If you're anything like me, you are rightfully tired of paying for monthly subscriptions. It feels like every day there's something new that's demanding a monthly fee, whether it's a TV show you like, your car's heated seats, or a piece of software that you need for work. The

corporate motto these days is you own nothing, you pay forever. And you could just lie there and take it, or you can do what we do and use your hyper-nerd powers to push back. You can load your media into a private Netflix with Plex, you can automate your home with home

assistant. Heck, you can even host your own cloud photo backup with Image. The problem is all of those things require at least some storage and, more critically, some know-how when it comes to setup and maintenance. Now, I'm sure that most of you are more than capable of

figuring it out, and you might even enjoy the process. But if you're like me, you probably also enjoy relaxing at the end of the day without your family complaining that the garage doors won't open and that Plex is buffering. What if there was a way to take that

complexity, wrap it up in a nice little package, or interface if you will, and make it so that anyone could be their home's tech hero? Okay, maybe not anyone, but the truth is I have no idea exactly how user-friendly it is because even though I invested

$250,000 into the idea that became Hexos over two years ago, I have literally never tried it until today. Like, right right now. Jake, is it any good? I'm not telling you before our sponsor, ODU. Don't let mismatching apps slow down your business. Use ODU to make

Your life easier, check out their all-in-one business suite using our link in the video description. The story of why I decided to invest in this is actually kind of funny. John from their team reached out to let me know, "Hey, I'm leaving Unraid. I'm going to embark on this crazy journey. Would you like to be an angel investor?" And I kind of went, "Yeah, thank you so much for thinking of me, but I'm out."

Then the very next weekend I burned an entire evening fighting with a new TrueNAS setup. And well, one thing led to another, and here it is. To uh answer your earlier question, it's still pretty beta, so there is a lot that's missing, but what's available today in the Early Access version they're launching is actually pretty promising, exciting maybe, but we should probably give everyone a quick TL;DR before we get into that.

Cool, Hexos, what you're seeing on the screen right now is an operating system, like say Windows, but purpose-built for running your own storage and your own apps on your own hardware, whether that's at home or a small business. Now, none of that is special. Network attached storage or NAS operating systems have been around for longer than I have, and we have featured similar software like TrueNAS and Unraid numerous times over the years.

The special sauce is that Hexos is designed to be easy to use, even if you're not a "Jake, what's that supposed to mean?" It means, "Show me how to set it up, nerd." Well, you've got your USB right here. Have at her! All got it? Yeah. Off the...

years. The special sauce is that Hexos is designed to be easy to use, even if you're not a "Jake, what's that supposed to mean?" It means, "Show me how to set it up, nerd." Well, you've got your USB right here. Have at her! All got it? Yeah. Off the...

floor Now we could have used a fancy pre-built server like we usually do, but we figured it'd be better to show it off with something from eBay like this Optiplex 3050 we got for 45 bucks. It's got solid quad-core bones, but it's

missing storage and only had a 1 gig network port, so we picked up a used 256 gig SSD to boot from, an Intel 10 gig network card, and a pair of 4 TB C8 NAS hard drives, which fit as long as you're

willing to get a little bit creative with the stubby from Mt. store.com. That brings our total before accounting for bulk storage to a nice $69. Nice. We're going to have links to those down in the video description if you want to build something similar. Now

we've already updated the BIOS, and if you're rehabbing an old machine like this, it is a good idea for you to do the same. Install-wise, then it's the same as any other OS. Plug in a bootable installer USB. You can make one of those

with the ISO image and a tool like Rufus or Etcher. Hold your system setup key, configure to select your USB boot device, restart, and you should be good to go. Oh, there is one thing. If you want to run virtual machines or apps, you're also

going to want to make sure that virtualization is enabled while you're in the system setup. Once you're in the installer, hit install, select your desired boot storage, administrative user, enter a password, and hit install. When that's done, remove the USB installer and reboot. Pretty simple, but it will

hopefully get even simpler in the future. How could that be simpler? Oh, you're actually asking? Yeah, I'm actually just going to remove steps. Oh, cool. All right, with the system booted, head to the Hexos Cloud dashboard, and as long as your system and you are on the same network

it should automatically detect it and be ready for setup. Hit claim, enter the password you said earlier, and this is it. I finally get to look at Hexos, and since I know you guys are going to ask, yes, a self-hostable app for the dashboard will

be available in the future, but for now, it's it's Cloud only. Save on magnetic cable management, screwdrivers, and more at LTT stores. Black Friday sale deals are still going on now, so check them out at the link below or at lm.g/Black

