April '24 - I’ve been a Linux based OS fan for some time now, for 15yrs or so. I’m comfortable with Linux and I can usually figure out how to get most things to work. My main rig has Pop!_os and while it can dual boot windows10 I almost always boot to Pop.

Feb 2024 I decided to resurrect an old clunker HP desktop PC. Swapped in an i7 3770 cpu and maxed out the ram. Found an Icy Dock drive cage for four 2.5" laptop hard drives and installed Proxmox and ran TrueNAS Scale as a VM and started tinkering.

I created a pool and setup SMB shares and started to learn new things. One of the things I learned was that with the way I had to pass the drives to the TrueNAS VM replacing a failing hdd was going to be way more difficult than it needed to be. I was really liking Proxmox but it has capabilities beyond my needs and beyond what this old clunker could handle.

May '24 - Re-retired the Clunker. Found a slightly used (and cheap) Dell XPS 8940 with an 11th gen core i5 an swapped in 64GB Ram. MacGyvered my drive cage to the outside of the case and off I go. Now I have TrueNAS installed for real and I’ll continue to learn this awesome software. And since TrueNAS can also do VM’s I still have some of the capabilities I left behind with Proxmox.

Thanks for stopping by!
B.