WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:04.560 I love my setup. My talk to your gaming PC not only brute forces its way through modern game 00:00:04.560 --> 00:00:13.840 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. 00:00:16.560 --> 00:00:23.600 Yes. He's not wrong and if you've only got one PC combining these functions is perfectly 00:00:23.600 --> 00:00:29.280 reasonable. But if you're looking to step up your reliability, not to mention the safety of 00:00:29.280 --> 00:00:36.080 your data storage. A dedicated NAS or network attached storage server is the way to go and 00:00:36.080 --> 00:00:41.200 it costs less than you might think. Not at the price I bought my hard drive that. I may have 00:00:41.200 --> 00:00:45.840 splurged a bit elsewhere too. Yeah well look I can't do anything about the way that you dive 00:00:45.840 --> 00:00:52.000 into a new hobby but you don't have to do things his way because everything Ploof wants to accomplish 00:00:52.000 --> 00:00:57.280 today. Sharing Plex with family and friends, offsite buddy backup, not to mention good old 00:00:57.280 --> 00:01:02.640 fashion local file share can be accomplished on basic or even secondhand hardware. And if you're 00:01:02.640 --> 00:01:07.120 not any good at this stuff that's okay because I'm not either. Notice I've never done a single 00:01:07.120 --> 00:01:12.640 network or storage video in the last five years? No. So we'll be learning together. But not until 00:01:12.640 --> 00:01:18.320 we all learn about our sponsor. Here's what I've got. A computer in the living room, a computer in 00:01:18.320 --> 00:01:25.200 my office, and me a lazy pile of trash who doesn't want to get up once I've sat down. I could use 00:01:25.200 --> 00:01:30.560 Google Drive or OneDrive to share all of my documents across my computers but I hate the idea 00:01:30.560 --> 00:01:36.160 of sending things to the cloud when all of my PCs could just be connected locally. Also, 00:01:36.160 --> 00:01:40.320 both of those companies, Google and Microsoft, they just kind of keep getting worse to the point 00:01:40.320 --> 00:01:46.240 where I might even be running Linux on my main gaming PC in another year or two. The plan is to 00:01:46.240 --> 00:01:52.640 pop a NAS down under my desk here. It'll act as a central repository and if someone wants to access 00:01:52.720 --> 00:01:57.600 my Plex account while I'm gaming, it won't cost me any frames. I am well aware that I could just 00:01:57.600 --> 00:02:02.720 buy an off-the-shelf box. Ugreen in particular has some really compelling options. But as soon as 00:02:02.720 --> 00:02:08.640 I started looking at anything with six hard drive bays or more, I ran into the starting at monster. 00:02:08.640 --> 00:02:12.720 Also, since I want this to be more than just a NAS and I'm not sure yet of all the things I want 00:02:12.720 --> 00:02:18.240 it to do in the future, a custom upgradable build feels like the right choice. It's also just more 00:02:18.240 --> 00:02:25.040 fun to pick exactly what I want, starting with the CPU, an Intel Core i3-12100. And I'll tell you 00:02:25.040 --> 00:02:30.080 all about it while I transfer all of the data from my two 8TB drives that I'm going to be upgrading 00:02:30.080 --> 00:02:36.000 from today. This ended up being an even better choice than I initially expected. With GPU prices 00:02:36.000 --> 00:02:40.240 being what they are, I asked the lab to run some encoding tests to see if I can get away without 00:02:40.240 --> 00:02:46.080 one. And it turns out the 12100 is great when it comes to direct play, software encoding, 00:02:46.080 --> 00:02:53.360 and can even use quick sync on the integrated GPU for great power efficiency. Also, unlike AMD's 5800G 00:02:53.360 --> 00:03:01.120 or the spare GTX 1660 Ti I would have used, the Intel chip has native AV1 support, if that ever 00:03:01.120 --> 00:03:05.760 ends up actually mattering. Guess I get to save some power, which is one of the reasons I spent 00:03:05.760 --> 00:03:11.920 a little more in the first place. There are much older and much cheaper CPUs that would work fine 00:03:11.920 --> 00:03:16.960 for basic storage, but that would come at the expense of some