Friday. Now, you'll probably notice right away that everything is pretty guided. It does compatibility checks for you to ensure that your hardware is optimal, and it makes it easy to see if everything is working. Click on the hard drives, let's see. Okay, what do we got there? Oh, yeah,

it's got the USB. We don't need that anymore. Oh, yeah, we can take that. Didn't follow our own instructions. Oops. Okay, and here's my storage. Yeah, so it should automatically set up your drives in the most optimal configuration, which for us

you can see with only two 4 TB drives is either a RAID Z1 or a mirror. I think it's a mirror. Yep. Okay, so that allows one of our drives to fail without any data loss, which actually does a really good job of communicating extremely

Clearly yeah, one drive can fail, four tables usable, it's great. What's cool is it'll even create separate pools for SSDs and hard drives if you have both, so you can put performance sensitive data like, uh, virtual discs for example on your SSDs

and then all the rest of it on your cheaper mechanical storage. It is worth noting that if we had more drives, which we could have if we threw an inexpensive, uh, HBA card into our server, it would configure it differently according to ZFS best practices. So if we had like

five or six drives, yeah, but six drives would probably do a RAID Z2, so we could lose two without losing any data. Fun fact by the way, if you're not trying to do anything custom like setting a non-standard array layout, which by the way will be supported in future releases,

all you have to do is click a few times, click continue, yeah, I confirm that these will be deleted, I create a name for the server, your dad's Dell, uh, confirm that you're going to wipe the drives, and that's it. You've got your very own

network attached storage server ready to go. Yeah, that means owning your data in a way that is not annoying to manage. Kind of awesome in theory, but what can it do? Wait, is it done already? Yes, oh wow, yeah, that's pretty cool. Yeah, huh? This is this

is actually surprisingly friendly. All of the features are definitely not there, but what is there is polished. So this is the dashboard, right? Hey, you got your processor that's doing stuff, you got your memory that's also doing stuff, yeah. Very clearly labels the speed that your networking is

operating at I didn't notice that that's cute yeah which one is that the one that's working yeah oh look at the little graph right there nice most importantly our storage Okay cool so what do we got here uh we can expand this no we can't we

don't have extra drives oh oh that kind of expansion yeah I thought it meant expand the look at it the the view drives you can do that okay cool I can view drives nice I think you broke D break it I I think I broke it already oh

you changed the networking settings oh dude dude this is why I'm such a good beta tester did I click apply oh yeah no I I totally clicked up you C 100% clicked right that's why there was an alias there cool all right okay we're back in

the Das trying storage we're trying to look at the storage yeah I don't know how we ended up there view drives hey look at that we got some drives let's go hey healthy device ID temperature a lot of parts of the dashboard like this have basic functionality but there is

stuff that's going to be added on later like eventually you'll be able to go hey run a smart test which is checking the drive's health or see your old smart test or schedule smart test but from a basic standpoint anyway this is working however we can't actually do anything

with it yet there's another step that we need to go through before we can use our storage over the network and that's creating a folder or a share it does take a couple of extra clicks uh okay add a folder line of share and then managing

permissions This is incredible This is so neat to add a user first Simple Uh yeah sure fine I'll add a user L and then I go into my folders Oh boom brother dude I sent some long emails to John Oh yeah bless his heart poor guy Um talking

about permissions and what a nightmare it is on other NAS operating systems Just drilling in guys It's got to be simple and this dude this is the best I could have possibly hoped for Are you telling me you don't want to learn how to do ACLs

No no I just I just want to get my Linux ISOs onto my network storage and off the Well right The idea here is that you can make users for your kids your roommate your spouse whatever and everyone can have their own private place to put files and you can either have read-only

access or full access So I'm going to give myself full access I'm just going to make this a public share which I wouldn't necessarily recommend doing but hey it's there now So theoretically I can just access this share immediately Yeah here click on this though Oh sure

and then go click browse There you go It tells you how to do it Oh oh oh cute Yeah and you just copy paste and click enter and you're there I mean you didn't technically follow the instructions they told you to map it but you're there and there

there's actually if you click the drop down it gives you the Mac instructions too Oh cute Yeah wasn't that so easy How long did that take You could probably have done that in like 3 minutes Look at that It's done already Yeah do another

