Sonic

We didn’t see an updated roadmap yet. I am very curious and looking forward to it.

This is very helpful!

Hi Dylan, I have the AMD version, and the Radeon Graphics aren’t really great for Hardware Accelerated Transcoding. I don’t have much experience with Plex, and I haven’t installed it on HexOS yet. I’m afraid I can’t help you with this.

There are no dumb questions. Just ask questions and learn. HexOS uses ZFS as file system. HexOS creates raidz1 pool if you have more then 3 drives. (One drive can fail). Raidz2 can not be created by HexOs yet ( two drives can fail), but you can in Truenas. with 2 drives a ZFS mirror is created. (One drive can fail). If you want to learn more about this topic, you can use google and search for ZFS vs Raid

This is proper tweaking. I like your approach! Why buy everything pre-made when you can 3D print it yourself?

Pretty fast CPU generally means fast single-core performance for most games. There are exceptions, but in most cases, multi-core performance isn't that relevant. Whether you can combine HexOS with a Minecraft or Palworld game server strongly depends on the number of concurrent users. Looking at the minimum specifications for Palworld (see below), you should easily be able to run HexOS on the same machine for up to 8 players. Minimum System Requirements: 1–8 players: CPU: 4 cores @ high frequency RAM: 16GB (10–15 players) + 1GB for each additional player Storage: 30 GB SSD Looking at your list on PCPartPicker, you can build a great server with those components and gain valuable experience. Personally, I think this configuration might be overkill. A (home) server is idle most of the time. Also, is noise a concern? IronWolf Pro drives are quite noisy. If the server will be in the garage, that's not an issue, but in a bedroom, it could be a problem. Do you already know which operating system you'll use?

Yes, it will run in Hyper-V in general. Also HDD passthrough is possible.

See reaction of Jonp. https://hub.hexos.com/topic/1916-so-far-good/#comment-12202 HexOs is hesitant to support NFS.

How important is energy usage? The i7-14700K is certainly overkill. You might want to consider some interesting NAS devices that are coming to market soon. For example, check out this video on YouTube (Nascompares). On Nascompares, you can also find guides for installing TrueNAS (and therefore HexOS) on devices like Ugreen, QNAP, and TerraMaster. The advantage is that you get a compact system with everything you need built in. Of course, you can also build your own. In terms of processors, Intel has been better suited for transcoding in recent years. I'm not sure how the latest-gen AMD Ryzen processors compare. On Reddit, I came across a few reviews suggesting that an Intel N305 is already capable of 4K transcoding (though I don’t have personal experience with it). The N305 is also quite energy-efficient. On YouTube, you can find plenty of reviews on Homelab Plex servers. This one by Techno Tim is worth a look: Techno Tim’s review.

Thanks for sharing. I was not familiar with Romm. It looks like a nice retro gaming platform. I will give it a try. I am just curious. Why did you choose the Dell R730XD? Do you need so much power? It’s a nice setup to play with.

I like the idea of a comprehensive hardware database for HexOS. Count me in for support! What do you think about collaborating with hardware vendors? You could aim for HexOS-certified systems. HexOS is simple to use, and pairing it with hardware that’s affordable and just works out of the box would be a big win. Especially if the price point is lower than Synology or QNAP, it would make HexOS very appealing to the average user. iXsystems already provides TrueNAS hardware, but their target audience and support level are very different. Personally, I enjoy researching and tweaking hardware, but most of my friends and family just want tech that works seamlessly. Combining HexOS with pre-certified, plug-and-play hardware could make it the go-to option for those users!

Hi Dylan, I'm really happy with it. It feels very solid and stable. Of course, there are a few things that could be improved, such as making the HDDs hot-swappable and adding 10 GbE networking. But at this price point, the WTR Pro is more than okay. It offers a great balance of performance and energy efficiency. This is an ideal machine for starting with a home server. I have some experience with Chinese mini PC brands, and often their customer service, BIOS/software quality, communication, and documentation are not up to the standard we’re used to in the EU/US. That said, Aoostar is doing a great job trying to improve in these areas. I don’t think they’re a very large company yet. By the way, the BIOS on the WTR Pro is very extensive. In summary: very satisfied! By the way, it seems there’s a 6-bay WTR with 10 GbE coming in Q1 2025.

