Having established my HexOS NAS was horribly power inefficient, I wanted to change hardware to reduce running costs. The NAS running costs were going to be around £156.95 per year ($215) which wasn’t in anyway competitive with the £80 of the next tier of Google One. However I didn’t have a budget for new parts and I was really worried about how HexOS would cope if I just swapped out components. Let’s see it went!
Table of Contents
“Choosing” new hardware for my NAS
I was given a free PC by my brother. He had made it from parts from my dad’s old PC as a gift for a neighbour – however they decided it was to big for their house (tbf the case is bloody massive!!).
Specs of the swap
My Original hardware:
- ASUS M5A97 R2 Motherboard
- AMD FX ™ -6300 6 core CPU
- Corsair GS600 power supply
Now gifted the following:
- Motherboard: MSI B350 PC MATE
- CPU AMD Athlon 200ge
- Corsair VS650 power supply
I knew the hardware was more modern, but this is what my brother said we should expect to see:
Swapping out the hardware
I was going to blog all the steps but I had a lot of help from my brother and the build went really well, so I skipped that. The initial rebuild got done at the end of June. These were the issues we had:
Bent SATA connector
One hard drive had it’s SATA input bent, we temporarily fixed with my new (and first) hot glue gun (I LOVE MY HOT GLUE GUN!)
Damage to power supply cable
After booting successfully at first, I was later having intermittent crashes and seeing a CPU warning light on the motherboard. My brother suggested a BIOS reset as he thought he had “left XMP on” (didn’t even Google that, sounds like gamer nonsense to me!)
After a while the server just wouldn’t post at all. I was fairly sure the issue must be something loose or shorting because it initially crashed when being moved. It turned out one of the power supply SATA cables was damaged and kept shorting.
Unfortunately it was the first connector on that cable and the other SATA cable was fully used by all my drives, so I didn’t have a way to power my SSD… which has the HexOS install on it. With my brothers advice I ordered a molex adaptor from ebay. I taped up the end of the damaged connector and used the molex cable to power the SSD instead …and then I was off and away and able to start using my server again.
Success! New hardware didn’t cause any HexOS issues
What surprised me is being able to literally replace the whole motherboard and CPU and HexOS didn’t even seem to notice! Except that…
Mostly success! New hardware didn’t cause hardly any issues
Okay so I did have ONE issue: Immich crashed and wouldn’t restart. I initially thought this was because the power and data cables to the hard drives had all being swapped about. Read on for the Immich story or skip ahead to power use info.
I decided to fix the Immich issue before updating HexOS to the new version because I didn’t want to risk updating while I had existing issues. This is something I have learned “the hard way” as a Linux user: don’t update something that’s already pissed.
Immich crashed after HexOS hardware swap
Restarting Immich
So Immich had been crashed since the hardware update. I had perused the forums while waiting for the Molex adaptor and so had already found a few possibly relevant posts. However was hoping just restarting the Immich app would do the trick.
I had checked the deck and found no way to restart Immich there, restarting the whole NAS didn’t get it working either. So I went into the TrueNAS interface (yuck).
On the Apps screen in TrueNAS I found Immich showing as crashed. Clicking on various parts of the Immich section on that screen didn’t seem to do anything: so I tried tapping the Deploy button. It wasn’t my first instinct to start there, I was hoping for some more info before taking an action like “deploy” which sounded intense.
Then Deploying status showed for a good long while (minutes feel like forever to the Neurospicy!)
It seemed to work!
However then the Immich app on my phone wasn’t working right. It hadn’t uploaded anything to the NAS and didn’t even seem to be trying to. It hadn’t even updated to include new photos on my phone, the screenshot below is missing 4 day of photos.
This may have been because I force stopped it when it kept sending errors at me whenever I was on wifi at home, presumably because it couldn’t reach the server… because the server was in bits on the table at that point! But now the server was running and the app was just… not doing anything… a mystery!
So I went back into the HexOS deck and checked the app. It also said running there, I tapped the Launch button in the Immich details pen on the right and I found the app was running but it didn’t have my latest photos.
After a bit of prodding the mobile app started trying to back up, I got a backing up assets to your server notification … but it sat at 0%.
I force restarted the mobile app but the same thing happened again. I thought should just go get some lunch, maybe it needed time… but I couldn’t leave it alone so I tried a few things first. I tried tapping the sync button, rebooting my phone etc, but none of this put my pics onto the server.
It did get images from my phone into the Immich android app… so I guess I know what that scary sounding “sync” button does finally!