efficiency. Plus, you know, who 00:03:16.960 --> 00:03:21.440 knows what I want to actually do with this thing, so I might as well buy modern-ish hardware. Let's 00:03:21.440 --> 00:03:29.280 check out the motherboard. I chose the ASUS Prime B760M-AD4. It's a little overkill, but it's got 00:03:29.280 --> 00:03:36.640 two and a half gig LAN, decent I-O, and tons of expansion slots in an MATX form factor. And 00:03:36.640 --> 00:03:40.880 since it's a couple of generations old, it's not that expensive. Now, you might be saying, 00:03:40.880 --> 00:03:46.080 Bluf, you fool, that board only has four SATA ports. But don't worry, I've got a surprise tool 00:03:46.080 --> 00:03:50.800 that I'll show you later. Thanks ASUS for sending this guy over. For memory, work agreed to give 00:03:50.800 --> 00:03:57.280 me some on the condition that I dig for our worst kit of DDR4. But with how things are out there, 00:03:57.280 --> 00:04:01.440 I'm not complaining. Capacity is more important than speed for what I'm doing anyway, 00:04:01.440 --> 00:04:06.640 especially if I want to run a virtual machine or two. And if memory ever does come down in price, 00:04:06.640 --> 00:04:12.720 I can always upgrade later thanks to my four dim slots. What I don't have that luxury for 00:04:12.720 --> 00:04:18.480 is storage. While I was planning this project, the humble hard drive got hit by the same shortage 00:04:18.480 --> 00:04:24.400 that has rocked memory and SSDs around the world. And it's at the point now where it's not even a 00:04:24.400 --> 00:04:30.320 question of price. Many drives are just plum out of stock. So on top of the couple of 8TBs I picked 00:04:30.320 --> 00:04:36.320 up from Weyler about a year ago, I had to ask my brother to buy me four 8TB Iron Wolf CMR 00:04:36.320 --> 00:04:42.160 NAS drives all the way over in Edmonton for about 1200 Canadian dollars. Now this is another area 00:04:42.160 --> 00:04:46.640 where you could definitely save some money. Unless you have multiple heavy users working off of your 00:04:46.640 --> 00:04:52.960 NAS, you probably don't need CMR or conventional magnetic recording. The alternative is SMR or 00:04:52.960 --> 00:04:58.240 shingled magnetic recording, which is cheaper and uses less power while still offering reasonable 00:04:58.240 --> 00:05:04.560 read speeds. The only downside is that it suffers during intensive write operations, which those 00:05:04.560 --> 00:05:09.760 won't come up for me unless I ever need to rebuild the data on my array in the event of a failure. 00:05:10.400 --> 00:05:16.960 Please don't fail me hard drives, please. The plan was to tell you guys all about the stuff 00:05:16.960 --> 00:05:22.640 while I installed the sleds. And then I realized that these don't have sleds. They just have little 00:05:22.640 --> 00:05:28.480 rubber stoppers that we're going to put on there. And then they've got these nice front handles that 00:05:28.480 --> 00:05:32.080 you put on the front. So if you haven't guessed it, the case is a Johnsbow case, which we'll get to 00:05:32.080 --> 00:05:36.960 in a bit. If I was really smart, what I could have done was waited a week or two before sticker 00:05:36.960 --> 00:05:43.440 bombing my hard drives. Most failures occur at the very beginning of life or near the end. 00:05:43.440 --> 00:05:48.240 But let's face it, I wasn't going to put together a system that wasn't covered in stickers. I'll 00:05:48.240 --> 00:05:52.800 live with my choice. And if I have to, I'll rip the stickers off and RMA the drives. By the way, 00:05:53.520 --> 00:06:00.080 great tool for building a computer, LTT screwdriver, LTTstore.com. For my OS drive, I was lucky enough 00:06:00.080 --> 00:06:06.560 to have a random 500 gig WD blue kicking around. I took one look at SSD pricing on new egg and decided 00:06:06.560 --> 00:06:13.760 to use it. If it dies, it dies. It won't be holding any of my precious Linux ISOs anyway. 00:06:13.760 --> 00:06:19.840 I also have a one terabyte Samsung 980 Pro that I was planning to use as a cache, but Linus told me 00:06:19.840 --> 00:06:24.800 that if I end up going with Trunas or HexOS, I may not have enough system memory to properly take 00:06:24.800 --> 00:06:29.920 advantage of L2 Arc. He recommended either using it to store virtual machines or to simply sell 00:06:30.000 --> 00:06:34.480 it and recoup some of my project budget because these hard drives cost a pretty penny. 