Hexos

punky_munky

punky_munky

punky_munky

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17 Oct 2002
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Has anyone had a look at Hexos yet? I saw the LTT video and the early bird pricing seems quite reasonable so I'm considering dipping a toe.

I currently don't have a good backup system other than using Dropbox and Google Drive for a few important documents but I do have plenty of old PC hardware knocking about.

I've not really got the time or inclination to learn TrueNAS so Hexos seems quite appealing as a low effort solution.
 
This is probably a thread for the servers section.

I’ve see some of the coverage and it looks like a promising product for people who don’t want to TrueNas for real.

I’d put myself in the ‘I don’t want to TrueNAS for real’ box. It’s not that I’m not capable, I just don’t have time for that mind of nonsense so having some software which is super easy so set up and maintain is a huge benefit.

I’ll keep an eye on it but I have a perpetual Unraid licence and migrating will be a proper pain in the proverbial. It’s set up and working and I’m very much a fan of ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’.

That said I find Unraid to just be a chore, the documentation is diabolical for a paid product. Even worse is having to rely on out of date YouTube videos and forum posts to actually understand how to set it up and use it is just urgh.
 
A slightly more in-depth video on it for anyone interested. I can only agree with this video, it's not for me. But it does look good for people who do want something powerful but easy to navigate and set up. I feel the full price is well over the top though.

 
I'm planning to repurpose my old PC into a NAS/Server, it'll be my first time building/setting up a server. I've been looking into all the options for OS over the past few months and before HexOS, I was looking at TruNAS. Admittedly, even for a newbie like me (supposedly the target audience for a product like this), there's still a bunch of features and options lacking that I'd want to use, which can be found on the alternatives.

Still, to me it doesn't seem worth more than the sale price last weekend (also a bit annoying that they used FOMO on pricing to sell it), but considering that one can always open the full TruNAS underneath if required, I felt it was worth my £80. The backup option of TruNAS if I need more control, makes me feel comfortable giving this a go first.

Unfortunately I won't be setting up my server anytime soon, since I need to buy the drives (and the 14TB HC530 I was looking at has jumped up in price by £50+ each) and probably a new GPU, since I'd want to use GPU encoding on Plex (and the CPU in that build is a Xeon with no integrated graphics).

I also need to look further into services/apps, since I'm looking for stuff like Handbrake, but for music files and image files (something I can schedule to run on a routine). At the moment it looks like nothing is out there. On this front, other OS options like TruNAS and Unraid seem to have better chance of getting things working.
 
Don't get me wrong, it looks great and it certainly has the potential to sit in that sweet spot for those that want to build a custom NAS yet want an feature rich NAS OS without the hassle of the usual setup that comes with the current crop of NAS OS's.
But, the talk of lifetime licences being $199-299 seems a bit too steep to me considering that pushes you into the realms of QNAP, Synology and the likes where you're getting hardware.
 
I saw the $100 black friday lifetime deal and I basically came to the conclusion.... what exactly does this offer me over unraid (which I basically paid the same for) and I also hate the fact that they thought it was a good idea to have the front end hosted remotely... um that's a BIG no for me. It is not worth more than $100 when it's just building on top of truenas (who are also invested) imo.

Now I'm probably not the target market due to already having an unraid server which I built recently, with 2 spare licenses for semi planned future machines that I bought before the price increases, and I specifically paid for unraid over truenas due to the fact that it didn't spin every disk up and that I can mix disks, expand array etc....
Having said that I wouldn't say no to some 'simplification' or templates for certain things inside unraid... hopefully this might kick unraid to make some things a little easier but then aren't some of the devs for this from unraid originally so maybe that is why they left.
 
Correct, some of the key devs from UnRaid left to build this. On the cloud frontend, there is a local one being added soon but your right not to evaluate a product on the promise of a future update.

Have you seen the price of UnRaid these days? It’s £250 for a perpetual licence that gets updates for more than a year. I think I paid £60 for mine and at the time I thought that was expensive for what you get.

UnRaid certainly has its pros, the mismatched discs feature is the main one. But that’s not ‘free’ it comes at a huge cost to performance. There is no denying that UnRaid is slow, like really slow. It also doesn’t really support SSDs as they can’t TRIM when in an UnRaid array.

UnRaid definitely needs an ‘easy mode for dummies’ though. I care very little for any of the advanced features and the documentation does t really support you through them.

Most home users really struggle with it because of this. The community based support is not great either, it can be very elitist and dismissive of people who are not experts in using command line. Personally I’d never want to touch the command line as I just don’t have time for that.

There is definitely a market for a simpler solution, I guess what will be more interesting how UnRaid responds, if they even do.
 
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b0rn2sk8 said:
Have you seen the price of UnRaid these days? It’s £250 for a perpetual licence that gets updates for more than a year. I think I paid £60 for mine and at the time I thought that was expensive for what you get.
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I actually posted on their forum my dislike for the new pricing model and it's also why I bought my 2 spare licences when I did at the old prices... I wouldn't have even touched it at £250, I'd have just gone pure truenas, even though I didn't really want 'raid' on my hard drives or even windows at that price, hell I'd have likely looked at pure linux options too.
UnRaid certainly has its pros, the mismatched discs feature is the main one. But that’s not ‘free’ it comes at a huge cost to performance. There is no denying that UnRaid is slow, like really slow. It also doesn’t really support SSDs as they can’t TRIM when in an UnRaid array.
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I could run a zfs array if I really wanted more speed but I'm happy with single drive performance for my usage scenario. Wouldn't say no to better trim support though in the arrays even though my array is all hard drives and my pools are ssd based.

There is definitely a market for a simpler solution, I guess what will be more interesting how UnRaid responds, if they even do.
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I said in my post on their forum that they needed to be aware of the ltt backed (it wasn't named back then) nas software when they started looking at jacking up prices.
 
I've been watching the LTT videos on this with interest, as I've been using Unraid on a couple of machines for years. I decided to take a punt on a HexOS licence as I think it has potential, and as others have said, Unraid pricing is steep these days. I've not got any spare hardware immediately to hand, so will probably wait for the full release before playing around with it. I suppose I was FOMO'd with the launch pricing, but that's not a concern as it'll get used for something no matter what.

For those who have it up and running, what hardware are you using, and how are you finding it so far?
 
I've only just received the Beta invite. But as mentioned, I don't have the drives atm to try it out (the 14TB ones I was looking at went up in price :c), nor a GPU on that system for the initial installation (since HexOS doesn't support dedicated hardware acceleration for stuff like Plex yet).
 
I decided to ask for a refund in the end as I realised that actually all I need is a decent USB drive for backups.

I had gotten as far as installing the beta, but never got it working as I didn't realise you need two storage disks i.e. you can't create a storage pool with a single disk. This might be obvious to people experienced with NAS but I don't think they make it all that clear up front. It could well be in the documentation somewhere but certainly isn't in the headline system requirements. Given a large part of their audience is supposed to be NAS noobs, they should spell this out.
 
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