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

  • phanto@lemmy.ca
    2·
    10 months ago

    I don’t know if this is answering your question or not, so I’m sorry if I’m missing the point. I’m a brand-new proxmox user too. I have a mini-pc that has a 4TB usb drive attached to it, and when I installed proxmox on the mini PC, proxmox saw the internal drive as disk 1, aka /dev/sda. The usb drive? Disk 2, aka /dev/sdb. Following some tutorial out there, I wiped the usb and set it up as a ZFS drive, and I can attach any chunk of it to any VM I spin up. If I try to run an OS off of it, it’s pretty slow, but I can attach a chunk of it to a VM in a mount, so a VM can have my movies ‘in’ the VM.

    I’d imagine you could attach the usb that way to your Plex VM, where the VM’s OS is on the main storage of the PC, and the media is on the external drive.

    • alexrmay91OP
      1·
      10 months ago

      Funny, I also have a mini-PC and a 4TB USB drive. That’s helpful though. Is it possible to mount the entire drive to two different containers? Or does it have to be separate “chunks” of it?

      For example, I want a container for Plex and another container for Samba to share the drive on my network. Both would be installed on the internal SSD. Can I set it up so both containers have direct access to the entire external drive at the same time?

      • phanto@lemmy.ca
        2·
        10 months ago

        If you mount it to the Plex, you could also share it out via samba. I know you can also mount shared drives, so if you had it shared as a samba share on one container, you could turn mount that share as a folder in the Plex container. I would have to ask more expert people than I am on how, but I know you can mount a share as a folder in a Linux box, so I assume a container would work the same.