I love my setup. My talk to your gaming PC not only brute forces its way through modern game
optimization, but it handles my Plex Streaming. You know what? I mean what? I've got a great CPU with lots of cores and the GPU is great at transcoding.
Yes. He's not wrong and if you've only got one PC combining these functions is perfectly
reasonable. But if you're looking to step up your reliability, not to mention the safety of
your data storage. A dedicated NAS or network attached storage server is the way to go and
it costs less than you might think. Not at the price I bought my hard drive that. I may have
splurged a bit elsewhere too. Yeah well look I can't do anything about the way that you dive
into a new hobby but you don't have to do things his way because everything Ploof wants to accomplish
today. Sharing Plex with family and friends, offsite buddy backup, not to mention good old
fashion local file share can be accomplished on basic or even secondhand hardware. And if you're
not any good at this stuff that's okay because I'm not either. Notice I've never done a single
network or storage video in the last five years? No. So we'll be learning together. But not until
we all learn about our sponsor. Here's what I've got. A computer in the living room, a computer in
my office, and me a lazy pile of trash who doesn't want to get up once I've sat down. I could use
Google Drive or OneDrive to share all of my documents across my computers but I hate the idea
of sending things to the cloud when all of my PCs could just be connected locally. Also,
both of those companies, Google and Microsoft, they just kind of keep getting worse to the point
where I might even be running Linux on my main gaming PC in another year or two. The plan is to
pop a NAS down under my desk here. It'll act as a central repository and if someone wants to access
my Plex account while I'm gaming, it won't cost me any frames. I am well aware that I could just
buy an off-the-shelf box. Ugreen in particular has some really compelling options. But as soon as
I started looking at anything with six hard drive bays or more, I ran into the starting at monster.
Also, since I want this to be more than just a NAS and I'm not sure yet of all the things I want
it to do in the future, a custom upgradable build feels like the right choice. It's also just more
fun to pick exactly what I want, starting with the CPU, an Intel Core i3-12100. And I'll tell you
all about it while I transfer all of the data from my two 8TB drives that I'm going to be upgrading
from today. This ended up being an even better choice than I initially expected. With GPU prices
being what they are, I asked the lab to run some encoding tests to see if I can get away without
one. And it turns out the 12100 is great when it comes to direct play, software encoding,
and can even use quick sync on the integrated GPU for great power efficiency. Also, unlike AMD's 5800G
or the spare GTX 1660 Ti I would have used, the Intel chip has native AV1 support, if that ever
ends up actually mattering. Guess I get to save some power, which is one of the reasons I spent
a little more in the first place. There are much older and much cheaper CPUs that would work fine
for basic storage, but that would come at the expense of some efficiency. Plus, you know, who
knows what I want to actually do with this thing, so I might as well buy modern-ish hardware. Let's
check out the motherboard. I chose the ASUS Prime B760M-AD4. It's a little overkill, but it's got
two and a half gig LAN, decent I-O, and tons of expansion slots in an MATX form factor. And
since it's a couple of generations old, it's not that expensive. Now, you might be saying,
Bluf, you fool, that board only has four SATA ports. But don't worry, I've got a surprise tool
that I'll show you later. Thanks ASUS for sending this guy over. For memory, work agreed to give
me some on the condition that I dig for our worst kit of DDR4. But with how things are out there,
I'm not complaining. Capacity is more important than speed for what I'm doing anyway,
especially if I want to run a virtual machine or two. And if memory ever does come down in price,
I can always upgrade later thanks to my four dim slots. What I don't have that luxury for
is storage. While I was planning this project, the humble hard drive got hit by the same shortage
that has rocked memory and SSDs around the world. And it's at the point now where it's not even a
question of price. Many drives are just plum out of stock. So on top of the couple of 8TBs I picked
up from Weyler about a year ago, I had to ask my brother to buy me four 8TB Iron Wolf CMR
NAS drives all the way over in Edmonton for about 1200 Canadian dollars. Now this is another area
where you could definitely save some money. Unless you have multiple heavy users working off of your
NAS, you probably don't need CMR or conventional magnetic recording. The alternative is SMR or
shingled magnetic recording, which is cheaper and uses less power while still offering reasonable
read speeds. The only downside is that it suffers during intensive write operations, which those
won't come up for me unless I ever need to rebuild the data on my array in the event of a failure.
