Welcome to my first blog about HexOS: I’m buying, building and installing a NAS for my family home. I’m documenting my user journey as a small contribution to this amazing project.

For about a decade I’ve wanted private home server to backup my family photos and media. However as a busy single mum I’ve not got time for a deep dive or tinkering, especially when Google backup is working okay for now. Will HexOS be the solution? I’m excited to find out!

HexOS NAS software is designed to be simple to configure and use, empowering users to backup, access and share their data. I have my wits about me and a PC gaming brother to call when I need to phone a friend. Let’s do this!

Why I want a NAS

I want….

• A backup of all my most precious data, with fail-safes built in
• To get rid of physical disks and store my DVD’s and CD’s digitally
• To feel less trapped by paying for cloud storage
  • I don’t mind paying Google a few pounds but I’ve now got so much data I’m paying £70 a year
  • I need the option to cut spending sometimes without having to lose personal data
• Home automation tools to play with, I have smart lighting and heating an would like to explore
  • But I don’t want to run a machine specifically for this
• To feel more secure, especially when it comes photos of my children, I am worried google photos is too easy to hack
• To feel welcome and valued by the community around the software I use
  • As a long time free software user, the “vibe” matters to me and get-good-or-go-home vibe is not for me right now
• To document my user journey, step by step, as my contribution to the project.

Who this post is for: This post is not a user guide so please don’t use it as such! I am a novice and will make plenty of mistakes. The purpose of this series is to be a real life user journey of someone from the hexos target market of semi-technical home user, to be read by anyone interested in that (hi there!)

What do I know about NAS hardware already?

I didn’t have an appropriate machine to reuse for this, not even for testing, so my first step was to buy some hardware to run HexOS on. I’ve never built a PC before but I have some knowledge as a curious PC user and from watching YouTube

Things I know that I know

• The basic components of a PC
  • Motherboard
    • with on-board graphics
    • or with graphics card
  • CPU
  • Power supply
    • Have different wattages
    • 1000 watts is high end, don’t know what’s average
  • RAM
    • I know it comes in sticks and sticks add up to total (4+4=8GB)
    • My laptop’s have had 16G recently
  • Computers need cooling
• There will be lots of hard drives
  • The big mechanical kind not SSD’s
  • I can put the OS on one of the little SSD drives though
• It should be in a computer case
  • Not all cases will fit lots of drives
• HexOS is an Operating System (OS) and as a Linux user I am used to installing from a USB stick “live disk” I am guessing this will be similar process

Things I knew I didn’t know

• Very little about compatibility between components:
  • I know things like “CPU’s only go in compatible motherboards”
  • But I don’t know what is compatible with what or how to find out
  • I know a few brand names but not always what they make
  • Names of individual products mean very little
• How fast or slow CPU’s, motherboards or graphics cards are
• If I look at an old cheap PC, I can’t tell you how fast/slow it will run
  • I could make a guess based off the ram, if specified
• I had a sense that some old office PC’s might not be upgradable but I don’t know much about why

Things I didn’t know I didn’t know

This is summarising some of the journey in the est of the post for simplicity

• How drives fit in a case
• What a SATA port is (how drives connect to motherboard
• What ATX motherboard is (standard size)
• How to know age of motherboard
• Buyer protection details on ebay (for parts not covered but other things are even if description says not tested)
• That attaching everything to the power supply is a big job
  • just “borrowing” a power supply from another machine is a huge job and really stupid!
• How to choose a hard drive
• How a hard drive should be packaged for shipping ship
  • I instinctively wasn’t happy about insufficient packaging but I don’t feel I know much about how drives should be shipped and what might damage them
• To really pay attention to the size of hard drives because it affects things later (I have 2x 3TB and 1x2TB and I think this might limit me a bit later)

Did I understand the minimum requirements?

I knew that I should check minimum requirements for hardware:

I understood

• The 8GB ram (was higher than I thought it would be though!)
• Recommended number of drives
• Boot drive capacity

I didn’t totally understand

• I was fairly sure anything I would buy would be “x86 compatible hardware” as I felt this is “the norm”
• I tentatively assumed most CPU’s I might choose would have more than 2 cores as anything else would be very old but not sure

I didn’t understand at all

• The bit about pools – I just decided to start with 3 drives because “expanding” later sounds good!