00:06:35.280 --> 00:06:38.640 Now it's time to answer the question of how I'm going to hook up all these drives to this 00:06:38.640 --> 00:06:42.960 little motherboard. Well, the case does have a nice backplane, but to connect all of that, 00:06:42.960 --> 00:06:48.640 we're going to use an HPA or host bus adapter card. The go-to brand for best reliability is LSI. 00:06:48.640 --> 00:06:52.800 And you can get them pretty much anywhere. Just be cautious of counterfeits and make sure you get 00:06:52.800 --> 00:06:58.400 one that explicitly supports IT mode. That way you can avoid flashing the card's firmware. With 00:06:58.400 --> 00:07:04.240 this installed, one of my unused PCIe slots turns into eight SAS ports, which can be used for either 00:07:04.240 --> 00:07:11.200 SAS or SATA drives. And just what case can store all of these hard drives? Only the Jonsbo N5. 00:07:11.920 --> 00:07:17.120 Okay, many others could. Hell, two strips of acrylic could hold them all, but this is what I 00:07:17.120 --> 00:07:24.320 chose. It's massive, but I wanted it for a few reasons. First and foremost, it's beautiful, 00:07:24.320 --> 00:07:30.480 and it really vibes with my space. Second, it supports up to 12 three and a half inch drives, 00:07:30.480 --> 00:07:35.840 getting me a ton of room to grow into my new data hoarding obsession. And third, cable management 00:07:35.840 --> 00:07:40.320 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 00:07:40.320 --> 00:07:44.880 to adjust bulk data a little faster in the future. Since we're not sucking back much power without a 00:07:44.880 --> 00:07:51.360 dedicated GPU, I went with a little 500 watt SFX power supply from Silverstone. I decided on this 00:07:51.360 --> 00:07:56.560 and asked Silverstone to send it over before choosing the Jonsbo N5. Could have used a regular 00:07:56.560 --> 00:08:01.040 size unit, but this one will fit just fine. Besides, you know, if you're building a NAS 00:08:01.040 --> 00:08:05.840 at home, you're probably building it in an SFF case until you'll need something small like this. 00:08:05.840 --> 00:08:10.320 But before I install the power supply, my copy's done. So I'm going to pop these last two drives in 00:08:10.320 --> 00:08:23.280 first. Minor issue, the adapter plate that came with the Silverstone power supply. It's got this 00:08:23.280 --> 00:08:30.320 lip on it and it makes our screws sit really proud and flipping it over just looks wrong. And also, 00:08:30.320 --> 00:08:34.480 it doesn't look like that's supposed to happen that way. So luckily, I work somewhere that has 00:08:34.480 --> 00:08:41.520 extra power supplies kind of just lying around. That means I grabbed this Mag A550BN 550 watt from 00:08:41.520 --> 00:08:46.960 MSI and I'm going to use this today. Luckily, this supports ATX power supplies. So I'm sorry, 00:08:46.960 --> 00:08:50.880 Silverstone. Thanks for sending it. I'm sure it's a great unit. Let's pop this in. 00:08:56.720 --> 00:09:02.400 Moment of truth. It's all put together. Let's see if I did anything wrong. The monitor detects 00:09:02.400 --> 00:09:16.000 something. One, two, three, four, five, six drives. And then where is my SSD? SSD? The system works. 00:09:16.960 --> 00:09:21.840 All right, overall, I feel pretty good about this build. Yeah, it was almost $2,000, 00:09:21.840 --> 00:09:27.280 not counting my two old eight terabyte drives, which is a lot of money. But most of that budget 00:09:27.280 --> 00:09:31.920 went to the storage, which one way or another, I was going to pay for anyway. Have you looked at 00:09:31.920 --> 00:09:36.240 the cost of cloud storage these days? And that's only going to go up as drives get more and more 00:09:36.240 --> 00:09:41.680 scarce. At least I've kind of locked in on my pricing. But this was the easy part. I know how 00:09:41.680 --> 00:09:46.160 to build a computer. I kind of do it for a living. The hard part is the software element of turning 00:09:46.160 --> 00:09:53.760 a computer into a NAS. The way I see it, I've got three options. True NAS, Unrayed, or HexOS. 