Please don't fail me hard drives, please. The plan was to tell you guys all about the stuff
while I installed the sleds. And then I realized that these don't have sleds. They just have little
rubber stoppers that we're going to put on there. And then they've got these nice front handles that
you put on the front. So if you haven't guessed it, the case is a Johnsbow case, which we'll get to
in a bit. If I was really smart, what I could have done was waited a week or two before sticker
bombing my hard drives. Most failures occur at the very beginning of life or near the end.
But let's face it, I wasn't going to put together a system that wasn't covered in stickers. I'll
live with my choice. And if I have to, I'll rip the stickers off and RMA the drives. By the way,
great tool for building a computer, LTT screwdriver, LTTstore.com. For my OS drive, I was lucky enough
to have a random 500 gig WD blue kicking around. I took one look at SSD pricing on new egg and decided
to use it. If it dies, it dies. It won't be holding any of my precious Linux ISOs anyway.
I also have a one terabyte Samsung 980 Pro that I was planning to use as a cache, but Linus told me
that if I end up going with Trunas or HexOS, I may not have enough system memory to properly take
advantage of L2 Arc. He recommended either using it to store virtual machines or to simply sell
it and recoup some of my project budget because these hard drives cost a pretty penny.
Now it's time to answer the question of how I'm going to hook up all these drives to this
little motherboard. Well, the case does have a nice backplane, but to connect all of that,
we're going to use an HPA or host bus adapter card. The go-to brand for best reliability is LSI.
And you can get them pretty much anywhere. Just be cautious of counterfeits and make sure you get
one that explicitly supports IT mode. That way you can avoid flashing the card's firmware. With
this installed, one of my unused PCIe slots turns into eight SAS ports, which can be used for either
SAS or SATA drives. And just what case can store all of these hard drives? Only the Jonsbo N5.
Okay, many others could. Hell, two strips of acrylic could hold them all, but this is what I
chose. It's massive, but I wanted it for a few reasons. First and foremost, it's beautiful,
and it really vibes with my space. Second, it supports up to 12 three and a half inch drives,
getting me a ton of room to grow into my new data hoarding obsession. And third, cable management
is going to be a breeze. Oh, and I like that it has USB-C on the front. That's great if I ever need
to adjust bulk data a little faster in the future. Since we're not sucking back much power without a
dedicated GPU, I went with a little 500 watt SFX power supply from Silverstone. I decided on this
and asked Silverstone to send it over before choosing the Jonsbo N5. Could have used a regular
size unit, but this one will fit just fine. Besides, you know, if you're building a NAS
at home, you're probably building it in an SFF case until you'll need something small like this.
But before I install the power supply, my copy's done. So I'm going to pop these last two drives in
first. Minor issue, the adapter plate that came with the Silverstone power supply. It's got this
lip on it and it makes our screws sit really proud and flipping it over just looks wrong. And also,
it doesn't look like that's supposed to happen that way. So luckily, I work somewhere that has
extra power supplies kind of just lying around. That means I grabbed this Mag A550BN 550 watt from
MSI and I'm going to use this today. Luckily, this supports ATX power supplies. So I'm sorry,
Silverstone. Thanks for sending it. I'm sure it's a great unit. Let's pop this in.
Moment of truth. It's all put together. Let's see if I did anything wrong. The monitor detects
something. One, two, three, four, five, six drives. And then where is my SSD? SSD? The system works.
