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
Samba network share. You will need to pass it though to a VM first
Would you recommend a VM or LXC to pass the drive through to/install samba?
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.
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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?
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.
Huh, I guess I’ll just embrace it then! Thanks for the input
The most beginner friendly way would be doing a pass through to TrueNAS or OMV or a similar easy to use NAS option.
Do you think using TrueNAS or OMV is as easy as Samba? Or maybe there are some benefits that justify a little bit more challenging solution?
I would say easier, as truenas/omv provide an easy to use UI to configure samba with good defaults.
You can configure samba yourself directly on Proxmox without needing a VM at all if you want to, it’s just a little more to learn at first.
Alright, I’ll check those out too. I have been assuming those would be more complicated to set up as a newbie
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.
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?
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.
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I just wanted to get suggestions on how to start out with something simple, specifically making that USB hard drive available on my network + the LXC for Plex.
I have a good idea how to do the other things I mentioned, but the network storage aspect is challenging. I think it’s because there are probably many ways to accomplish this, so I don’t know how to choose what’s best as a beginner. Lots of new terminology and a poor understanding on how things work together.
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