00:09:53.760 --> 00:09:58.640 True NAS seems to be the best bet for power users, but I don't really know if that's me. 00:09:58.640 --> 00:10:02.960 Unrayed is pretty flexible in how you utilize your storage. Pretty sure you can also just chuck in 00:10:02.960 --> 00:10:08.080 kind of whatever size drives you want, and it'll figure it out. But Linus really recommends HexOS. 00:10:08.080 --> 00:10:13.920 And because I was able to get a license because I work where I work, it was kind of a no-brainer. 00:10:13.920 --> 00:10:18.800 So I've got my HexOS media right here. We're going to try to install it. I've never done this 00:10:18.800 --> 00:10:25.200 before. We'll see how it goes. I went to HexOS's website, followed their instructions to flash my 00:10:25.200 --> 00:10:30.080 thumb drive with some media. This should be easy. That's the reason I picked HexOS. So I'm really 00:10:30.080 --> 00:10:34.320 hoping it is. I'm going to hit save and exit here, and away we go. All right, we're going to select 00:10:34.320 --> 00:10:42.080 our USB partition two for our boot device. Start HexOS installation. All right, it's doing something. 00:10:42.720 --> 00:10:50.000 Install, shell, reboot, shutdown. I want to install or upgrade. Okay, install HexOS to a drive. If 00:10:50.000 --> 00:10:54.640 desired, select multiple drives to provide redundancy. HexOS installation drive are not 00:10:54.640 --> 00:10:59.520 available for use in storage pools. That's fine. Okay, so I'm just picking which ones to select, 00:10:59.520 --> 00:11:04.080 and then pressing space bar. Oh, pressing space bar to select. So not big backup. That's going to 00:11:04.080 --> 00:11:12.000 get wiped. I want this 500 gig WD. This will erase all partitions and data on SDH. That is fine. 00:11:12.000 --> 00:11:18.480 Proceed, yes. Enter your TrueNAS admin user password. Group password login will be disabled. 00:11:18.560 --> 00:11:26.000 Extracting, extracting, creating data set, creating boot pool. The HexOS installation on SDH succeeded. 00:11:26.640 --> 00:11:32.160 Please reboot and remove the installation media. That should be all it takes to install. Now I 00:11:32.160 --> 00:11:37.760 should have to set up my actual storage pools and whatnot. Let's do it. Let's get started. We'll 00:11:37.760 --> 00:11:42.320 guide you through setting up your new server. All right, cool. Looking for servers. If you recently 00:11:42.320 --> 00:11:46.880 installed HexOS, it should automatically be detected when this device is on the same network. 00:11:46.880 --> 00:11:52.480 And then if this doesn't work, I'll hit the having problems button. Okay, we gave looking for servers 00:11:52.480 --> 00:11:56.160 a few minutes here and it's not finding anything. This is the sort of thing that normally it'll 00:11:56.160 --> 00:12:00.160 detect it within like 10 to 30 seconds. But we gave it an extra few minutes, you know, just in 00:12:00.160 --> 00:12:04.800 case. But I'm going to click having problems. Troubleshooting steps. Make sure that the server 00:12:04.800 --> 00:12:08.960 is running and has an internet connection. Check. Ensure the device you're using is connected to 00:12:08.960 --> 00:12:14.880 the same local network. It should be. Check that MDNS, multicast DNS, is enabled and functioning 00:12:14.880 --> 00:12:18.720 correctly on both devices for proper discovery. If the above are correct, then try restarting 00:12:18.720 --> 00:12:23.440 the server. If you have a custom network configuration, try entering the IP manually. 00:12:23.440 --> 00:12:28.560 Let's enter the IP manually because if I was at home, I'd probably try just restarting it. But 00:12:28.560 --> 00:12:32.560 we have a pretty different network than like what my home network is going to be like. 00:12:32.560 --> 00:12:39.280 Try to connect. Looking for servers. A new server is detected. That's great. And it matches my IP. 00:12:39.280 --> 00:12:44.080 Perfect. So I'm going to claim that. I'm going to enter my admin password. Claim server error. 