Kinkajou

The best I would expect is maybe a Black Friday/Cyber Monday launch sale that drops the price to 150 lifetime, and then Tuesday December 2nd the price is at 300 dollars and we have 1.0 out of beta.

Well, I dunno if or when a subscription model would be available, but if you have the hardware ready to go, you could go for the full lifetime license, it has a 30 refund period. So you could get it, try it, and if not for you after three weeks you can start the process to request a refund. Keep in mind however that depending on what you want to do there are still things that need to be set up and configured in the underlying TrueNAS system that HexOS is built on top of, but having said that most tasks you may want to accomplish that would need you to drop into that interface are either rather straightforward if you read all the options or if there is a guide already posted (for example setting up TailScale). From the Terms of Service: Any and all purchases are subject to a 30-day refund policy. To request a refund, email us at support@hexos.com using the email account associated with your purchase. For Early Access orders, the 30-days starts from the date you receive your invite to participate in the beta.

I'm going to make it work, was just hoping for more HDD bays internally. 4 total storage bays will be sufficient for my use case, at least for the next few years, hoping I can use these till 2030 before upgrading to something more purpose built as a storage server. Also while frustrating to work in, the design and form factor is rather nice on the outside, I wish more cases looked similar. I'm not big on glass size panels and RGB everything.

Upside: Relatively inexpensive if you can get a good deal and they aren't too terribly old (the two I got are from 2019). Downsides: It only supports four drives up front that you can swap out without taking the side panel off (I knew that going in from pictures I saw) It only supports one additional HDD internally and it would be mounted in the 5.25" bay, which needs an additional adapter. If the front flex bays have been converted to use NVMe, you cannot use a mechanical HDD or a 2.5" SSD in those slots, it must be a NVMe using their special carrier cards. So there is another additional component you would need to purchase. The front SD card slot shows as a HDD and I have been unable to get the system to stop reporting it as a storage device, I only figured it out by putting an SD card in the slot and now HexOS reports it there with the storage of the SD card even when the SD isn't inserted. It persists after restarts. Supposedly the PCIe slots are capable of bifurcation but there's no clear setting in the BIOS about it, so hopefully when I get a PCIe to NVMe carrier card it will be able to recognize the four additional SSDs I want to populate it with. Hopefully this post saves someone that may be looking at one of these machines to use for their system from the same headaches I have run into. I'm excited to get started on my journey with HexOS, just a matter of fixing the front backplane to accept HDDs instead of NVMe and getting the drives I want to use. 4 drives will be plenty for my needs for the time being, but I know others might feel too limited by that.