One, let's go. It's a mirror, so we're limited to the speed of one hard drive, but I mean it just works, right? To be clear, there is nothing groundbreaking about having a network share and being able to copy some files to it. But if you have ever set up TRz, you will

know that it takes a few more clicks and probably some Google searches. I have no idea what you're talking about. Yeah, sure, but while simplicity sounds great in theory, when it comes to trusting something that holds your precious data, you would hope that stability and

security would also be priorities, and they are. And it's kind of the coolest part. See, Hexos is not a ground-up project that would have taken even more years to pull off, and frankly, would have been a complete waste of time, which is why the team decided to build off of an

already respected storage system, TRz. For the uninitiated, TRz, formerly known as FreeNAS, has been around in some form or another for nearly two decades. And while their business focuses on reliable, performant, open-source, enterprise-grade storage, something that doesn't really need to be home user friendly, they also

love the idea of making it easier to use, which is why X Systems is the other main investor in Hexos, which gives them a financial incentive to ensure that Hexos is a success. This collaboration is super cool because even though Hexos is built for normies first, all of that TRz

goodness is still under the hood if you know where to look. And where is that? Literally right here, settings, TRz done. So if you want to do something Hexos doesn't do but TRz does, you can drop into the TRz interface and override it.

No questions asked, it also means that Hexos works with their existing Docker apps and virtual machine functionality. It's pretty cool until beta 2 comes out in a few months. You're only going to see support for apps and as of shooting a few weeks before this video goes live, 

only Plex and image are curated for Hexos so far. Let's do let's do Plex and then hit install. Okay, and that's it. That's it. That's literally it. No configuring storage paths, assigning resources. Negative. Okay, what if my Plex, I wanted GPU acceleration or something like that?

Have they got that solved? That is not there yet, as you can imagine, having only two curated apps, not a huge priority at the moment. But in the future, the idea would be, you know, like a drop-down or a checkbox, "Yes, I want to use my GPU." But if 

you go back to folders now, yeah, you'll see that they're exposed, so now they're passed through as network shares. And if you click on one of them, like say Media, go to browse, copy the path. You can just copy movies right over. All right, because 

of the design for user-friendly, these are public shares by default, which I was like, "I get it. I hate it, but I get it." Hexos test. Oh, do we have any media files? Yeah, easy peasy, dude. This shouldn't be this exciting. This should just be how it's 

always worked. This is a $69 computer. Yeah, just like any random ancient machine. Yeah, just throw this on it and NAS. Even just having the permissions so that I can just click the one that says Movies and and that'll like, if you do the intuitive thing, yeah, it'll probably 

be right yeah and that's it okay so we can see everything here yep um I'm just going to go to other videos  despic just like that boys hey and nobody can take this content off the platform or take away your access to it that compared to

the other times I've had to fight with folder permissions in tras with Plex yep wow okay now imagine this one's even more challenging it's actually kind of mindboggling that these guys have been working away on this after like me giving them some

funding and I have not even like asked for an update you literally never even looked at it they showed me like uh a really early couple like screenshots of what they were kind of thinking for the vibe of the wizard yeah your email was basically I will only give you this

money if if you just don't talk to me about it until it's ready I don't have time for I agree okay look at that so that's it get started bloody H okay me I mean we can't do anything about the setup process of the apps themselves but

well you might be able to actually but right now not a priority well put it on your phone no way just download the app there is absolutely no way that that just works you have image already okay I need to set a server endpoint oh perfect okay uh allow full access oh oh

my God are you just going to how many photos are on this phone I a few there's no like the photos we wouldn't want to see in there is there I should certainly hope not so I just go to backup and then I can select any uh album that I want to

back up from your phone from my from my phone and then I go back and I click backup and then just boom Hey look it's boom look at it go that's such a cute photo look at the kittens I know wow look at that it works so you uploaded

that whole folder and it's done which is great as long as you're on the same local network but to truly replace your expensive subscription services like Google photos you've got to be able to use it when you're out and about that'll be covered they'll be curating apps that

allow you to have a reverse proxy setup with like a domain you could have photos.lin.com and that would be a relatively secure way to do it and I also pitched John on maybe working with Cloudflare to integrate their access zero trust setup which allows you to do

that but without port forwarding and you can even like password protect it with your Google account oh that would be super cool um they're also going to have WireGuard VPN integrated soon for easy remote access and they also also plan to offer a fully integrated remote access

system by way of an inexpensive subscription which yes I know a subscription but doing that for free wouldn't be sustainable and it's not like you're forced to use it it reminds me of Home Assistant where the subscription is it's kind of more of a

convenience thing you can 100% have Home Assistant remotely accessible on your own but it is inconvenient um I pay for it and there's even more the original reason for integrating WireGuard was actually for a feature that I have been begging John to create for n years well

Buddy, backup this is going to be super cool. The idea is that if you and a paid friend both have Hexos, you'll be able to easily share storage capacity with each other in a safe, secure manner. That way I could back up my stuff to a separate

geographic location, say for example your house, and you could back up your stuff to my house. And both of the shares would be encrypted. I'm not giving you, what, no, it, it's encrypted. I can't even access it. I don't care. I'm giving you my bytes. Look.