I had a buffering icon on the backup screen and couldn’t see the settings there:
So I tried turning off background and foreground backup from the cog icon menu to see if that gave me a look at the manual backup screen again. I knew already that manual and automatic backups don’t play well together. It did let me see the manual back screen but the start backup button remained greyed out (no screenshot sorry).
Finding a solution
Separately to this, when I was restating Immich via my laptop, I had noticed my password manager was struggling to show me the correct logins to Immich and TrueNAS. I noticed the IP address had different digits at the end, 152 in password manager and 201 in the current server IP in my browser.
Maybe having a new motherboard had changed the IP address of my server? Maybe Immich on my phone was confused by this?
So had a look at the Immich Android app menus: I went A icon (for Anna), Settings cog, Networking, and found the screen showed below. And yes, the IP address does not match. This is phone:
This is on my laptop, from Launch on the deck apps screen.
However I was unclear how to edit the IP address.
The only option I could see was to toggle on Automatic URL switching which I didn’t think sounded very safe, I don’t like the idea of my phone just … looking for connections to servers …. but I couldn’t find anything else to try. So I decided to try toggling this on temporarily and then I would turn it off again if it fixed the issue.
I turned it on: it wanted location permissions which was fiddly, I gave it the minimum needed. It didn’t fix the IP address but it did let me manually edit it to the new IP address.
This didn’t seem to let backup work though, I tried refreshing both phone and laptop. I tried the sync button on the backup options screen again, this took much longer buffering which seemed hopeful but I STILL wasn’t images into my Immich on the NAS. So I went to get lunch before I keeled over!!
After a little Laura Kampf video and a big salad I decided to give in and Google the problem (thanks for the AI summary Google, I wasn’t asking). Reddit said:
So I turned off the Automatic URL switching setting and then just… logged out of the Immich android app… and then the login screen had the correct url for logging in! Simple!
I logged in and from there everything worked smoothly, I switched on automatic backups again to finish off.
It wasn’t a fantastic experience tbh. I have since learned that in this Immich app logging out and back in is a first step to troubleshooting every issue I have had, but how would anyone know that.
It would have helped if there was a prompt to sign out on the Networking page of the Immich android app, I would never have guessed to do that. But also I think noticing the IP address had changed because my password manager wasn’t auto-filling is a bit of a long shot guess for most people. This just all needs to be more clear, even though swapping out hardware isn’t a common I would assume various things might change the IP address of a server? I made a ticket at Immich.
More hardware woes
After resolving the Immich issue I continued to have silent crashes of the server, just finding it sitting there with a red light and not running HexOS, and struggling to reboot it.
My brother eventually came over to take a look thankfully, my enthusiasm for computer hardware is very minimal – especially when it’s not working!
Eventually he just swapped out the power supply completely and it’s been much more stable since. However I do still have random crashes occasionally that I don’t notice till I get errors on the Immich app. I need an uptime detector of some kind really. Anyway, the hardware issues were wrapped up mid July with the new motherboard installed end of June. It’s now end of September so this has taken a while, mostly thanks to going backpacking with my kids in Europe this summer and being totally exhausted after!!
Has the new hardware reduced my NAS power use?
Here is the energy consumption breakdown:
- Original hardware: 1.96 kWh per day
- With replacement motherboard: 1.42 kWh per day (0.54kWh saving)
- With replacement power supply also: 1.07kWh (0.89 kWh saving total, additional 0.3kWh)
I was surprised how much I saved by swapping the power supply in particular.
So at my 22.22p per KWH electricity price
- Original hardware: £156 per year / $209
- With replacement motherboard: £115 per year (£41 saving) / $154 ($55 saving)
- With replacement power supply also: £86 per year (£70 saving total, additional £29) / $115 ($94 saving total, additional $39)
So now at £86 per year I’m getting close to what Google want to charge me for my subscription which feels like a huge win.
Additionally the motherboard I got sells for about £15, the CPU for £5-20 and the power supply for £30: I would have made back my money quickly in savings on my energy bill had I bought them.
Wrong hardware choices cost a lot
The original kit I got was £43 for motherboard, cpu and ram which is about the same price as the kit I have been given by my brother. I could have just made “better” choices in the first place and been in the same place at this stage. I will sell on the kit I bought for sure.
I remain confident HexOS’s biggest issue selling to less technical users is hardware, not software.
Carbon footprint change
Honestly really too tired for the sums right now, but I wouldn’t be doing my job as an annoying vegan eco warrior without it. So, using the same on-line tools as last time I’ve saved about 30 steaks worth of Co2e with this hardware change. That’s decent. Lucky cows.