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Thanks Mobius. Done. The whole think does not seems to be ready. Yet, let see.

Hey, A couple of remarks: The selected GPU is very week and cannot handle 4k transcoding. If you are going for Media Center you need a lot more storage (you can get significant more storage with HDDs compared to SSDs for the same price). You should probably look at an Intel CPU (their CPUs are shit for gaming but man, Intel QuickSync on the on-board GPU is one heck of a power house for transcoding). This way you don't need a dedicated GPU and can still transcode. Your currently selected Motherboard has a Realtek NIC, Realtek NICs are mostly not supported and/or are not working correctly with Hexos/Truenas so if you choose a MoBo with a Realtek NIC you also need another (preferably Intel NIC) to get any network connections. In combination with the HBA card and a dedicated GPU (if you are going that path) you need to make sure to have enough PCIe slots and PCIe Lanes for those 3 extansion cards to work properly.

This is a build I put together on PC Part Picker: https://pcpartpicker.com/user/Unconquered/saved/#view=ps4TP6 What improvements can be made while still staying under $1000? Or what did I screw up since this is my first x86 NAS build?

A discussion thread for posting sub $1000 USD builds with these concepts: Parts are available (not rare) so other people can copy the build Build is less than $1000 USD Build has basic NAS function NAS has basic media center abilities (streaming, etc..)

The big thing is that once HexOS is ready it will just simplify the use of the underlying Truenas. The goal is that one won't have to understand how to setup permissions and what not. I purposely haven't bothered to learn how to use Truenas so maybe someone with more experience with truenas can better fill you in.

Here is where I am coming from: I'm a "prosumer" home user. I want to use my own hardware, and use a single machine for the following: Storage Backups Windows Filesharing Plex Immich Nextcloud Minecraft Server Various Containers: caddy reverse proxy pi-hole etc Currently I'm doing all of the above using Ubuntu. But, I don't have RAID, just some external USB drives for storage & backups.

Please help me understand the value-add that HexOS gives over TrueNAS Scale. I have never used either. However, I am interested in signing up for a lifetime HexOS license after I heard Linus (of Linus TechTips fame) endorse it (or at least positively mention it) in what seemed like a non-paid mention. I have been reading about TrueNAS & HexOS. And the understanding I am getting is that HexOS isn't really an OS.... ? It's more like a set of helpful utilities on top of TrueNAS Scale? Ie, it's TrueNAS Scale with some monitoring, UI, and installation tools. If it is more than this, I would really like to understand how much more value it adds. I mean, TrueNAS already has a UI and apps for containers. Like Plex: https://www.truenas.com/docs/truenasapps/stableapps/plex/ But HexOS just makes a better UI!? I mean, I'm making these statements not as a declaration, but as a question: am I understanding it right? I understand that the command deck is an external service that runs in the cloud, outside my own home network. So that can have its uses, for sure, but how does that help with the actual OS side in terms of containerization, storage features, zfs, etc? Command Deck just helps manage it all?

not all external drive enclosures are compatible with hexos either. Hexos requires the drives to have their serial numbers reported but many enclosures cheap out on that and just report a generic serial number that is the same for all drives which will cause problems detecting all drives. I'm not aware of which enclosures report all the proper data.

8 GB of 2133 MHz LPDDR3 RAM, 128 GB SSD, Intel Core i5 processor (1.6 GHz base clock, with Turbo up to 3.6 GHz) with Intel UHD Graphics 617. I forgot to list this. You are correct, I would only install HexOs on internal SSD and use external HDD for storage. Thanks! Now I have to find where I stored the 2 Macs.

Try reaching out to support using the contact us link at the bottom of this website. I can't make any promises tho.

I believe that's an Intel Mac so it should be possible to install alternative operating systems like hexos. However running hexos on external drives can be problematic and generally not recommended

Hi! I have 2 MacBook Airs 2018 that have been mothballed. I would like to use 1 as a dedicated NAS server. Is it possible to erase the MacOs from Air and install HexOs as the only OS on it? Do I even need to erase the MacOS? I want to add a 4 bay HDD enclosure to the Mac. If successful I will give the second Air to a friend and have them be my buddy. Thanks in advance! Total newb to NAS.