00:12:44.080 --> 00:12:49.200 You do not have any licenses available. Elijah. All right. Day two. Elijah got my code from 00:12:49.200 --> 00:12:54.320 HexOS squared away and I should just be able to hit get started here. And this time it should work. 00:12:54.320 --> 00:12:59.520 Zero SSDs of six and six HDDs. Yep. That's correct. I don't know why that's a warning. 00:12:59.520 --> 00:13:04.560 This drive has existing. Oh, very cool. Okay. So luckily I backed up all of my data, 00:13:04.560 --> 00:13:08.480 but I like that it's telling me that two of my hard drives actually have data on them and it 00:13:08.480 --> 00:13:13.280 lets you know they're going to be wiped. Storage pools. 40 terabyte usable storage. 00:13:13.280 --> 00:13:16.720 It automatically configured to either RAID Z1 or RAID 5. I'm not sure which, 00:13:16.720 --> 00:13:21.120 but 40 terabyte. One drive can fail. Yeah, that sounds good to me. 00:13:21.120 --> 00:13:27.520 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. 00:13:27.520 --> 00:13:30.720 You know, most of ours are named after little municipalities around town. 00:13:30.720 --> 00:13:39.760 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. 00:13:39.760 --> 00:13:42.800 Welcome to Hexa West. Here are some shortcuts. Configure storage. 00:13:42.800 --> 00:13:46.480 Configure users. Add folders. Install your first app. I'm on the dashboard. 00:13:47.280 --> 00:13:51.040 Everything seems to be running normally. I've installed Plex. Once I take this home, 00:13:51.040 --> 00:13:55.200 I'll actually sign into Plex and get all that set up. But that happens a little later. I just 00:13:55.200 --> 00:13:59.920 want to make sure everything's, you know, running properly. My RAM is working. My hard drive pool 00:13:59.920 --> 00:14:09.280 has got 38.19 TB of storage available. Folders. Okay. So the other thing that I'm really worried 00:14:09.280 --> 00:14:16.080 about because networking is not my strong suit. Permissions. I hate figuring out permissions 00:14:16.080 --> 00:14:21.600 in Windows. It is terrible. I am terrified of trying to do that in Linux without running into 00:14:21.600 --> 00:14:27.040 issues. A huge part of why I'm going to Hexa West that I've said multiple times is this should be 00:14:27.040 --> 00:14:33.520 brain dead easy and I should just be able to make folders and assign users and we'll see if that works. 00:14:33.520 --> 00:14:37.680 So the next step is taking this home, making sure it connects on my local network 00:14:37.680 --> 00:14:45.280 and getting Plex installed. So let's go. All right. It's been one week since you got a NAS. 00:14:45.280 --> 00:14:51.440 How's it going? Pretty good so far. Okay. The whole experience was a little easier than expected, 00:14:51.440 --> 00:14:57.840 but also much harder at the same time. Okay. Now, before we get any further into that, 00:14:57.840 --> 00:15:02.160 what operating system did you end up going with that was easier and harder than expected? 00:15:02.160 --> 00:15:07.280 I ended up going with Hexa West. Really? Because I was going to say like it wasn't that long ago. 00:15:07.360 --> 00:15:10.960 Investment disclosure. I'm an investor in the company that makes Hexa West. 00:15:10.960 --> 00:15:16.160 It wasn't that long ago that we and everyone else under the sun recommended Unraid for its simplicity. 00:15:16.160 --> 00:15:20.880 I know. And even then watching because I watched a bunch of videos on installing and how to do 00:15:20.880 --> 00:15:24.480 initial setup and everything. TrueNAS was definitely like, no, I don't want to do that. 00:15:26.160 --> 00:15:30.960 And Unraid was definitely the more simple looking option. But then I watched a few Hexa West videos 00:15:30.960 --> 00:15:37.360 and it's about 1.0 now. Almost. Almost. So I figured, okay, fine. Plus I get the key. 00:15:37.360 --> 00:15:41.360 Right. Okay. So I didn't pay for it, which makes a massive difference, 00:15:41.920 --> 00:15:46.320 but I really did go with that route just because I thought it would be the easiest. 00:15:46.320 --> 00:15:49.920 Well, Unraid's a paid option too. Yeah. So they're both paid either way. 00:15:49.920 --> 00:15:53.280 Yeah. Hexa West still just seemed the easiest and it kind of was. 00:15:53.280 --> 00:15:57.440 What wasn't easy? Because I already know a lot of answers to that question. 