I didn’t understand how drives fit in a pc case! Early stages of shopping

I tried to just jump in and buy something, but found the process of choosing hardware really frustrating. The main issues were:

• Not understanding how the pieces come together – literally!
  • I didn’t understand how to fit lots of hard drives in a PC case
  • When looking for a cheap already-built used PC, it wasn’t clear where extra drives would go
  • I didn’t know how to attach the drives to the motherboard and what the constraints might be
• Many unsuitable PC’s on ebay in my price range,
  • Lots of ex-office Dell’s – smaller form factor computers and their components flooding ebay
  • I figured these would be too small to add drives
• Second hand pc parts in general very expensive I thought
  • I was seeing listings for PC’s with 2 and 4 GB of ram for £50-60

How I found my way – pausing to research a little

I backtracked on trying to shop and Googled “how to build a home nas cheaply ltt” (because I trust Linus Tech Tips guides).

In the main search I only got old forum posts so the specs would be unhelpful, I went to videos and found this great vid. The part screen grabbed below helped me understand how drives are fitting in a case though I was still a little unclear on what type of “holes” in the case are needed to mound drives. But I figured… I have a drill… can probably work something out….

I also realised the motherboard has connectors for the drives and what they look like roughly, then checked and found they’re called SATA ports.

A case of romance!

With a little more confidence I went back to ebay. I searched for “pc” with 8 12 and 16 GB of ram filtered, price up to £130 gbp and ending soonest.

I ignored anything small form factor or labelled mini. I found a lot of the computers were the in the same handful of cases, this is where the flood of dell’s became quite annoying.

But then…. shining in custom powder coated glory, kicking the yawn grey butts of those smelly dells was my future baby…

I fell in LOVE with this case.

☎️ Phone a friend: I called my brother and he said it it will work for a NAS. He agreed the bays at the bottom right are for hard drives and said there are connectors to put them in the old CD drive slots too.

So I bid stupid high and bought her. I’m occasionally irresponsible!

Choosing a motherboard

Buying the case put me down the road of buying components and not a finished PC but I think I was already going to need to do that as I hadn’t seen anything cheap enough with space for drives.

I searched a few things on ebay and ended up on the suggested search term “motherboard cpu bundle i5“. This was because I remember I had an i5 laptop a while ago so I figured it’s a bit old but not dreadful (I know there is i7 and i9 already). My brother explained later it’s not that simple and please don’t use the i number as a way of differentiating processors!

I looked at the photo of the board to see what was on it. I thought that two ram slots would be okay and I want lots of SATA connectors for my drives. This had 4 SATA ports.

☎️ Phone a friend: My brother said this isn’t a standard shape so might not fit in my case. He said it needs to be ATX or something like mATX or ITX which are standardised.

My brother was also thinking a more efficient CPU would be better. As UK electricity prices are high, he said for a permanent built getting a lower wattage processor would be sensible. We spent a while looking at options but couldn’t find much good value in energy efficient ranges.

During this search process, however I stumbled upon a really cheap bundle of most of the components from  a private seller. There was motherboard, CPU and graphics card.

I searched for the motherboard number on Google and found there were drivers from 2016 but I wasn’t sure if that mean it was made in 2016 or was much older and just had an update.

It had 4 ram slots and 6 SATA ports which seemed really great compared to the other items I looked at. It was a little bit of a gamble because it was just “taken from a working pc” not “tested” but it was cheap enough to be worth risking.

☎️ Phone a friend: I asked my brother and he said it’s fine for my NAS. He also mentioned it’s not listed as “for parts” so is am covered by buyer protection if it doesn’t work. He pointed out there is no on-board graphics so I will need a functioning graphics card.

Last bits and bobs

I needed:

• Power supply: I decided to borrow it from my main (currently unused) PC for now (lesson learned!)
• Boot disk: my brother sent me an SSD
• USB stick: he also sent me a USB for my HexOS install
• 3rd hard drive, I only had two
  • I bought a used 2TB Seagate barracuda pro for on ebay. On arrival it was not the same brand as descried and came in a thin jiffy bag.
  • I retuned it and bought one from Amazon for new, similar price
  • I later realised my other hard drives were 3TB but I had already opened the drive

What I paid

• £29.99 for the case £4.85 shipping (I would have paid more!)
• £37.00 for motherboard, cpu and graphics card + £6.50 shipping
• £31.49 for 2TB hard drive
• Total so far = £109.50
• Excluding HEXOS licence

How I felt

I had felt quite overwhelmed at points in this, especially when it came to trying to find value on ebay.. Feeling out of my depth and knowing I don’t have the time to become an expert is a hard situation for me personally. However the cute case and prospect of exciting software to play was enough motivation for me to feel really buzzed for everything to arrive.

Next step, building the NAS! Coming soon