Cloud Key Gen2 Plus

welcome to crosstalk Solutions my name is Chris and today we're gonna be taking a look at the new ubiquity generation 2 cloud key plus now this is one of two of the new generations of cloud key this is the one that has an onboard hard drive and also has unify protect built-in which is the sort of new version of unify video I will talk about all that in a little bit but first let me bring the camera in we're gonna unbox this thing and see what comes inside this box it's actually a little bit heavier than I imagined it would be okay so here we have the Gen 2 a cloud key plus let's go ahead and pop this thing open all right beautiful packaging as usual so right here we have a probably a QuickStart guide I would imagine Gen 2 cloud key plus powerful remote cloud management oh look we have stickers oh these are window stickers oh that's nice so they give you some window stickers so you can tell people hey we got cameras on this property don't mess with us here is the gen 2 cloud key plus there's a little tab that we can pull on to get it out of here and it comes wrapped in this little plastic sleeve let's go ahead and take that off alright and there we go so this is the gen 2 cloud key plus this features a 2 gigahertz octa-core CPU 3 gigs of RAM and it has a 1 terabyte hard drive I believe there's a hard drive release yep right there let's see if we get the hard drive out oh there we go that does not want to move easily but it also pops right out so there's the hard drive Toshiba brand and it's a 1 terabyte hard drive by default it says you can upgrade to a 4 terabyte excuse me a 5 terabyte hard drive alright let's pop this thing back in ok so on the front we have a little display screen I'll plug this thing in and get that powered up on the back we have a USB C for power we have a power button we have a 1 gig at port this is also a POS oh this can be powered by power over ethernet 802 3 AF p OE or it can be powered by 9 volt 3 amp USB C power from what I understand you can actually plug both of them in and the USB C will function as a backup power in case the power of riether net ever goes out for any reason there's also another USB C port over here however this one is reserved for future use it's not currently something that can be used on this side we have a Kensington lock port and then on the bottom we have a cloud key rack link port as well as that hard drive release that I showed earlier now there is a rack mount option for this cloud key that rack mount option is still early access so it's not quite available yet but basically allows you to mount this into a 1u sort of fascia that fits into a 19-inch standard rack alright let's go ahead and power this thing on I'm plugging this in with 802 3 AF p OE there we go so blinking light on top means that it's booting up when this is ready to adopt or ready to be configured this will turn into a solid white light and then when it is actually configured it will be a solid blue light and now our light is solid white and we can see a little progress bar beneath the Ubiquiti logo that is indicating we're about halfway done here this is not touchscreen by the way this is informational only now you can configure this device by bringing up a browser and browsing to the IP address that's displayed on the screen or you can use the Bluetooth integrated Bluetooth to set it up with your phone and the unify Sdn application so let's go ahead and try that and see what we can come up with okay so I've moved the cloud key over to my main Network it now has an IP address of 192 168 200 150 and there's two ways to configure this cloud key you can do it through bluetooth with the unify Sdn application or you can do it with your browsers like Google Chrome so we're going to start with bluetooth using the unified the end app I have it up here we're gonna click Add controller and it says found one controller already there we go verifying capabilities authenticating connected boom done so super super simple to do it over bluetooth let's call this u ck g 2 + country united states timezone los angeles that's all good we're gonna click Next and now we have the option of enabling or disabling cloud access now there are advantages and disadvantages to both the advantage to enabling cloud access which basically allows you to use a single sign-on account through ubiquity and connect to your cloud key anywhere in the world the advantage is that you can connect to anywhere in the world the disadvantage is that you're now accessing the cloud key through the internet right so you're opening up potentially a security risk if you turn off the cloud access your security your cloud key is local only so it's much more secure much more private but again you don't have the flexibility of enabling it to the rest of the world where if you're at home you can make changes to the unified configuration or you know view your protect cameras or whatever so we're gonna go ahead and turn that on in our case to enable cloud access and I'm gonna say next and now it would adopt devices so if I had any devices in the layer 2 network that were pending adoption they would show up in this screen I don't currently so we're gonna say finish and there we go setup complete so super super simple and that's actually a lot better than the way it used to be set up with the generation 1 cloud key so I'm real happy about that we're gonna say done and there we go my uck g2 plus shows up in my unify Sdn app we're gonna click on it connecting trying direct access it should be able to directly connect trusts server you're gonna say trust and connected there we go so now I'm connected to my cloud key alright but let's go ahead and do the same thing stop the screen recording let's do the same thing though over the browser so here I am at the desktop I'm going to bring up my Sdn and click on managed cloud key now since I connected this with my ubiquity single sign-on account it's going to be my single sign-on login information in order to access