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Hey, this is only true for your specific CPU & MoBo combi but not as a general statement. According to your MoBo Manual, once you use 2 PCIe slots the bandwidth from the first slot drops from x16 to x8. And I suppose the ASUS card is using 4 PCIe lanes per SSD therefor with 8 lines you can only use 2 SSDs. However if the first PCIe slot drops to x8 depends on the CPU generation and chipset, lots of the newer boards don't have this issue, Server Motherboards usually have more PCIe lanes then you will ever need and even some older platform don't have this problem neither. So yes in your case it is unfortunately not possible to use the full 4 SSDs from the card in combination with a HBA card (due to HW limitations) , but for other setups this might not be a problem.

Hello everyone! I wanted to setup a secondary server - one for testing to break things and one for a more stable NAS environment that I will wait for HexOS to support updates and etc. To do this I needed to get some things off of my test server - primarily my VMs that I had created. Here is how I setup replication and moved the VMs. Hope you find this useful! 1. Find the VM you would like to move. 2. TrueNAS should be able to make the connection to the other server but it sometimes (frequently) fails to do so, so I will dive into how to do it manually. 3. Setup the backup credentials on the server you are transferring from. In my case this is my 01 server. 1. Navigate to Credentials > Backup credentials on the left side: 2. In SSH Keypairs section click the Add button 3. Give your keypair a name and click the Generate Keypair button: 4. Copy your Public Key. You will need this on your new server. 4. Setup the keypair on your new server. 1. Navigate to your new server and Credentials > Users 2. Select the user you will be using to do your ZFS replication task and click Edit 3. In the Authentication section of the edit dialog for the user you should see "Authorized Keys". This is where you will paste your public key that you generated. 4. Scroll down and check the box that says "Allow all sudo commands" and "Allow all sudo commands with no password". 5. Time to setup the SSH link on your primary server. Navigate back to it. 5. On the primary server navigate back to Credentials > Backup Credentials and click Add on SSH Connections 6. In the new dialog give it a name, change the Setup Method to Manual, and fill out the rest of this information (including selecting the Private Key you generated): 7. Once you select your Private Key you can click the Discover Remote Host Key button. 8. Click Save. Now it is time to generate a replication task. 9. Navigate to Data Protection on the left side and click Add on Replication Task: 10. Fill out this information and click Next: 11. When you select your SSH credentials this dialog opens. Select "Use Sudo for ZFS Commands" or check the box with the arrow above. 12. If you have snapshots for VMs you can select "Recursive" to copy those snapshots over. 13. Keep your name that TrueNAS generates for you or rename it to something else and click Next. 14. In the When section I selected "Run Once". 15. Save it and the replication will start. If on the same network it is incredibly fast - Moved two VMs roughly 120 GB in less than 5 minutes. 16. Verify on your new server the zVOL disks you copied over are present and recreate your virtual machines as you would setting up a new VM, linking the VirtIO disks you just replicated.

100%!!! And a huge thank you to @ShinobiRen for taking your time to create this helpful guide! Directory of Guides has been updated.

The thing is, DSM really holds up well in terms of functionality, stability, and ease of use. When it comes to hardware, Synology is lagging behind, and it’s clearly moving toward a more closed ecosystem. But no other player has quite managed to match Synology’s level when it comes to software. TrueNAS and Unraid are both very solid, but neither is as user-friendly as DSM. HexOS is still in beta, and even after the 1.0 release, it will take time before it reaches feature parity with DSM. This video mentions a few alternatives, but if QNAP is off the table for you, things start getting tricky. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSkO1bdXLyg Ultimately, what you should do really depends on how much effort you're willing to put into switching systems. If you’re not up for that, there’s nothing wrong with paying the "Synology tax" and accepting that you're tied to Synology drives. In return, you get a DSM system that’ll likely serve you well for years. I’ve had a Synology running in my network for over 15 years, and it just does what it’s supposed to. My most important data still lives on it. Let me be clear: I’m definitely not happy with their recent direction. I think they’ve abandoned part of their user base with flimsy arguments—no 10GbE, Synology-only drives, EOL hardware. That criticism is everywhere on YouTube right now. But on the flip side, no one’s forcing you to buy Synology. If you want the DSM appliance experience and you're okay with Synology’s quirks, it can still be a solid choice. Personally, I’m very disappointed with Synology’s 2025 releases. I was hoping for a lot more. But if I’m being honest, I wouldn’t rule out buying another Synology in the future. That would be strictly for NAS and backup functionality. I haven’t used DSM for anything else in a long time. I’m really into the vision behind HexOS. It’s a super promising project. But for now, it’s still a system in development, and it’s not yet a replacement for DSM when it comes to storing my most critical data. At the end of the day, it’s about figuring out what matters most to you. In short: make your own call.

