I have a mini-PC running windows. On that, I run home assistant in virtualbox, have plex installed, and a cheap USB harddrive plugged in to keep my plex media. I’ve turned on sharing for a folder in this drive so other devices on my network can access it.

I’ve watched some videos and read some tutorials. I have a pretty good idea on how I’m going to run HA and Plex, but I’m unsure about turning my USB drive into something the rest of my devices can access as well as something Plex can directly access too.

What would you recommend as the most beginner friendly, easy way to accomplish this? I keep seeing TrueNAS pop up, but I’m not convinced this isn’t way overkill for what I want to do. So what would you recommend I look at to start out? The amount of information and things I don’t know yet is a little overwhelming.

After I get more familiar with the system, I’m totally happy to branch out and try more advanced things that most people prefer, but that’s down the road for me now.

Edit: to be clear, I’m planning on completely ditching windows and setting everything back up in proxmox

  • NoogsA
    4•10 months ago

    If you want multiple containers or VMs to have access to the data it needs to be shared from somewhere. As others have mentioned you can setup a VM to run a NAS OS like FreeNAS or just run a container with samba and pass the drive through to the container. The difference is how you access the data from the other containers and VMs. You’ll access them via samba shares as opposed to local drives.

    To my knowledge two containers/VMs cannot share the same physical or virtual disks in Proxmox. I tried and had to go a different route to get what I needed.

    • @[email protected]OP
      1•10 months ago

      This is helpful, thank you. I’ll have to look into the different ways to accomplish this. It would feel weird to access a drive over my network when it’s just from another container. Maybe it’s not as weird as I think it is?

      • NoogsA
        2•10 months ago

        Not weird at all. All my data is shared from a single VM but I access it from several others than run jellyfin and the *arrs, and a few other things. When you don’t want everything running on the same virtual machine, you need to share the data over the network, even if it’s all on the same physical box.