ysuissa

You probably can, just be careful not to add the boot drive to one of the pools. I don't know if that's even possible (I would assume not), but I'd double check before formatting any drive. It's "user friendly" but still very much in beta

you won't feel the difference, maybe a couple seconds at boot time, but that's negligible since a server is supposedly on 24/7 anyway if you run out of sata ports you could always buy a cheap PCIE to sata (or PCIE to nvme) adapter off aliexpress (depending on what you get you MAY be band limited, so do your research before buying!)

generally HBA is just "an interface" to connect your HDDs to your CPU. assuming you're using a consumer-grade PC (rather than a server), the sata ports connect to your chipset (a chip that is built in to your motherboard), which does the job a HBA would've done. hypothetically, lets say you use all 6 sata ports and wanna add more drives? only THEN would you need to get a HBA/RAID card, and allocate it in a PCIE slot

looks REALLY neat from a preserving standpoint, but that hardware is SO old, i don't think you should run it. don't get me wrong, it'll probably do whatever you throw at it (speed can be debated, but it'll PROBABLY be fine), my main concern is power consumption. each CPU can draw a non-negligent amount of power. and the performance per watt for these things aren't that good, even in comparison to a more modern dell optiplex or something. if the power bill isn't a concern, then go for it! should be fun!

as mentioned, a steel or 3d printed caddy is the only real viable solution ("letting it hang loose" in your case would cause the drive to die pretty fast since its a spinning disk). if you're getting it 3d printed, i suggest first seeing how you can mount it in your case. you can also search thangs.com to see if someone already made a HDD caddy for your case

i'm not currently enrolled in the beta, but i guess that as long as they didn't advertise a one click solution for it - this is the experience you'll get. if you take plex for example, it opens the folders AND sets the permissions for you with one click (as much as i've witnessed from LTT's video). protip: if you didn't FIND the folders, this means that Jellyfin wasn't exposed to those folders to begin with (that's a problem with your docker config, not a permissions problem). if you CAN find the folders in jellyfin, but can't write to them, only then i'm afraid you'll have to access TrueNAS's ACL system. i can guide you through it if you wish, but you'll have to provide images from TrueNAS's shares so i can see the folder structure

just out of curiosity (as someone who isnt in the beta yet), the current TrueNAS version has a checkbox that handles the gpu passthrough and does this automagically by its own. i use this right now with my plex setup. have you tried it? if not, its worth a shot for the rest of your app needs. i wonder if this breaks something in the HexOS interface (i don't think it should, but meh)

i don't think you should expect native support for advanced battery management (like windows has), deep sleep states etc, so i wouldn't use this as an actual laptop if you're only speaking about using this as a "always connected PC that happens to have a screen and a battery attached to it", then yeah sure. your only problem would be connecting the HDDs to your laptop, but that can be solved with a m.2 to sata adapter from AliExpress or something

i chose to pass my RAID card to my TrueNAS scale and i run my storage on it. any containers i want are running on a separate ubuntu VM with docker, though now that TrueNAS (and thus HexOS) supports docker (rather than kubernetes (which im illiterate at), there's no actual reason for me to do that anymore. go with whatever is most convenient for you to diagnose. everything else is secondary. you won't feel the the difference in overhead of any solution.

right now i'm running TrueNAS Scale as a VM on proxmox and i have no issues, and that's how i plan on using HexOS as well! i'm not planning on running any critical infrastructure on it though, i don't trust it yet lmao