So, @Dylan , I plan to use it for my files mostly, not a lot of apps on my mind, yet. Files being the regular ones: Digital photos Libreoffice files CD collection ripped to computer as files and played through a streamer. If buddy backup is offered it would seem like a good idea in general, but I wouldn’t be a very good buddy 😉 My storage drives so far only has space for my own growing collection of files. I may put a second NAS in my sister’s apartment for backup and security, and/or(?) some form of cloud arrangement, like ownclud or Nextcloud. Any suggestions are welcome! And my NAS may not end up staying on the shelf in my hallway. I put it there to show it’s not something you absolutely would want to hide somewhere. The white ”box” on the wall to the left is for fiber internet, not yet implemented by me. I use some form of mobile broadband for now. I’ve got 5-6 linux ISOs to play with for storage, as long as HexOS is under development. If catastrophe happens they are only a download away. As I described in an earlier post I tried to establish some RAID10 inspired setup in the TrueNAS environment. @Sonic suggested I try to take away one or two drives to see what happens. That’s what I’m going to do, when I got smb shares ABC in order, and the ISOs are in place.

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.

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 😎

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

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! 🙏🏻

I just wanted to share a few things I've learned about the lspcie command as it's helped me understand how my NVME storage devices connect. The build is based on an Asus Prime H310T R2.0 Motherboard with an i5-8400, 32GB of DDR4-2666. and a pair of SATA drives for the OS. I currently use this as a working 'temporary backup' location, to host my Steam library, running PiHole and running a Windows VM (hosting legacy game servers!!!) The whole thing idles at 19W to 26W with just the PiHole and Windows VM in use. I've also added a 2.5 GbE NIC in the 'WiFi' slot which allows quick access to my Steam library, while the quite probably more reliable onboard 1 GbE port is used for management and other 'services'... The main storage comes from 4 x WD NVME drives mounted on the PCIe card (2 on each side). The PCIe card is a SU-EM5204(A2), and which a quick 'google' reveals a variety of conflicting information, so let's see what we can learn from the lspci command... The card appears to use an ASMedia ASM1806, which (according to the ASMedia website) is a PCIe Gen2 switch with 2 upstream and 4 downstream ports. The 'upstream' port reports that the link is capable (LnkCap) of 5GT/s (PCIe gen 2) over 8 lanes (weird?), however the link status (LnkSta) shows that is is connected over only 2, noting that the link width is 'downgraded'. This is to be expected as I can see from the physical interface that the card is only wired for an x2 connection, and I also know that the Motherboard also only presents 2 lanes to the NVME port (where the PCIe riser is connected). If I run the same command on one of the downstream ports, I can see that they are presenting and connecting (to the respective NVME SSDs) 1 PCIe V2 lane. Looking at one of the NVME SSDs, we can see that they are PCIe V4 (16GT/s) x4 (4 lanes), but are operating at PCIe V2 (5GT/s) x1 lane only. Putting all this together, I now understand that each drive connects to the PCIe switch at PCIe V2 x1, and the switch then connects to the CPU at PCIe V2 x2. This means that the 4 drives are sharing 10GT/s (less switching overheads) back to the CPU, and as 1 of the 4 drives is for redundancy / parity only 75% of that is usable data, so I'm probably getting about 7GT/s to the array. Next I'm going to look at how to actually test the internal performance, right after I've found a way of recovering my data from the HDDs you may have noticed (now disconnected) in the first pic...

https://www.gingerling.co.uk/playing-with-hexos-part-3-installing-an-app-automated-backup-and-peeking-at-truenas/ Hi all here is the next instalment in my series. I hope you enjoy it 🙂

There will also a PoE version. FAQ on Kickstarter (24th of October 2024): While there won’t be a Power over Ethernet version just yet, a PoE-compatible JetKVM device is on our roadmap.

Yeah found the last email i received March 26th

Afaik at this time there is no easy way to do that with hexos. It might be better for you to use a prebuilt nas since most have that functionality built in. Maybe someone else has a better answer for you

Look what finally showed up at my door this morning. Ah yeah, Im one of the cool kids now lol

Thank you for this guide! @Dylan, can we add this one to the guides page?

Nice!, glad you have found the solution. I had a same kind of error with Proxmox and it took me several hours to solve the issue. Always nerve breaking 😀

I believe it'll be on Amazon within the next few weeks. But kickstarter is over.

For the most part it is safe to tweak things using the truenas interface. Some things however are not supported even if tweaked in truenas such as single drive pools

That fixed it, didn’t even think to do that. Thanks!

Did you already did a reboot via the TrueNas interface. I have seen another forum post with describing the same issue. A simple reboot fixed this issue. If not, you can try the steps @Mobius recommend.

It's a no questions refund as long as you send the request email within the 30 days. There is no other trial. License follows the user and there is no limit swapping hardware. You can easily disconnect the license and connect it to a different server yourself.

not sure if this will help but it wouldn't hurt to try this

@ulfn This is fantastic! I love the design and implementation - how will you be using it? (this is really fun stuff!!)

