Over the last couple of years, I have been very interested in making or buying my very own NAS. If, at this point, you are asking yourself, "What is a NAS?" You may be tempted to just click out of this article and return to your regularly scheduled stimulus feed. However, I implore you to keep reading this because it's more about the journey than the destination. To clear things up with a very simplistic, somewhat sophomoric overview, a NAS is basically like setting up your own digital Cloud at home. Instead of renting a home from Alphabet or Tim Apple to store your cat photos, you can have your own machine at home store them. The most prominent positives of having your pictures and videos hosted in the Cloud by someone like Google or Apple are ease of use and redundancy. If a machine or part fails at these corporations, rest assured your videos of fireworks that you will never watch again will be safe. The positives for self-hosting your own data are that you own all of your own data, and besides the high startup costs, you will most likely save money in the long run.
There is no question that paying someone else for storage solutions is much easier than having your own NAS, but there are consumer NAS brands that aim for ease of use for a home user. Synology offers simple hardware to enable personal data storage with user-friendly software. However, like with anything, there are drawbacks to purchasing consumer-facing NAS devices. For instance, they can run more expensive than other solutions, and you are locked down to the hardware and software they provide. Using one of these pre-built devices never really interested me. I also have held off building my own because the software for running your own NAS at home can be inconsistent and difficult to set up and maintain without networking experience. However, recently, a software called Hex OS was released, and thus, my monomyth call to action began. Hex OS aims to be a consumer-facing NAS software that allows you to use whatever hardware you'd like. It hopes to eliminate the difficult setup, configuration, and maintenance of TrueNAS, the enterprise software it's built upon, so much so that even a somewhat computer-savvy pleb like me can utilize its functionality.
After I saw the NAS Beacons of Minas Tirith lit, all that was left was gathering a machine to run Hex OS on. I decided going with a pre-built desktop computer would be the most straightforward approach. The only constraints I had when starting the journey of finding dedicated NAS hardware were that I wanted a relatively low wattage newer CPU and a dedicated GPU for possible video encoding in the future (meaning the GPU can help stream videos to devices for a smoother experience). I ended up getting a pre-built HP Pavilion with a 10th gen I3, an RTX 3050, 16 GB of RAM, a 256 GB SSD, and a 512 GB m.2 SSD that I purchased for around $250. I also got two 12 TB certified refurbished Seagate hard drives for approximately $330. When reviewing my purchases I became dissatisfied by the possible power draw of the RTX 3050 GPU, so I sold that to a friend for $50 and ended up getting a lower wattage Quadro P2200 card that is made for professional use. This brought my total price paid for the NAS so far to around $720, including the Hex OS license. It is possible to make a NAS for much cheaper, but considering that if I paid a year's worth of 12 TB storage for iCloud, the price would also be approximately $720, it seems worth it, especially since idle hands are the devil's workshop.
As the title suggests, this is only part one. I have not actually completely assembled my machine yet, nor have I installed Hex OS on it. However, I have done a few things. For starters, I have put the new GPU in and confirmed that it's working. Also, the m.2 SSD that came with the machine is a strange Chinese brand that I have never heard of. So, I made the 256 GB SSD the boot drive and will put the strange SSD into my personal machine to store unimportant things. Since I didn't plan before or during procuring my hardware, I have run into some snags. The most significant being that the case of my HP Pavilion desktop is a compact tower design. Luckily, there are two SATA connectors on my board, so I can attach and use the two hard drives I purchased. The issue is that there is no place, or space really, to put them in the case. I have come up with some solutions to resolve this, but you'll have to wait for part 2 to see how they go.