00:15:57.440 --> 00:16:03.200 Okay. So the install went fine. I took it home. It ran into issues exactly where I thought I would. 00:16:03.200 --> 00:16:09.680 Windows file sharing stuff. Really? Yeah. That's one part of my Hexa West NAS at home. That does work perfectly. 00:16:09.680 --> 00:16:13.280 The funny thing is I've got two main desktops that I'm booking up to, right? 00:16:13.280 --> 00:16:18.480 Yeah. My living room PC that I went to do second, it was fine. 00:16:18.480 --> 00:16:27.280 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 00:16:27.280 --> 00:16:32.960 I spent like an hour or so troubleshooting and I got to a point where everything I was looking at 00:16:32.960 --> 00:16:37.280 was telling me to like buy Windows 11 Pro and enable stuff and I knew that was wrong. 00:16:37.280 --> 00:16:43.760 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. 00:16:43.760 --> 00:16:48.480 All my private network stuff was working fine. Everything was seeing everything. 00:16:48.480 --> 00:16:52.880 So I could see the machine on my network, but I couldn't access any folders. 00:16:52.880 --> 00:16:57.280 I couldn't do anything with it. Do you want to know what happened? It had to be Windows credential manager. 00:16:57.280 --> 00:17:02.240 Pankrats went there first. We had to open PowerShell and he had to change 00:17:02.240 --> 00:17:07.200 SMB client configuration setting, requires security signature. It was set to true. 00:17:07.200 --> 00:17:13.920 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. 00:17:13.920 --> 00:17:17.120 That's so weird. I reset my computer like six months ago or so. 00:17:17.120 --> 00:17:21.840 So it's not even an issue with your NAS? No. This was an issue with your desktop? Yes. 00:17:22.400 --> 00:17:27.200 Why is SMB still like this? Microsoft? 00:17:27.200 --> 00:17:28.320 One in a million chance. 00:17:31.920 --> 00:17:35.040 With it working? Yes. What's the first thing you did? 00:17:35.040 --> 00:17:40.560 I started backing everything up, which took a while. It was like eight terabytes worth of data, but it was awesome. 00:17:40.560 --> 00:17:43.760 Like I just, I set the transfer going and I didn't even worry about it. 00:17:43.760 --> 00:17:46.320 It doesn't require security signature anymore. So it's all good. 00:17:47.120 --> 00:17:51.840 I've got TailScale set up and running now. I just finished that as well. 00:17:51.840 --> 00:18:00.480 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 00:18:01.200 --> 00:18:05.360 other users so that like if my cousin wants to go onto my NAS, I give him my, 00:18:05.360 --> 00:18:09.440 well, he has his own TailScale and then he logs in and through my invite and gets access. 00:18:09.440 --> 00:18:16.880 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 00:18:16.880 --> 00:18:22.480 your internal network. Yeah, it's much safer. But the funny thing is what really has been enjoyable about this whole experience 00:18:22.480 --> 00:18:26.800 is I feel like I'm learning stuff about computers again. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. Like I actually like, 00:18:26.800 --> 00:18:31.920 Oh, networking is a whole new Pandora's box. So I'm well aware and it was a terrifying one for the longest time. 00:18:31.920 --> 00:18:37.120 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, 00:18:37.120 --> 00:18:41.040 I'll try that. Like whatever. I'll set this up and dig through troubleshooting guides and 00:18:41.040 --> 00:18:45.440 spend a bunch of time doing it. And it's enjoyable because everything works. 00:18:45.440 --> 00:18:48.480 And if it breaks, it's not the end of the world. So I know how to set it up again. 00:18:48.480 --> 00:18:54.880 With that said, there's a big difference between, yeah, this is a pretty good experience for me and I enjoy working on it. 00:18:54.880 --> 00:18:59.360 And this is something I would recommend to my family and friends or my parents. 00:19:00.480 --> 00:19:04.880 Where are we at right now? If everything had gone as smoothly as it was supposed to. 00:19:04.880 --> 00:19:12.240 It's a big if. 100% it is. I would be okay with helping my dad or someone else who's less tech literate 00:19:12.800 --> 00:19:16.080 set this up in their home remotely with me being remote. 