it and what we can see here is the name the model the internet says that it is connected we've got our gateway our dns settings and here's that processor Qualcomm 64 bit 8 core with three gigs of ram now we can configure the cloud key G 2 plus or from here we can go into the unify Sdn which looks like it needs an upgrade so it comes with five dot 8.30 installed and then we can upgrade to the latest which is 5.9 dot 29 and then we can also go into unify protect let's hold off on those for a second we're gonna click configure on the cloud key itself and see what our options are so we have the name time zone you can set it DHCP or static I'm gonna leave my DHCP for now cloud key update available so we have 0.77 firmware that came with it I can upgrade it to 0.87 let's go ahead and upgrade yep alright there we go it just finished updating and there's actually a new splash page here which is interesting ok so let's go ahead and sign in again that's by the way the update of the cloud key firmware took about four minutes total but time I downloaded it installed and then rebooted so let's go ahead and log in again alright and now yeah look at this now it looks totally different they really changed everything from the point seven to the point eight firmware all right unify Internet is connected Sdn is active unified protect is active let's click on performance CPU load is good CPU temp is 39 degrees memory I'm assuming that Celsius memory is one point two one gig two point nine one gigs used nothing used on the hard drive and nothing used on the EMCC or very little used on the EMCC drive excuse me e MMC which I assume is the on-board sort of where the operating system runs the the terabyte hard drive I imagine is for unified protect videos whereas the EMM C Drive is for the actual operating system of and the firmware of the Sdn the cloud key and protect itself alright if we click on controllers we can open Sdn or we can open you in a five protect if we click on Network now we have advanced configuration this is where we can now set it static versus DHCP if we wanted to do that we can also see the data and then if we click on settings there's the name let's look at the hardware enable or disable the reset button that's an interesting option there's a reset button or a a power button on the back of the device I imagine this basically if you turn this off it helps prevent from accidentally hitting the button and then we can factory reset power off or reboot if we look at firmware we can see that we are currently up to date with the latest version which is 0.87 all right let's go back to controllers and let's go ahead and pop into the unify Sdn as a matter of fact I'm going to import my home unify site from my cloud controller over to the cloud key and then I'll come back once that's done it's been a few days since that last part of the video because I had a problem importing from my old unified controller to my new unified control I didn't want to import the entire thing I just wanted my own personal unify site which is you know this equipment over here my USG and my 24 port POS switch and all that sort of good stuff I only wanted that site imported onto this cloud key so that I could you leave all of the rest of my production customers alone the problem was my production unify controller was running unify version 5.7 dot something I don't remember the exact firmware that it was running but I was unable to export from 5.7 and import into 5.9 dot 29 it wouldn't let me do it so I had to first upgrade my production unify controller 25.9 dot 29 which thankfully went mostly okay I did have to travel on site to one of my customers whose access points did not upgrade properly but beyond that everything went perfectly fine oh there was one other issue I had - it wasn't showing up in unified at ub NT comm properly after the upgrade so I had to disassociate it and then re-enable the cloud access with my single sign-on account with ubiquity and then that problem went away as well so my production controller was now on 5.9 dot 29 I was able to export my site and then import it on to this cloud key in the meantime there was also a new firmware update that came out for the cloud key so I had originally updated to version 0.8.1 and they subsequently released version 0 8 10 interesting thing about this upgrade is that it did not work through the GUI interface so if you come over here to settings and then you click on firmware there's two buttons here so right now there's only one button because I am completely up to date but if you are not up to date this will be yellow and it will tell you the latest version and it'll say update automatically or update manually when I click the update automatically button it did not work it didn't really give any sort of error other than just saying that it didn't work I even tried rebooting and then trying the automatic update again it still did not work so then I tried the manual update when you click on update manually you're given the option to provide a URL to download the firmware file or you can upload the file from your local system so I tried to provide a URL based on what the you know the URL that I copied out of the blog post that was talking about the 0 8 10 firmware update that also did not work so if you take a look at the unified blog and you scroll down there are three different ways that you can update so you can do the automatic check for updates you can do the manual and then finally you can do you can update via SSH where you have to SSH into the gen 2 Cloud key then you can do you've ent - sis tool f/w update and then provide the URL of the firmware that you want to update to that worked for me ok so when I did the SSH command I was able to successfully update my cloud key to version 0.18 but man it was a little bit of a hassle and I have not seen that happen before hopefully that automatic update stuff gets resolved and let me know if you guys are seeing the same sort of problem if you try to update to 0-8 