Hi all,

I recently bought an HP MediaSmart EX490 for only 10 euro's.
When it arrived the previous owner has "modded" a VGA cable to the motherboard making it look quite bad but functioning perfectly.

I placed 3x a 2TB WD-Black drive in there and 1x a 60GB SSD.
On this I have deployed Debian11 and CasaOS giving it kind of the Synology experience and it is working smoothly.
Loved the experience here so made a small youtube video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqhPvdYQfFs

However, I was wondering, have any of you had successful experience running TrueNas on this?
I'm trying to achieve a successful home cloud solution and I'm using TwinGate (free ZTNA solution) to easily and securily connect to it.
I'm currently running 2GB of memory, will upgrade this to 4GB (that's the max as I understood).

Looking forward to your reply.

Kind regards,
Daan

Crazy how these little servers keep on ticking.

Most of us here are using windows because the drivers and the backup solution is baked in. Did you try a search?

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Hi All, Thanks to everyone for your continued effort to keep the MSS & WHS alive. Haven't registered yet? Please do so the moderators know your here!

ex49x/v1 (toyin w/Vail)
VGA
Q8200s w/two 30mm cooling fans
4gb Ram
Rear Casecover Cooling Mod

Thanks for sharing your video, I've been looking into CasaOS recently so it was fun to see it running on our beloved little server.

I looked into TrueNAS for my EX490 a little while ago, but decided the limit of 4GB non ECC ram would mean I wouldn't really be able to take advantage of many of its features. There are people who do run it on their MSS boxes, I found several posts on the TrueNAS forums from people who reported that it works for them, they were just using it as a basic file server if memory serves though. I subsequently bought a Gen7 MicroServer off eBay for cheap with the intention of using that to have a play with TrueNAS.

For my MSS box, I decided that when the time comes to finally move on from WHS, I probably will try UNRAID. I have created a USB stick and tested booting my 490, which it did and all the hardware was detected without issue. UNRAID is not free, but I think it's a better match for the limited resources of the MSS.

For now though, the quad core Xeon and 4Gb ram stick remain waiting in a drawer, WHS is still good enough for me.

Do please report back if you do go ahead with TrueNAS, would love to hear how you got on.

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EX490
WHS v1
E5800
Stock Ram
HGST 1 x 2TB, 3 x 8TB

If your hardware still works well I recommend upgrading the OS to Windows Server 2022. The standard version can have the Essentials role installed on top of it using OfficeMaven's installer, and that site also has other great tips. I've used every version of Windows Server on my EX490 and found 2022 to run the best. I also use TrueNAS Core and Scale and find 8GB ECC RAM to be the absolute minimum for acceptable performance and data integrity. I will say that for Windows Home Server 2011 (which is out of support) 4GB RAM is essential, and for Windows Server 2019 and above a quad-code CPU and SSD boot drive make a large improvement. Here is the thread on this site that discusses Windows Server 2019 and 2022 on the E49X series in detail:

viewtopic.php?f=40&t=14950

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HP EX490: L3360 4GB
Boot: 256GB SSD
Drives 2-5: WD101EFAX (ReFS)
WHS>WHS2011>WSE2012R2>WSE2016>WS2019>WS2022+Essentials

HP N40L: 16GB ECC
Boot: 256GB SSD
Drives 2-5: WD101EFAX (RAIDZ2)
OMV>NAS4Free>FreeNAS>TrueNAS Core>Scale