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I think you might be mixing up a few things here. As we say, you’re comparing apples to pears 😊. This is mostly a matter of form factor. Technically, you can build a NAS out of a laptop, but it’s far from ideal—especially since you’d likely end up using external hard drives via USB. HexOS and TrueNAS require drives to report their individual serial numbers, but many cheap USB enclosures skip that and just report a generic serial for all connected drives. That causes issues with drive detection and undermines data integrity. In your case, the hardware is also quite old and doesn’t meet the minimum requirements. That said, this doesn’t mean HexOS isn’t suitable. On the contrary, it’s very easy to use—just keep in mind it’s still in beta. But if you’re considering buying something like a UGREEN NAS, there are other NAS form factor devices that might be more interesting. For example: https://aoostar.com/collections/nas-series https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lincplus/redefining-nas-style-power-and-usability-with-lincplus These devices let you choose your own OS, whether it’s HexOS, TrueNAS, or Unraid. Another option is buying a NAS from UGREEN, QNAP, ASUSTOR, or TerraMaster (but not Synology). You can use the default OS or install something custom like HexOS or TrueNAS, if the hardware is supported. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmFb_kO5V3Q So, in short: there are lots of options. Could you tell us what you plan to use the NAS for? That might help us give you more targeted suggestions.

I have done this using Nextcloud AIO. It took quite a bit of troubleshooting to get working in a way that uses Cloudflare Tunnel so I can access it remotely without exposing my IP address, and I'm looking at better solutions than Cloudflare Tunnel still, but so far it is working nicely and I have been able to use it to share files with students using just a link and not giving them login accounts. About to head to bed, but if you're interested, I can work on a step by step guide of what I did to get it working~

Oh no, the 'Bad Idea NAS' is back!!! So I briefly covered my recent upgrade to all NVME storage on my 'production' NAS and pondered how to recover the data from the old SATA drives, of course I backed it up but what if I hadn't? So yeah, I cobbled together this abomination, which has more 'bad practice' and 'unsupported' features than I'm willing to mention for fear of triggering some kind of keyboard-smashing rage in anyone reading this... This does actually work and I was able to read back all the data from the drives. I did use the HexOS installer but then imported the pools and configured the shares in the TrueNAS interface. I appreciate that this forum is more focused on the HexOS side but I only learnt how to do all this thanks to HexOS. So anyway, still enjoying messing around with this, thanks all...

Not pretending to be an expert but i hear zfs is amazing and in that xda article there is a link to an article detailing why zfs is great. It might be worth googling btrfs vs zfs. I know it was a quite talked about topic before unraid added zfs support.

U.S. backers can make a $1 pledge. Update JetKVM on Kickstarter: New U.S. backers A few weeks ago, we effectively disabled new U.S. rewards due to the tariff uncertainty. Instead, we added a $1 “reservation” reward so U.S. backers can hold a spot in the queue once things stabilize. We really hope we'll have some tariff stability in the coming weeks, but it's currently too risky for us to accept new U.S. backers with rapid tariffs changes in the last weeks.

Hey, Rockstor uses Btrfs and Raid5/6 (equal to RaidZ1/RaidZ2 in ZFS) are unstable and strongly adviced against being used with Btrfs. While Hexos uses ZFS which supports RaidZ1 (out of the Box) and RaidZ2/3 via Truenas GUI which are rock solid. Truenas also has a large community where you can get help and is also open source. 🙂 I would only consider Rockstor when going for a mirrored setup (with 2 data drives max) but with 3 drives + I wouldn't risk my data by using Btrfs RAID5/6.

Thanks, I appreciate all the help you gave me.

Hi all, here is the next chapter! https://www.gingerling.co.uk/playing-with-hexos-part-3-installing-an-app-automated-backup-and-peeking-at-truenas/ @TheCamba Thanks for the comment. As you'll see, I predictably did the not sensible thing and installed a totally different app. Next post I think I'll look at Plex. I'm having a LOT of fun!