Right now the influencers are reporting issues with the Comet. Lawrence Systems reported some were taken care of the past few days

It does not break anything, myself and others have been using it this way for months

There is nothing announced at this time. I wouldn't bet on it though since we are still at a discounted price right now

GL.inet Comet looks also interesting. Especially this specs: 2K@60FPS video with H.264 hardware encoding for smooth performance Ultra-low latency (30ms-60ms) for real-time remote control And almost the same pricepoint

I'm in the same boat @Matt11 running a dell r730xd, and currently doing the same thing with IPMI, just have a word document with the hex codes I need to input. I don't really see there being a day where HexOS really implements a fan control within the software. Thankfully since my server just runs 24/7 and my load remains mostly static as far as CPU usage, I don't have a huge problem with the set and forget fan speed via IPMI.

Is there any plans to upgrade to 25.04? I am mostly looking forward to "Configurable IP addresses for newly added Apps in the catalog are available. All existing Apps will have this support added by June 1s" Anyone tried updating truenas anyway and seeing if the HexOS dashboard still works (I generally use it for read only data anyway, so I might be tempted to upgrade anyway...)

This should work. I suggest that you first move your drives as to the new system. And I it works, then clone the boot drive. I know @ubergeek migrated his drives in a new system more then once. I you search in this forum on his name, you will find more guidance.

(I cant edit the above message) Make sure you set up the Data, and Cofiguration Storage locations all as ixVolume (Dataset created automatically by the system). Also select Plex Logs Storage and Plex Transcode Storage to Temporary directory created on disk)

I was able to get it to work by uninstalling Plex and re-installing it directly from TrueNAS. The key thing is make sure you set up the Data, and Cofiguration Storage locations all as ixVolume (Dataset created automatically by the system) This should only take you 5-10 mins

So @Dylan you said a while ago ”Looking forward to see and hearing about it when you've got it all up and running.”. Well since last weekend I’m running HexOS on my Pocket NAS. I’ve just now realized I would have to catch up on smb shares though, to make it really work. So far no files on my NAS, just running ”empty”. If those cables were tidied up a bit it could well be sitting there in my hallway for good.

It is a must these days to have TailScale support, especially for secure remote access. It is far too easy to mess up a WireGaurd/OpenVPN Config, if the goal is security and simplicity, Tailscale VPN access should be a high priority.

Nice blog! You do a good job of providing personal contextualization and remain mindful to link when referring to previous posts (so annoying when you have to go hunt for that). Thanks for sharing!

Hello, not sure if it was requested already, but a curation for the "Actual Budget" app would be greatly appreciated. I found it by looking at the apps tab, and did some more research on it and i would love to switch to it instead of my current app of Quicken since I pay yearly to use it. I think it would help many nowadays due to inflation. Thanks!

The ability to change the Platform folders installed. For example when Plex installs, it auto sets the folders which is fine but I can't then change them or add new ones into the Platform folders. Any new ones go straight into My Folders.

I believe integrating Home Assistant with HexOS could be a game-changer for the operating system, offering functionality that is sorely lacking in almost all other OS platforms today. A Home Assistant integration would allow users to monitor and manage their NAS more effectively. Imagine being able to track critical metrics such as system uptime, array health, disk health checks, and the overall status of your storage systems — all from within Home Assistant. Furthermore, adding control features would significantly enhance the user experience. It would be fantastic if users could automate tasks like rebooting or stopping/starting applications, VMs, or containers directly through Home Assistant. Additionally, automating disk spin-downs during off-peak hours for power savings would be a powerful and eco-friendly feature. The potential of Home Assistant integration is vast, and it's difficult to fully capture all the possibilities in a single topic. However, the core idea is simple: having such an integration, with continuous updates and new features, would be a major advantage for HexOS. While most other operating systems either lack similar functionality or offer only basic, limited capabilities, HexOS could stand out by providing a more comprehensive, user-friendly, and flexible solution.

Jdownloader (usefull for 1-click hosters) Duckdns (DNS) Filezilla Adguard / PiHole HomeAssistant NGINX Proxy Manager Mediaelch (Media Organisation Tool) Rustdesk server (Remote Software like Teamviewer but free) Vaultwarden (Password Manager) Linkwarden (Link Manager) qbittorrent/Deluge or whatever (Torrent) Nordvpn (VPN support) everything from the "arr" usiverse

There's a thread already with this issue HERE, but i also posted about my fix as had the same issue when i moved my server to it's remote location. Try those steps and see what happens?

I would like to install Nginx Proxy Manager, DuckDNS, the Arr's (Sonarr, Radarr etc.), Jellyfin etc. If these could be direct app installs, this would be great.

HexOS will eventually move to the most up to date stable releases of truenas. At this time there are no etas.