10 ok so after the update if we look at our overview we are on 0.10 that's the cloud key firmware if we look at our controllers the Sdn is still 5.9 29 and unify protect is 1.4.2 taking a look at the performance tab now that I have three cameras on this system as well as one unify site with about a half a dozen devices or so we can see our CPU load is at 6% CPU temperature is still 39 degrees memories at 38% storage one this is the protect hard drive is at 14% and then we've got the regular emmc drive at 1% utilized this by the way the storage one is 14 percent utilized that's two cameras running on unify protect over the course of about four days so take that for what you will that's about 14% of course that's anecdotal given the amount of motion that's happening on the cameras that I'm using and that sort of stuff but there you have it 14% after about four days if we click on Sdn there we go everything is connected perfectly everything's working great and it has been working great for four days now since I ran the import we also have unify protect now I am NOT going to go too in depth into unify protect in this video I'm going to do a separate standalone video specifically on unify protect so if there's anything that you guys want to see in unify protect let me know down in the comments below and I will be sure to include those items or answer any questions in that next video but let's go ahead and here's my cameras we can see I've got one dome camera I've got one g3 micro and let's go ahead and see if we can add one more camera because I do have a g3 flooding there we go right there so I just clicked it g3 Flex was already plugged in we're gonna add that selected camera and it is adopting that camera now updating the firmware it looks like ok there we go the g3 flex has now been added let's go ahead and see if we can click on it and we can see the live view and of course as I'm trying to show you the live view of unify protect it is not working these cameras are not loading into the live view and I don't know if that's because I've got this hooked up through a couple of different switches or what the actual problem is but I'm not gonna worry about it too much now we're going to cover in that other video and hopefully I will sort out these sorts of little issues in the meantime however now let's go ahead and switch over to show you a little bit more about the USBC power and some of the other environmental variables about this device itself okay so I've had this cloud key running for a little while it's been plugged in it's actually not too hot let's take a temperature reading right now it is reading eighty nine point six degrees Fahrenheit I have seen it up to as much as ninety-eight degrees Fahrenheit so it actually is it doesn't run too hot not like some of the switches in the USG that sort of stuff so that's that's good as far as the front panel display there's three different panels that this Scrolls through there's a main status which shows you the IP address of the device it shows you whether or not it has Internet connectivity and it shows you whether or not the Bluetooth is enabled or disabled the second panel relates to the SDN it shows you the IP address of unify Sdn it shows you how many clients are currently connected as well as how many access points are currently connected and then finally there's a third panel that shows you information about unify protect and that shows you how many cameras are connected as well as the last time that motion was detected now let's talk a little bit more about how to power this device certainly power over ethernet is the preferred method that delivers p OE as well as network connectivity to the device however it does have a USB type-c connector as well for power and that says QC 2.0 okay so that means quick charge 2.0 now they don't really make quick charge 2.0 devices anymore mostly everything is quick charge 3.0 however from my research quick charge 3.0 devices are typically backwards compatible with quick charge 2.0 so any 3.0 device that you get quick charge 3.0 device that you get should work fine with this cloud key if you plug a USB type-c connector that does not provide sufficient power into this device it will say on the front display bad USB C power now I tried just a straight-up like iPhone USB you know dongle with a USB type-c connector or cable plugged into it that gave me bad USB type-c power I even tried the switchable USB type-c power supply that came with my Nintendo switch that one also did not work even though it's much more powerful than you know what you're gonna charge an iPhone or a tablet with that did not work as well and so I had to actually buy a quick charge 3.0 turn and the one that I got here was from Ankur aan keer I will put a link to this down in the description below this was $13.99 on Amazon and then I just used a spare USB C cable I believe this came from my GoPro and I was able to plug this in and it works fine now if you plug in only USB type-c power you will get a message on the screen it'll boot up fine but you'll get a message on the screen that says Ethernet disconnected same thing if you take the power of riether net and simply unplug it after a few moments you will get power disconnected so as I was doing that test this actually ion so I plugged in the USB type-c with the quick charge 3.0 charger and then I unplugged the PIO II and it actually normally I've done testing on this already it would normally go to Ethernet disconnected like which is what it says right now instead when I just unplugged that it went to p OE disconnected shutting down in and then gives you a seven second timer and then shuts down the cloud key after it's shut down it came right back up and said bad USB C power even though I was plugged into the quick charge 3.0 plug so I unplugged the quick charge 3.0 plug and I replugged it back in and now it did not give me bad USB C power the power is sufficient however it now says Ethernet disconnected okay so there is some funky