All right, overall, I feel pretty good about this build. Yeah, it was almost $2,000,
not counting my two old eight terabyte drives, which is a lot of money. But most of that budget
went to the storage, which one way or another, I was going to pay for anyway. Have you looked at
the cost of cloud storage these days? And that's only going to go up as drives get more and more
scarce. At least I've kind of locked in on my pricing. But this was the easy part. I know how
to build a computer. I kind of do it for a living. The hard part is the software element of turning
a computer into a NAS. The way I see it, I've got three options. True NAS, Unrayed, or HexOS.
True NAS seems to be the best bet for power users, but I don't really know if that's me.
Unrayed is pretty flexible in how you utilize your storage. Pretty sure you can also just chuck in
kind of whatever size drives you want, and it'll figure it out. But Linus really recommends HexOS.
And because I was able to get a license because I work where I work, it was kind of a no-brainer.
So I've got my HexOS media right here. We're going to try to install it. I've never done this
before. We'll see how it goes. I went to HexOS's website, followed their instructions to flash my
thumb drive with some media. This should be easy. That's the reason I picked HexOS. So I'm really
hoping it is. I'm going to hit save and exit here, and away we go. All right, we're going to select
our USB partition two for our boot device. Start HexOS installation. All right, it's doing something.
Install, shell, reboot, shutdown. I want to install or upgrade. Okay, install HexOS to a drive. If
desired, select multiple drives to provide redundancy. HexOS installation drive are not
available for use in storage pools. That's fine. Okay, so I'm just picking which ones to select,
and then pressing space bar. Oh, pressing space bar to select. So not big backup. That's going to
get wiped. I want this 500 gig WD. This will erase all partitions and data on SDH. That is fine.
Proceed, yes. Enter your TrueNAS admin user password. Group password login will be disabled.
Extracting, extracting, creating data set, creating boot pool. The HexOS installation on SDH succeeded.
Please reboot and remove the installation media. That should be all it takes to install. Now I
should have to set up my actual storage pools and whatnot. Let's do it. Let's get started. We'll
guide you through setting up your new server. All right, cool. Looking for servers. If you recently
installed HexOS, it should automatically be detected when this device is on the same network.
And then if this doesn't work, I'll hit the having problems button. Okay, we gave looking for servers
a few minutes here and it's not finding anything. This is the sort of thing that normally it'll
detect it within like 10 to 30 seconds. But we gave it an extra few minutes, you know, just in
case. But I'm going to click having problems. Troubleshooting steps. Make sure that the server
is running and has an internet connection. Check. Ensure the device you're using is connected to
the same local network. It should be. Check that MDNS, multicast DNS, is enabled and functioning
correctly on both devices for proper discovery. If the above are correct, then try restarting
the server. If you have a custom network configuration, try entering the IP manually.
Let's enter the IP manually because if I was at home, I'd probably try just restarting it. But
we have a pretty different network than like what my home network is going to be like.
Try to connect. Looking for servers. A new server is detected. That's great. And it matches my IP.
Perfect. So I'm going to claim that. I'm going to enter my admin password. Claim server error.
You do not have any licenses available. Elijah. All right. Day two. Elijah got my code from
HexOS squared away and I should just be able to hit get started here. And this time it should work.
Zero SSDs of six and six HDDs. Yep. That's correct. I don't know why that's a warning.
This drive has existing. Oh, very cool. Okay. So luckily I backed up all of my data,
but I like that it's telling me that two of my hard drives actually have data on them and it
lets you know they're going to be wiped. Storage pools. 40 terabyte usable storage.
It automatically configured to either RAID Z1 or RAID 5. I'm not sure which,
but 40 terabyte. One drive can fail. Yeah, that sounds good to me.
Almost done. We've collected everything we need to get your server up and running to make it easier to find and identify your server. You should also give it a name.
You know, most of ours are named after little municipalities around town.
I'm going to name mine after where I'm from. Yellow knife. So let's do that. And yes, this is going to wipe it. Finish setup. Initializing. Preparing drives.