So you know the pain and frustration 🙂. But if it works it's great

I’m not saying it’s impossible. There are guides online for migrating bare metal to KVM, Proxmox, VirtualBox, etc. However, this involves diving straight into a lot of advanced topics. My recommendation would be to back up your data and do a clean setup of KVM. You’ll learn a lot if you go with QEMU + KVM, but if you want to get things up and running quickly and efficiently, Proxmox is a solid alternative.

Running HexOS in a Proxmox VM is straightforward, and it would be easy to create a simple guide for that. Hardware passthrough, however, can quickly become more complex. When it works immediately, it seems simple. But when you encounter errors, it often leads to lengthy troubleshooting and frustration. Especially if you’re not experienced with Linux or virtualization. Consumer-grade hardware sometimes lacks full BIOS support for virtualization, particularly with older hardware. For older server hardware, it’s a different story. SATA passthrough is relatively simple. Under "Datacenter" in "Resource Mappings," you can easily map the SATA controller(s). When creating the VM, you can then add these as a PCI device.

No worries, the WTR Pro comes in both an AMD Ryzen 7 5825U version and an Intel N100 version. Both are very energy-efficient while still offering quite a bit of power. I personally have the Ryzen version, and I'm very happy with it. For Plex/transcoding, the N100 performs slightly better. You can find a review of the WTR Pro on Hardware Haven: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ct4yewC7mKA. That said, the right choice depends heavily on your use case. I also have a mini PC with an N100 in my network, which I use for Proxmox with several Docker containers. I'm very satisfied with it. Plenty of performance with very low energy consumption.

I use one NUC 11 with Proxmox to run Windows 11 VDIs. Additionally, I have a Mini PC with Proxmox and an Intel N100 (low power), which I use to run my Docker containers. This machine is always on. My third machine is an Aoostar WTR Pro, on which I run HexOS with SATA passthrough and a Proxmox Backup server. These three machines are the "production" setup in my homelab. Additionally, I have one more PC with Proxmox for testing purposes.

You can check nascompares.com. You will find several guides to install TrueNas on Qnap, Terramaster, Ugreen, ... Example: How to Install UnRAID/TrueNAS on a UGREEN NAS - A Quick Install Guide https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmFb_kO5V3Q

Unless you stripe the drives (and you shouldn’t) a vdev can only be the size of the smallest drive multiplied with the number of drives and subtracted the parity, and some overhead. A pool can consist of more then one vdev, but it has no redundancy in that layer. You loose one vdev, you lost your entire pool.

I agree with that! I bought the AMD version of the WTR Pro, and I’m very happy with it! A great choice.

Can you also explain in the vision how HexOs views NFS support? I read in earlier responses to other posts that you doubt whether NFS will ever be supported by HexOs. A clear "no" is also a good answer, as long as it’s clear. After reading the response below, I looked into my homelab to review my NFS shares. In principle, I can also use SMB for the same shares, so I could manage without NFS. https://hub.hexos.com/topic/1916-so-far-good/#comment-12202

I really like this feature request! Using NFS in Truenas is way to complicated. I already had a lot of Truenas NFS permission denied errors in the past.

Hi HexOS team, Over the past few weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to work with HexOS. Even though it’s still in beta, HexOS shows a lot of promise. Creating configurations is super simple. I’ve also adjusted quite a few things using the TrueNAS interface. Compared to that, creating an NFS share suddenly feels much more complex. I also have some ideas for potential HexOS features. What I’m wondering is: which user group or groups are the sweet spot for HexOS? Let’s take NFS shares as an example. For a user with a homelab, using an NFS share can be an interesting use case. The average homelab user is capable of configuring settings in more technical user interfaces. However, for example, my parents would never use NFS but do have a need for the simplest way to store and access their data. I’m very curious about your product vision for HexOS regarding the different usergroups. Thanks in advance for your response! Let me know if you'd like any adjustments!

Hi Dylan, Thank you for your suggestion. I am familiar with the command line and rsync. I use Truenas next to Synology DSM already for a long time. But in my opinion this is not an easy solution. Synology Hyper Drive and Synology Drive are easy to setup and easy to use. This should also be the strength of HexOS, ease of use and ease of setup. If I want to do more complicated stuff, I can always use Truenas and the commandline.

Next to Truenas and HexOS I still have a very solid Synology NAS in my network and I think I am not the only one. It would be very nice if there is an easy way to Backup HexOS data to Synology and the other way around