used and unused sections of the disk.

@@tkd128 even with a cheap dram flash SSD nope its been just fine. this unit did move to my garage so its now just on three 1080P cameras, but drive still shows healthy. the original hard drive in some of my other UCK G2+ units have failed after 3 years.

@@OvalboreTech thank you, I started looking for this, because my original drive just died :)

@@tkd128 only had one die at 24000 hours so far. hard drive

Difference between 5400 & 7200 rpm is lightly comparable. But SSD is not to be compared against either. Which last longer?. HDD is electro-magneto-mechanical, it has disk platters, motors, heads circuit boards & all manor of failure could occur. SSD has memory chips & circuits. No moving parts, superior performance. Could still fail. Fast spinning hard drive gets a hard bump or knock, it's toast. SSD laughs in the face of bumps & knocks. My advice is no matter which one you choose, buy a good brand & it should outlast the technology you're putting it into.

According to the unifi forums, These things generate a lot of heat. This is likely coming from the HDD its self. So, upgrading to a 7200RPM drive would require the addition of an external heat sink attached to the aluminum body of the case. As for SSD drives, most consumer grade ssd's aren't designed to withstand the constant over-writing required in an NVR system and are very likely to fail prematurely.

going strong.

Jason Photography it is a significant difference in scrubbing, retrieval and even notification send speed

cloud backup is enabled by default and as long as you have it set up even halfway decent, it'll restore just fine. Protect is also the only bit that wipes. network auto installs and re configures. no announce changes needed for network.

Never use an HDD - the cloud key gen 2 device has major heat problems and killed my 5 GB HDD in 2 weeks. I'm replacing with an SSD now because of HDD heat problems.