stuff going on and so what I would recommend is if you're going to use USB type-c power as a backup to power over ethernet make sure you plug this power in first and then plug in your POA now it says configuring network and it'll come up with its IP address normally and now let's see what happens when I unplug BPO II there we go so now it says Ethernet disconnected ok so for some reason when you have the or at least in my experience it seems when you plug in the POF first and then plug in USB power second it doesn't seem to work as well but it does prove the point that if you have plugged everything in properly to begin with and you unplug boe it does not go through the shutdown process it just says Ethernet disconnected and it will stay powered up by the USB type-c quick charge 2.0 cable ok let's plug power back in now I'm going to unplug USB type-c get rid of this and then what you can see here and this is probably one of the main benefits of going to the gen 2 Cloud key over the gen 1 cloud key and that is that there is a battery on board that will gracefully shut down this device if power does get disconnected one of the biggest problems with the generation 1 cloud key is if power was yanked from that thing for instance if you didn't have your POS switch on a battery backup and there was a power outage or something like that it had a tendency to corrupt to the database on the gen 1 cloud key and could just wipe it out I can't tell you how many times we had to deal with that problem so now we don't have that problem anymore if I simply unplug the PIO II I get a message on the screen power disconnected shutting down in 7 6 and then it gives a countdown and then it will shut down the device but that is beautiful because this does a graceful shutdown and I have tested with this thing a lot and I have yet to hose it ok so so far I've pulled the plug on this thing easily a dozen times and it's always come right back up no problem shutting down and it just went off ok while this things shut down let's take a closer look it's the hard drive that comes with it I pop this out once before so by the way this little thing on the bottom here that it pops out the hard drive I have not been able to do it with my fingers ok I've always had to use a flathead screwdriver and of course try not to you know Shiv myself while I'm doing it but it comes out relatively easily when you do a flathead screwdriver but I cannot do it with my hand so it's not really like a thumb switch or something like that unless maybe you have really powerful yes which apparently I don't okay so the drive that comes inside this device is the Toshiba mq 0 1 ABD 100 v it's a 1 terabyte Toshiba 2.5 inch drive this hard drive on Amazon is $46.50 ok so the first thing that I would say about this is if you are going to buy a gen 2 cloud key currently the non protect version so this is the cloud key gen 2 plus the cloud key Gen 2 non plus version which doesn't have unify protect it doesn't have this extra hard drive is a hundred and seventy nine dollars on the ubiquity store the plus model is $20 more ok so it's a hundred and ninety-nine dollars that makes in my opinion getting the plus a no-brainer ok because just the cost of the one terabyte hard drive that's inside of this unit is forty six dollars on Amazon okay so it makes a big difference and I'm sure you pick with these profit margins they're actually a lot smaller on this because of that but that's the price for now however if you try to buy this gen 2 Cloud key + i keep saying gen 2 cloud key plus it's cloud key gen 2 plus if you buy the cloud key gen 2 plus on amazon right now it's $299 ok so I would suggest buying in the ubiquity store now for 199 just in case they release it widely to all their distributors including Amazon and the price goes up so it's a really really good value for now if you want to upgrade this drive to a 5 terabyte drive it's gonna cost about a hundred and forty three dollars so I found a Seagate five terabyte Barracuda in the 2.5 inch form factor there's plenty of extra space in here there's about an extra three or four millimeters that you can get a hard drive into this little hard drive cage so it will handle a thicker Drive so you can absolutely put the five terabyte drive into this I will put a link down below to the one that I would buy if I were going to be upgrading and again the five terabyte upgrade was a hundred and forty three dollars and 40 cents for that drive this one however I'm just gonna slap right back in here okay so there you have it there is the cloud key gen 2 plus from Ubiquiti Networks what do you guys think about this device I am actually pretty impressed with it so in my testing it's been relatively bulletproof I have not been able to screw it up I have had a few issues with unify protect I feel that that might just be a protect thing though maybe protect isn't quite up to snuff yet but other than that it has been really solid and moving forward I will only be recommending the gen 2 cloud keys to my customers that want cloud keys specifically because of the battery that's inside that when you plug the power it doesn't graceful shutdown that's worth the extra money for the gen 2 cloud keys right there and then if you're going to get a Gen 2 cloud key again pay the extra 20 bucks to get the one that has the hard drive it gives you the option to go with protect even if you don't actually have any ubiquity cameras that you're going to be connecting to it you will at least have that option or if nothing else you could pop it out and you've got a 40 you know $40.00 you know one terabyte hard drive sitting in there okay so there you go if you guys enjoyed this video please give me a thumbs up if you'd like to see more on this device or if you have any questions about it put those down in the comments below and perhaps I will do a follow-up I will certainly be doing a follow-up on it unified protect my name is Chris with crosstalk solutions and thank you so much for watching [Music]

