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Aren't you better off buying a disk shelf for your server rack? Those will hold 12 or 24 3.5in drives. You can often find them used for reasonably cheap prices, often pre-populated with old drives. This isn't bad, because even if the drives aren't useful to you, the sleds are. You can always on-sell old drives if you want. You can use SAS or SATA drives in a disk shelf, just don't mix them, stick to one type of drive per shelf. For commercial use disk shelves always plug in to a controller unit that acts as the brains of the NAS, controlling the dozens of drives for the network. You don't need that tho. Home rack folks will often just use a PC with a HBA card with external ports (eg. SFF-8088 ports on a HBA card from LSI), and connect that to the disk shelves with SAS cables. Or you could buy the rackmount control unit used too. They aren't much, and if you want to upgrade from SAS (3Gbps) to SAS2 (6Gbps) or SAS3 (12Gbps) controllers, then they're modular upgrades. The biggest drawback is probably noise from all of those drives working and fans to keep the HDDs and PSUs cool. Seeing as you're already going with rackmount tho, I guess that noise isn't a concern in your setup. caveat: I haven't done this myself. I researched it and ended up passing because I can't manage the noise in my living situation. Otherwise, it's easily the cheapest and cleanest way to 100TB+ storage levels so long as you buy used gear. Need more storage later? Add another disk shelf to your rack.

It's for folks who want a NAS to support their hobby rather than the NAS being their hobby.

Yeah, it was a desperation move. There's just legitimately no way that I should be spending $99, and def can't $199. I know that I'm going to need this. And this was a now or never moment. I either get HexOS now, or forever be looking at it from the outside. I may have also been driven by the month long struggle that I'm in the middle of with my own NAS setup right now. I've known the pain in the pass, but is it again fresh and raw, lol. I had to cast aside shame and ask. I honestly wasn't expecting it to happen. There was no obligation on Jon's or HexOS' part. So, I was very surprised to see them thrown me a hail mary pass. Much love. ❤️

I spoke too soon. I got the sale price. I have had an unexpected victory and acquired a HexOS license! So happy right now. The way it works: I received an email half an hour ago that told me I'd received $100 credit in my account here. Go through normal purchase process, but when you get to "How do you want to pay?" Choose Account Credit (not CC or Paypal). Proceed with the sale process, and it completes. Then you restart the sale process, this time you'll have the credit already applied, and choose CC or Paypal for the $99 payment. I used a one-time disposable CC number (from Revolut) and it worked fine.

$199 is beyond my budget. Maybe I could stretch to $120, but I can't spend beyond that. I'm kicking myself for watching the LTT video eight hours too late. Really sucks. I PM'd the admin here and emailed support@hexos.com on the same day. Haven't heard back yet, but here's hoping. 🙂

I'm in the same boat. I've been keen to know more about this ever since Linus first revealed he'd invested in a user-friendly NAS startup. I just saw the reveal and announcement video a little too late.