Welcome to Hexa West. Here are some shortcuts. Configure storage.
Configure users. Add folders. Install your first app. I'm on the dashboard.
Everything seems to be running normally. I've installed Plex. Once I take this home,
I'll actually sign into Plex and get all that set up. But that happens a little later. I just
want to make sure everything's, you know, running properly. My RAM is working. My hard drive pool
has got 38.19 TB of storage available. Folders. Okay. So the other thing that I'm really worried
about because networking is not my strong suit. Permissions. I hate figuring out permissions
in Windows. It is terrible. I am terrified of trying to do that in Linux without running into
issues. A huge part of why I'm going to Hexa West that I've said multiple times is this should be
brain dead easy and I should just be able to make folders and assign users and we'll see if that works.
So the next step is taking this home, making sure it connects on my local network
and getting Plex installed. So let's go. All right. It's been one week since you got a NAS.
How's it going? Pretty good so far. Okay. The whole experience was a little easier than expected,
but also much harder at the same time. Okay. Now, before we get any further into that,
what operating system did you end up going with that was easier and harder than expected?
I ended up going with Hexa West. Really? Because I was going to say like it wasn't that long ago.
Investment disclosure. I'm an investor in the company that makes Hexa West.
It wasn't that long ago that we and everyone else under the sun recommended Unraid for its simplicity.
I know. And even then watching because I watched a bunch of videos on installing and how to do
initial setup and everything. TrueNAS was definitely like, no, I don't want to do that.
And Unraid was definitely the more simple looking option. But then I watched a few Hexa West videos
and it's about 1.0 now. Almost. Almost. So I figured, okay, fine. Plus I get the key.
Right. Okay. So I didn't pay for it, which makes a massive difference,
but I really did go with that route just because I thought it would be the easiest.
Well, Unraid's a paid option too. Yeah. So they're both paid either way.
Yeah. Hexa West still just seemed the easiest and it kind of was.
What wasn't easy? Because I already know a lot of answers to that question.
Okay. So the install went fine. I took it home. It ran into issues exactly where I thought I would.
Windows file sharing stuff. Really? Yeah. That's one part of my Hexa West NAS at home. That does work perfectly.
The funny thing is I've got two main desktops that I'm booking up to, right?
Yeah. My living room PC that I went to do second, it was fine.
Literally just logged in with the credentials. No problem at all. My desktop PC, the one I wanted to do first was an absolute nightmare to the point where
I spent like an hour or so troubleshooting and I got to a point where everything I was looking at
was telling me to like buy Windows 11 Pro and enable stuff and I knew that was wrong.
What? No. I knew that was wrong. I knew that was wrong. No. I don't know. I knew that was wrong. Okay. So I enabled SMB protocols.
All my private network stuff was working fine. Everything was seeing everything.
So I could see the machine on my network, but I couldn't access any folders.
I couldn't do anything with it. Do you want to know what happened? It had to be Windows credential manager.
Pankrats went there first. We had to open PowerShell and he had to change
SMB client configuration setting, requires security signature. It was set to true.
We had to set that to false. Why was that set to true? I have no idea. This is even a pretty fresh Windows 11 install.
That's so weird. I reset my computer like six months ago or so.
So it's not even an issue with your NAS? No. This was an issue with your desktop? Yes.
Why is SMB still like this? Microsoft?
One in a million chance.
With it working? Yes. What's the first thing you did?
I started backing everything up, which took a while. It was like eight terabytes worth of data, but it was awesome.
Like I just, I set the transfer going and I didn't even worry about it.
It doesn't require security signature anymore. So it's all good.
I've got TailScale set up and running now. I just finished that as well.
Want to explain what TailScale is for people who are not in the know? TailScale is basically a way to SSH into your machine and add virtual networking to
other users so that like if my cousin wants to go onto my NAS, I give him my,
well, he has his own TailScale and then he logs in and through my invite and gets access.