Channel: Crosstalk Solutions

Views: 243,041

Rating: 4.9265227 out of 5

Keywords: ubiquiti, ubiquity, ubiquiti cloud key, ubiquiti cloud key gen2 plus, ubiquiti cloud key gen2, ubiquiti cloud key 2, ubiquiti cloud key 2 plus, ubiquiti cloud key gen2 plus review, cloud key, cloud key gen2, cloud key gen2 plus, cloud key setup, cloud key gen2 plus review, cloud key 2, cloud key 2 plus, cloud key ubiquiti, cloud key gen2 review, cloud key plus

Id: H_a1BCf1jH0

Length: 26min 11sec (1571 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 17 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/azsheepdog]

Wait so this whole drive can be powered with PoE? I was looking for something exactly like this so i could hide the drive someplace so in case of a break-in they would not be able to find the drive to take it thus I would have evidence after the fact of who broke in.

Am i missing something that the whole thing is able to be powered by PoE?

[u/two2teps]

Three words.

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Self. Hosted. Protect.

[u/Intechtel]

I have one of these and they are pretty sweet. With the rack mount kit, it compliments your UniFi setup if you have the switches or USG Pro 4.

[u/rustyb78]

i'm falling in love with UBNT products...

[u/Talisk3r]

I bought one immediately after watching this video, can’t wait for it to arrive! :)

[u/[deleted]]

So TL;DR it sounds like the RAID 1 solution 2 dual M.2 SSDs works? I couldnt find whether or not they actually got it to work or not? That is a really slick idea. The adapter is only like $20 or so. SSDs will be a bit pricey, but even a 1TB setup (2 x 512) if you only have a few cameras recording should provide a very long time in terms of endurance. Not entirely sure how to calculate how much video is recorded each day. Does Unifi Protect record continuously? Or is it only with motion? I assumed it record motion events (what I think they call mocord?). If not now, is that something planned on? I would ideally want to only record motion, not 24/7 as I have no use for minutes of video bits that are the same.

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For those that are using this now, I was thinking of one of the G3 Pros (or would the new 4K one be better to wait for) for my main front area, and a few of the cheaper G3s for back yard, etc. We live butted up against other homes, so it is far less likely someone would enter my back yard from a neighbors house, especially if the intent was to break in and steal.. they would eventually have to go out one side or the other of our front area. I would primarily want a good quality camera that could provide good face clarity and possibly car/license plate clarity (which would be about 40 feet from where the camera is). The G3 Pro has that 3x zoom.. not sure if that is auto zoom or you can set it to be zoomed in full time, or how that works.

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I currently have Arlo with 5 cameras, but looking to use Unif with outdoor cameras for better quality, real time faster streaming (of better quality). I will achieve this with Unifi Protect right? Arlo is so laggy, and with them now removing the free 7 day cloud storage.. the only thing I can do is stream the feed live or when I am home look at what was recorded on the USB key I put in the base station. Thus, I am fine with that for indoor activity, though eventually I want to get rid of it completely. Anyway, just reaffirming from those of you using this now, that the quality of video from the Unifi cameras is better than that of Arlo... and hopefully the ability to stream is much faster (using PoE to power/connect to each camera)?

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The pain point will be figuring out how to run PoE Cat 6 cable to the locations where the cameras should be! One will require 60 or more feet of cable and running it through walls to get out to garage and then drilling holes from inside garage to outside where it will mount. I take it this is pretty common?

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[u/joelhowell]

He's got a great channel on ubiquiti products

[u/daven1985]

Those asking about POE draw. He is mine running happily.

https://imgur.com/nAv7yQc

[u/netw0rks]

Nice "plant" ya got back there Chris. ;)