00:19:16.080 --> 00:19:19.280 The setup and everything was really simple. Yeah. 00:19:19.280 --> 00:19:22.640 The UI is good. It's really easy to use and navigate. 00:19:22.640 --> 00:19:27.680 But as soon as they get into some kind of error that the documentation isn't going to cover, 00:19:27.680 --> 00:19:31.280 like what I encountered, like sure, I know how to fix that now going forward. 00:19:31.280 --> 00:19:33.840 And so that's something that's added to my own troubleshooting repertoire. 00:19:34.400 --> 00:19:38.720 But like, yeah, I wouldn't expect them to do this on their own, 00:19:39.760 --> 00:19:44.240 assuming there's something that goes wrong. If the process is perfect or like, 00:19:44.240 --> 00:19:49.760 perfecter than it is now. Yes, I think this is something even my sister or my dad could do. 00:19:49.760 --> 00:19:52.880 Now that that's all sorted, it's fine. And it works great. 00:19:52.880 --> 00:19:59.120 And like, I'm just doing whatever I want. The flexibility overall of everything has been so nice. 00:19:59.120 --> 00:20:03.600 Yeah. Like, I just, you know, I make sure that whatever I'm working on is on my NAS. 00:20:03.680 --> 00:20:09.040 Instead of on my desktop locally. And then I can just move to the couch and open the file there. 00:20:09.040 --> 00:20:12.800 Yep. And then all I'm halfway done and all I want to sit at my desk with like music playing or something, 00:20:12.800 --> 00:20:15.440 I just go over there. And you're on tail scale. 00:20:16.000 --> 00:20:19.280 So if you wanted to go to a cafe. 100%. And work on it there. 00:20:19.840 --> 00:20:27.920 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. 00:20:27.920 --> 00:20:33.520 Who cares? It's gone. Or I'm taking all of this personal information and I'm synchronizing it 00:20:33.520 --> 00:20:38.160 with some corporate cloud service somewhere. Yep. You own your data. 00:20:38.160 --> 00:20:42.400 Yeah. That's the bottom line with a NAS. Which is a huge deal to me. 00:20:42.400 --> 00:20:46.880 Is it more work than subscribing to, you know, Google One? 00:20:46.880 --> 00:20:53.360 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 00:20:53.360 --> 00:20:58.400 eventually save, not subscribing to someone's service because it's just math. 00:20:58.400 --> 00:21:04.320 Yeah. Eventually, if you're going to use that storage, eventually you must pay for those hard drives. 00:21:04.320 --> 00:21:08.640 Yeah. 100%. Whether you buy them and put them in your home or whether you pay for Google to put 00:21:08.640 --> 00:21:13.920 them in a data center somewhere. And now I've got all my digital photos backed up somewhere safe. 00:21:13.920 --> 00:21:22.240 I've got other files, like everything. With that said, a single NAS offers redundancy, but is not in and of itself a backup. 00:21:22.240 --> 00:21:27.120 So the next level would be that I've talked to the HexOS team and I've told them it's a huge 00:21:27.120 --> 00:21:31.680 priority for me as kind of an activist investor that they implement buddy backup. 00:21:31.680 --> 00:21:37.120 Yeah. And so that's intended to be a feature where for no additional subscription fee, 00:21:37.120 --> 00:21:42.560 you and a buddy, like me and Ploof could be like, okay, here, I bought an eight terabyte drive. 00:21:42.560 --> 00:21:45.680 Here you go, buddy. Yep. You buy an eight terabyte drive. You give it to me. 00:21:45.680 --> 00:21:53.840 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 00:21:53.840 --> 00:21:57.680 synchronize. But yeah, right now it's just, I feel like I can breathe easy. 00:21:57.680 --> 00:22:01.360 Knowing that everything's backed up and like, yeah, it's not a three, two, one fully because 00:22:01.360 --> 00:22:08.480 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 00:22:08.480 --> 00:22:09.760 over the years. 00:22:12.240 --> 00:22:16.080 You know what else we preach? What? The gospel of the segue. 00:22:16.080 --> 00:22:22.960 To our sponsor. If you guys enjoyed this video, why not check out the build that we did for Mark Rober, actually? 00:22:22.960 --> 00:22:30.000 Oh, yeah, yeah. I'd say that's a pretty good modern take on a like, balls to the wall, home NAS.