Yeah you're probably right. Hardware will change over time. But that is also the point of this endeavour 😊

Hmm. When I bought a 10MB hard drive for my PC XT I was told that was future proof. I wonder how much of that hardware will still be there in two years? Sure looks set for now though. 😁

Nice transition. Looks as a future proof setup! And a pretty clean setup too.

The other day I securely erased my Synology NAS. Marking the start of my future with HexOS and TrueNAS after a few months of testing. I went from three mini PC:s and one synology NAS to this: The pic includes my main gaming rig - the NAS is the black box. The box that now runs all my services including a VM with Windows for certain windows specific tasks. The NAS specs: Fractal Node 304 case Gigabyte A520I AC ITX motherboard Ryzen 5700G (8C/16 threads) 32GB 3200mhz (memtested 24h) 3x 4TB HDDs (can expand to 6 drives as needed) GTX 1060 for steam streaming - isolated for the windows VM PSU 350w (The NAS draws 60w idle) APC UPS What’s running: Transmission Immich VPN Minecraft server Windows VM (“Steamcache”, streaming and more) NUT-server (as the UPS is shared with the gaming rig) Cloud backups Samba of course More to come (the hardware is barely working) Problems setting it up: There were some but so few that I can't even remember them. Mostly with HexOS on testing-hardware not the final parts. Looking forward to everything coming in the future. But honestly… I’m fine 😎

Can you add a picture please? I am wrestling with Tailscale/reverse proxy/Cloudflare and getting remote access. For Plex I get remote access sometimes and not other times. Since I seriously doubt this is a HexOS issue I am trying to talk to Plex themselves. I would not be surprised if I jus missed something like this or have it in the wrong place. Thanks.

Hi, I missed the $99 offer. Didnt know about it. Think the price is higher at $199 and yet even higher @ $249. Anyways, I have a unique situation. I cannot pay more than $150 per transaction. So, either keep the price $150 for me i/o $199. Or let me pay in two installments. Regards, Zia.

So, installed and ready, would it work? TrueNAS dashboard has the answer. Success 😀 Next step would be playing with storage files. After I got the hang of smb shares…

Just one thing I forgot to mention earlier. My SSD chip should be connected to SATA 2 or SATA 3 on the motherboard, according to ipc.net support (Jessica Fang). The one I used, the more easily available is SATA 3 to the middle right in this photo, with the black connector and cable visible. You can also see half of another SATA port just below in the photo, with the other half hidden under the board above it.

By now I feel comfortable opening up this computer case, and here is the pre-installed RAM, top of the picture. The two shiny metal ”handles” left and right of the stick you push outwards to release the stick. New RAM installed, ready to be pushed down, to sit properly. Second picture.

Literally had that recently when getting my remote server, bought a second hand system with a board that had built in IPMI, but then it doesn't work, as to use the software even in a browser, it needs Java that's so old it's blocked across ALL OS's... 🫠 i even created a windows 7 VM to attempt to use it to no avail haha... Jet KVM > Plug & Play! 🙏🏻

About two weeks ago I mentioned I got a 48GB RAM stick, for a spare or for upgrade at some point. Could I resist installing it now? No. 48GB is the max RAM possible here, and I believe it doesn’t hurt with a little more of it 😉

Just to add a little more info about NVME performance in this configuration, I know the 'bottleneck' is going to be the 2.5GbE NIC, but as I also mentioned I also run a Windows VM on the NAS. I just built another VM for some testing and thought it would be appropriate to run CrystalDiskMark on it, results below; In this run (above) I think the ZFS cache absorbed the 'test file' and massively accelerated the read performance. In this one I increased the memory allocated tot he VM with the intention of making it unavailable for ZFS caching. I'm aware that I could have disabled it on the pool but I have other things running on there and I thought this way would be more representative of a system being starved of memory. This one was (I think) more representative of the windows experience I'm seeing. Windows is very usable over RDP and I noticed no performance issues in the tasks I was using it for.

I seem to have resolved this my simply adding the local IP to the custom port field 192.168.68.72:32400 Hope this helps someone in the future!