beardedbrewer

I live in California where electricity is not so cheap... 😞

How would someone make it more energry efficient?

That does looks great! I'm using a very similar specced system, just have less RAM. The idea of turning the 5.25 drive bays into a hot swappable 3.5 drive bay seems like something I should look into for my build. Do you have any resources for the backplane?

Might as well introduce myself as well... I am beardedbrewer, but go by beardman as well, not just because I have a beard and I am a brewer... of mostly beer and coffee, sometimes both! I am an IT professional who loves all things tech. I am excited for HexOS and purchased a lifetime license during the Black Friday promotion. I love the idea of building my own NAS with little fuss, and I believe HexOS allows me to do just that.

In preperation for the tariffs, I did end up buying parts for my first gaming PC build, which is now built, but my wife will be using it to game mostly... and in the future I'm hoping to build a second... or buy a pre-built... Which ever is going to be more cost effective at the time... I wanted to order some network upgrades (I'm planning on upgrading my home network to all Ubiquiti equipment) but lost the chance to, now I have to pay some bills down and prep for getting floors put in as well as getting an electrician to add a couple of outlets and running new circuits in our garage. I'm lucky enough to work for an IT company where when one of our clients is getting rid of older hardware, they contacts us to e-waste it, and sometimes we can get our hands on some pretty cool hardware that someone gets to take home. And as mentioned above, I, too, will probably going the scrap yards way to upgrading my NAS hardware down the line.

You know, I haven't considered trying this... but will be definitely looking into it.

I thought about doing that, but since it's a SFF, there wouldn't be enough physical space to put drives. I also thought about building the NAS inside an old cheese grater Mac Pro. But the power draw would be way too much to make it worth it... I would love to use my 2018 Mac Mini and use 4 thunderbolt external drives as the pool...

I first wanted to setup a Dell Optiplex 5060 SFF to be used with HexOS. I wanted to use it because it has a NVME slot, uses DDR4 memory, and an 8th gen Intel Core i5 (which is a 6 core CPU, I believe). Would have a been a great started NAS, only downside is that I can only add 1 3.5 HDD, maybe a second HDD, but it would have to be a 2.5, and I'd be removing the optical drive. While I was able to get HexOS to install without issue, after some tinkering with the BIOS, I wasn't able to create any Pools with just 1 drive. Luckily, my father-in-law had an old gaming PC he wasn't using anymore - So I took it over, the case itself has slots for as many as 6-8 3.5 in drives, which is great! This would be perfect! Biggest downside to this setup is that the hardware is using 4th gen Intel core i7... and the mb doesn't have an NVME slot 😞 Currently, it's setup with 3 4TB WD Black drives as the pool (giving approximately 8TB of storage), and 2.5 in SSD drive as the boot drive. Just need to get a couple of HBA cards, remove the 2 optical drives, and start loading it up with drives. Eventually I'd like to upgrade to some much newer hardware for the CPU/MB/RAM/GPU. I'll post some pictures later of the setup.