My Build - A renewed appreciation of HexOS's mission

[bdistin]

Background:

I work as a System Administrator professionally managing Windows Servers, Virtualization, QNAP Nas's, and other network engineering. I had an old Windows Server I cobbled together at home years ago I was running plex, home assistant, and some other stuff; but it's been on its deathbed for a few years now. It was time for an upgrade, and LTT convinced me to give HexOS a try.

The Build:

Amazon Refurbished Dell R730XD w/ 128GB of ECC memory, dual Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2690 v4 @ 2.60GHz (28-cores total), 6 - 1.2TB SAS HDD (going to add 2 more soon), 4 - 1TB SATA SSDs, OS on Mirrored 240GB SATA SSDs, NVIDIA 3050 for Hardware Transcoding. I have another 12 open drive slots to expand later if needed. Total cost of build: $1,272.82

The Configuration:

I did a lot of stuff in unrecommended ways to see just how well HexOS/TrueNAS adapts, and went beyond a curated experience to get a good feel of the value HexOS adds to TrueNAS. This is also partially because I was replacing services I use with yet-to-be-curated apps. I have to say, HexOS handled what I threw at it very well. I found setting up a HomeAssistant VM in TrueNAS to be pretty straightforward, albeit more advanced than I would expect a family member to achieve, but not bad. I did install plex/immich via the curated way. Both required a touch of tweaks to get them to use hardware transcoding and a permission fix for images to get from uploads to the pictures folder, but they were technically usable in the curated state. Romm was another story though... I went through and made up the datasets w/ ACLs in the way plex/immich did, and doing that work manually is honestly an unintuitive pain. That's where my title comes from because I had begun to doubt how much HexOS was doing in the background to provide a polished experience. Getting Romm working abolished my budding doubts.

 

Keep up the good work HexOS team!

[Sonic]

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.

Edited January 17 by Sonic
Typo

[bdistin]

28 minutes ago, Sonic said:

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 thought it was a very good deal for the refurbished unit. $399 before tax, came with 4 1.2tb sas drives/the cpus/ram, and it had lots of room to grow. All the rest of the budget was just adding more drives/drive sleds and the GPU. I knew I was migrating a decent sized plex library, wanted some ssd storage for apps, and a GPU that fit in the server case for transcoding (the 3050 is completely PCI bus powered, so no extra cables needed).