Leaderboard

@Dylan I just have to work with ALOT of them . So in theory yes this motherboard can be put into a normal case, A few things you will have to keep in mind is there will be some needs for modifications. As in the pin headers for power on , also they make all the adapter cables to use a normal power supply. For mounting into another case it will you should get some of the motherboard standoffs to fit, as for the other mounting locations that dont fit you can make new holes or go the safer route and get the plastic motherboard standoffs " usually cheap" . If you have any questions Im glad to lend a helping hand

I'm seeing a lot of interesting rigs on here but not seen much in the way of re-purposed thin-clients yet, so here's one: This is an Atrust t176 configured with total disregard for 'best practices and it works just fine...

I thought it was a very good deal for the refurbished unit. $399 before tax, came with 4 1.2tb sas drives/the cpus/ram, and it had lots of room to grow. All the rest of the budget was just adding more drives/drive sleds and the GPU. I knew I was migrating a decent sized plex library, wanted some ssd storage for apps, and a GPU that fit in the server case for transcoding (the 3050 is completely PCI bus powered, so no extra cables needed).

After many, many many hours of self learning (Google-fu) I came to that same conclusion. Truth be told, I figured hexOS for my tinkering and went straight to true NAS. I'll find a use for hex later. I tested with an SSD mounted to my pool in a few ways and it never changed much. My big bottle neck is network mostly, pinging off that 1 gig redline pretty much. As for my VM stuff, i got a Windows VM up after many hours, but found it I can install a makemkv docker instead of struggling to pass through a sata device to the VM. Overall, I rate my experience... Cry/10 Spent hours trouble shooting to get miniscule victories. The dopamine from problem solving wasn't "woohoo! I figured it out!" It was "f**king finally, I can stop googling this obscure garbage and not deal with it anymore" I'm still having fun, deep down, just exhausted from making the same VM settings 100 times lol

since you wanna use vms and you got time to tinker, take a look into proxmox adding a ssd shouldn't help transfer speeds afaik. to the best of my understanding how truenas/hexos works is transfers go to your ram first then to your hdd, bottle necked by the hard drive speed. if you add a slog ssd it would go ram -> to both slog drive and hdd but unfortunately it is still bottle necked by the hard drive. slog drives only copies whats still on the ram. This is mostly for in case of power loss nothing on the ram is lost.

username: truenas_admin password: whatever you put in when you installed hexos

We just put in an order for 5 that we should get some time in March I think. These things look awesome. Glad to hear you're liking yours so much!!

Can't disagree with you there, that clicking is not particularly pleasant. However I don't know how Hex handles HDD timeout and spin-down as I don't have any suitable HDDs to test with. Presumably if you only use your NAS periodically and the drives are set to spin-down the power savings from using SSDs would be negligible.

Had already installed the HA app through truenas and ran into countless issues, it was unusable! plus had been so long since i'd not be running bare metal / HA OS that i completely forgot about the lack of Add ons and other key features, which was a another blocker. Thus what would be amazing is a 'One-Click' option for Home Assistant BUT the option to install either as: VM (HA OS) App (Container) That way, users have the choice, and could be presented with the pro's / con's of both up front!

Do you have a free PCIe slot? This has a 5-port SATA controller and 2 x m.2 (SATA) slots on the board. The other 3 ports present to regular SATA ports. It also came with a low-profile bracket for SFF cases. This would allow you to put your first 2 drives on the card!

Could you please post the power consumption and which drives you use? I'm looking into a low budget low power system myself too and this has the added advantage of being small

^^This guy loves hardware like I do...

I had a look at a JMB582 based SATA expansion board today, this one fits into the 'WiFi' card slot. It worked pretty well, I had a 2-drive pool connected to it and was able to saturate the 1GbE NIC reading/writing through it.

I posted this on another thread, and for the record, I am 100% newb to all things NAS. I have now also set up the Jellyfin app on my roku box and can stream media perfectly across my home network: I managed to install Jellyfin today, it was pretty easy (on the third attempt!!) Before install I created a media folder as a public folder in HexOS, then created subfolders therein for movies, music, etc. Then installed in TrueNAS, left everything as default except for additional storage which was setup as: Type: Host path (Path that already exists on the system) Mount path: /media/movies (or other type) Host path: navigate to, or type path to folders you created before install (for me was: /mnt/HDDs/Media/Movies etc) Complete install, then in Jellyfin UI go through the wizard, and when you get to media libraries, select type, and display name, click +Folder, and browse from the drop down to the corresponding Host Path. I can access it fine from a browser on my phone, haven't got to the point of using the Jellyfin client on other devices yet. The reason I hadn't set myself up a NAS before now was that I was genuinely intimidated at the process, but the LTT video and HexOS showed me just how easy it can be. Not saying the above will work for everyone, but I tried a few times before getting Jellyfin to work.

It would also be nice if we could up/down vote all posts and not just q&a