Huh, I guess I’ll just embrace it then! Thanks for the input

Alright, I’ll check those out too. I have been assuming those would be more complicated to set up as a newbie

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?

Would you recommend a VM or LXC to pass the drive through to/install samba?

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?

Your comment sounds really helpful, but I’m going to have to come back and read it when I understand things more lol

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?

Thanks. That’s what I was thinking but I wasn’t sure if it was easier to have Plex and samba in the same container since I want both to directly access the hard drive.

That’s really helpful thanks. I should be able to Google around and figure out how to install samba. Would you recommend installing samba directly on the host or spinning up a dedicated VM or LXC to install there?

I’m planning on running Plex in a LXC. Maybe install Samba on that container alongside Plex?

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.

I want to completely switch over to proxmox and ditch windows on the server. Sorry if that wasn’t clear in the post.

I just want to replicate the functionality but proxmox (and Linux in general) is very new to me.

Thirded. Home assistant is amazing and getting more beginner friendly every release.

Download VirtualBox and set it up on your computer to try it out for free! No investment required.