And you can do that without opening up ports. The traditional way that you would allow someone else to access a resource that's on
your internal network. Yeah, it's much safer. But the funny thing is what really has been enjoyable about this whole experience
is I feel like I'm learning stuff about computers again. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. Like I actually like,
Oh, networking is a whole new Pandora's box. So I'm well aware and it was a terrifying one for the longest time.
But now that I have like my own, I mean, it's not really a home lab, but now that I kind of have my own little home lab, I'm like, Oh yeah,
I'll try that. Like whatever. I'll set this up and dig through troubleshooting guides and
spend a bunch of time doing it. And it's enjoyable because everything works.
And if it breaks, it's not the end of the world. So I know how to set it up again.
With that said, there's a big difference between, yeah, this is a pretty good experience for me and I enjoy working on it.
And this is something I would recommend to my family and friends or my parents.
Where are we at right now? If everything had gone as smoothly as it was supposed to.
It's a big if. 100% it is. I would be okay with helping my dad or someone else who's less tech literate
set this up in their home remotely with me being remote.
The setup and everything was really simple. Yeah.
The UI is good. It's really easy to use and navigate.
But as soon as they get into some kind of error that the documentation isn't going to cover,
like what I encountered, like sure, I know how to fix that now going forward.
And so that's something that's added to my own troubleshooting repertoire.
But like, yeah, I wouldn't expect them to do this on their own,
assuming there's something that goes wrong. If the process is perfect or like,
perfecter than it is now. Yes, I think this is something even my sister or my dad could do.
Now that that's all sorted, it's fine. And it works great.
And like, I'm just doing whatever I want. The flexibility overall of everything has been so nice.
Yeah. Like, I just, you know, I make sure that whatever I'm working on is on my NAS.
Instead of on my desktop locally. And then I can just move to the couch and open the file there.
Yep. And then all I'm halfway done and all I want to sit at my desk with like music playing or something,
I just go over there. And you're on tail scale.
So if you wanted to go to a cafe. 100%. And work on it there.
Boom. It's pretty cool. And you never worry about, okay, I'm in the middle of this draft and coffee spills on my laptop.
Who cares? It's gone. Or I'm taking all of this personal information and I'm synchronizing it
with some corporate cloud service somewhere. Yep. You own your data.
Yeah. That's the bottom line with a NAS. Which is a huge deal to me.
Is it more work than subscribing to, you know, Google One?
I mean, yeah, it's more work. Yeah. But like in the longer time, you can pay yourself to do that work in the money that you will
eventually save, not subscribing to someone's service because it's just math.
Yeah. Eventually, if you're going to use that storage, eventually you must pay for those hard drives.
Yeah. 100%. Whether you buy them and put them in your home or whether you pay for Google to put
them in a data center somewhere. And now I've got all my digital photos backed up somewhere safe.
I've got other files, like everything. With that said, a single NAS offers redundancy, but is not in and of itself a backup.
So the next level would be that I've talked to the HexOS team and I've told them it's a huge
priority for me as kind of an activist investor that they implement buddy backup.
Yeah. And so that's intended to be a feature where for no additional subscription fee,
you and a buddy, like me and Ploof could be like, okay, here, I bought an eight terabyte drive.
Here you go, buddy. Yep. You buy an eight terabyte drive. You give it to me.
Here you go, buddy. We put those into our NASs. We now have some extra space and we can set aside an encrypted folder that can automatically
synchronize. But yeah, right now it's just, I feel like I can breathe easy.
Knowing that everything's backed up and like, yeah, it's not a three, two, one fully because
I don't have an offsite yet. But once that's there, I will finally actually be practicing what I've preached to so many people
over the years.
You know what else we preach? What? The gospel of the segue.
To our sponsor. If you guys enjoyed this video, why not check out the build that we did for Mark Rober, actually?
Oh, yeah, yeah. I'd say that's a pretty good modern take on a like, balls to the wall, home NAS.