He Needs a NAS

I love my setup. My top tier gaming PC not only brute forces its way through modern game optimization, but it handles my Plex streaming. Your 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 networkattached storage server is the way to go. And it costs less than you might think. Not at the price I bought my hard drives at. 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 PLOF wants to accomplish today, sharing Plex with family and friends, off-site buddy backup, not to mention good old-fashioned local fileshare can be accomplished on basic or even secondhand hardware. And if you're not any good at this stuff, that's okay because uh I'm not either. Notice I've never done a single network or storage video in the last 5 years. No. So, we'll be learning together, but not until we all learn about our sponsor, Squarespace. Do you need a website to help take your business or hobby to the next level? Well, Squarespace has a ton of tools to help make it easy for you to get started. Check them out and get 10% off your first purchase at the link down below. 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 One Drive to share all of my documents across my computers, but uh 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. UG 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 an ass, 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 8 TBTE 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 quicks sync on the integrated GPU for great power efficiency. Also, unlike AMD's 5800G or the spare GTX 1660Ti 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 modernish hardware. Let's check out the motherboard. I chose the Asus Prime B760M- D4. It's a little overkill, but it's got 2 and 1/2 gig LAN, decent IO, 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, "Plof, 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 8 TB I picked up from Wher about a year ago, I had to ask my brother to buy me four 8 TBTE Iron Wolf CMR NAS drives all the way over in Edmonton for about $1,200 Canadian. 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 uh these don't have sleds. They just have little rubber stoppers that we're going to put on there. And then they've got uh these nice front handles that you put on the front. So, if you haven't guessed it, the case is a John's 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, ltstore.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 Newegg 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 1 TBTE Samsung 980 Pro that I was planning to use as a cache, but Linus told me that if I end up going with Trunass 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 uh yeah, 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 back plane, but to connect all of that, we're going to use an HBA 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 Jonbo 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 3 and 1/2 in 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 USBC on the front. That's great if I ever need to ingest 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 uh decided on this and asked Silverstone to send it over before choosing the Jonbo 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. And so you'll need something small like this. But before I install the power supply, my copies done. So I'm going to pop these last two drives in first. Minor issue. The adapter plate that came with the Silverstoneone power supply, it's got this lip on it and it makes our screws sit really proud and uh flipping it over just looks wrong. And also it's 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 A550 BN 550 W from MSI and I'm going to use this today. Luckily this supports ATX power supplies. So uh 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 8 TB 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: TRNA, Unrade, or Hexos. Trunass seems to be the best bet for power users, but I don't really know if that's me. Unrade 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 Lionus 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 2 for our boot device. Start Hexos installation. All right, it's doing something. Uh, install, shell, reboot, shutdown. I want to install or upgrade. Okay. Install Hex OS 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 spacebar. Oh, pressing space bar to select. So, not big backup. That's going to get wiped. Um, I want this 500 gig WD. This will erase all partitions and data on SDH. That is fine. Proceed. Yes. Enter your TRNAS admin user password. Root 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 Hex OS, 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. Uh, 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 multiccast 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 terbte usable storage. It automatically configured to either RAID Z1 or RAID 5. I'm not sure which, but uh 40 TB 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. Uh, and yes, this is going to wipe it. Finish setup. Initializing. Preparing drives. Welcome to HexOS. Here are some shortcuts. Configure storage. Configure users. Add folders. Install your first app. I'm on the dashboard. Uh, 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. Uh, 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 38.19TB of uh storage available uh 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 with XOS 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 1 week since you got a NAS. How's it going? Pretty good so far. Okay. The whole experience was uh a little easier than I 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 Hexos. Really? Cuz I was going to say like it wasn't that long ago, investment disclosure, I'm an investor in the company that makes Hexos. It wasn't that long ago that we and everyone else under the sun recommended Unra for its simplicity. I know. And even even then watching because I watched a bunch of videos on installing and how to do initial setup and everything. Truess was definitely like no I don't want to do that and Unrade was definitely the more simple looking option. But then I watched a few hexos 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. Um, but I really did go with that route just because I thought it would be the easiest. Well, Unre is a paid option, too. Yeah. So, they're both paid either way. Yeah. Hexos still just seemed the easiest, and it kind of was. What wasn't easy? Cuz 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 it would. Windows file sharing stuff. Really? That's one part of my Hexos Naz at home that does work perfectly. The funny thing is I've got two main desktops that I'm hooking up to, right? My living room PC, yeah, 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. I knew that was wrong. I knew that was wrong. No, no. I knew that was wrong. Okay. So, I enabled SMB protocols. All my private network uh 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? Had to be Windows Credential Manager. Pancrats went there first. We had to open PowerShell and he had to change uh 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 6 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. You're the guy. With it working. 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 tail scale set up and running now. I just finished that as well. You want to explain what tail scale is for people who are not in the know? Telescale is basically a way to SSH into your machine and add virtual networking to uh other users so that like if my cousin wants to go onto my NAS, I give him my well he has his own tail scale 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 to open. 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 because 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. 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 perfect 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. Yeah, like I just, you know, I 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, oh, I'm halfway done and oh, 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. it's gone. Or I'm taking all of this personal information and I'm synchronizing it with some corporate cloud service somewhere. 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. 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. And so, that's intended to be a feature where for no additional subscription fee, you and a buddy like me and PLO could be like, "Okay, here I bought an 8 TB drive. Here you go, buddy. You buy an 8 TB drive. you give it to me. Here you go, buddy. We put those into our Nazis. 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 321 fully cuz 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, Squarespace. They've made it even easier than before to build a website that matches your brand and personality. Thanks to their design intelligence tool with a few prompts, you can start with a template for your web page that matches the vibes that you're going for. From there, it's as easy as replacing assets, moving things around with the drag and drop interface, and then you're up and running. If you need to, you can invoice clients directly through the Squarespace platform with compatibility for major payment methods like debit, Apple Pay, CLA, and more. Squarespace will even help you find the right domain for your business and give you SEO tools and tips to help your website discoverability. Track your website's performance with a variety of analytics and adjust your web page as needed. We have even used Squarespace for our Linus Media Group website for years at this point. Start building your website today and receive 10% off your first purchase by visiting squarespace.com/ltt. If you guys enjoyed this video, why not check out the build that we did for Mark Robber? Actually, oh yeah, I'd say that's a pretty good modern take on a like balls tothe-wall homenaz.