The point is that you can have a mutually beneficial agreement to give each other offsite backup. You hear that word? Said agreement. What, Jake? Oh, you're being so unhelpful right now. The point is that you'd be able to share capacity with each other, uh, or

just file share with each other without having to manually set up a solution for that, which is very doable today, but a royal pain in the rear. Yeah, the file sharing thing is, I, I could vibe with that. Uh, man, I got to tell you the real

reason I want to do this is so that I can just build a giant offsite backup target here, and then like, it'll be an employment perk because as long as I provide it for people other than myself, then it's tax-free. That means it's free.

Right? Is it? Right off now, here's the pitch. Hexos is an awesome concept with real backing and a passionate team, but unlike Tres, which it's based on, it is not free. There are real people behind this project, and as much as I'd love to

it's not something that I can personally fund forever so with all of that said, till the end of the day, December 2nd, Hexo's Early Access is finally available to try out at the Black Friday only price of $99 for a lifetime license.

One payment access for life, including any and all future updates. After the Black Friday sale, they plan to increase the lifetime pricing to $1.99 during early access and then $2.99 when it goes retail, with yes, a cheaper monthly subscription option coming sometime

later. To reiterate, it is very beta. There will be bugs which you can report on the Hexo's forums, and you shouldn't use it for anything that you need to work flawlessly, like it'll probably be fine in terms of data integrity since it's

mostly just an interface for an existing very stable and reliable product, but I have to give you guys that warning regardless. It's also not going to be the only NAS software that we ever use or mention again. It's a focused product that is meant for the homelab creator and

Tech Dad market, so while it would work for a small business once it's ready, it's not going to replace a dedicated hypervisor like Proxmox for instance. And if you already have a true NAS system that's working perfectly fine, it doesn't yet support adopting an existing

install so it'll require reinstalling. But hey, if you like myself, believe in the idea of owning your own data and you want great NAS software that is actually user-friendly, like I do, and you can afford to mess around with it on a spare system, the Hexo's folks and myself

would love for you to try it out and let them know what you think. If you absolutely hate it during the beta, you will be able to request a refund within 30 days. And another separate note, if you're a Typescript or Node developer who

loves the idea, they're hiring and the info will be in the description. Overall, Hexos takes our $69 NZ up to $368, not as nice, but what I like is that it's an ecosystem, you're not locked into, and that you can upgrade the hardware if

you want. You can get a better machine or you can beef up your existing one. And worst case, if you don't like Hexos or if the company somehow implodes, you can just disconnect it from the dashboard and you're essentially running a Traz I

really hope that doesn't happen, but I just wanted to make it clear here that there will be options unlike all those users that are running those vulnerable D-Link routers that simply will never be updated to fix it. Brutal, like this brutal segue to our sponsor, ODU. If

you're running a business, keeping track of a hundred different apps running at once can be a pain. But with ODU's all-in-one business management software, you can combine all of those into one unified operating system. That's right, no more worrying about how well one service

syncs with another. ODU's apps are all interconnected. Check out their CRM and sales apps, which make lead generation and closing deals a breeze. Their timesheets app helps you keep track of your employees' schedules, and their accounting app lets you automatically create and send invoices, integrating with 28,000

Banks worldwide, the best part is you only need to choose the apps that your business needs. And if you only need one single app to shore up some holes, you can even get access to that for free. So start saving time and resources by unifying your processes with ODU. Check

them out in the description box for a free 15-day trial or to set up a demo with their expert team. If you guys enjoyed this video, why not check out my last home NAS build? I cannot wait to try this at my house because I have like

some super sick plants. I am completely out of storage, dude. Me too. I'm at like 88% utilized. So many Linux hard drives are so expensive. Were you certified though? They're still expensive.

Revealing my NEW Investment!

Linus Tech Tips is a passionate team of "professionally curious" experts in consumer technology and video production who aim to educate and entertain.
