I'm a beginner and want to use Proxmox. What should I use to make a USB hard drive accessible to other devices on my network?

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

possiblylinux127 ,
@possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip avatar

Samba network share. You will need to pass it though to a VM first

alexrmay91 OP ,

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

MangoPenguin ,
@MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

The most beginner friendly way would be doing a pass through to TrueNAS or OMV or a similar easy to use NAS option.

alexrmay91 OP ,

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?

MangoPenguin ,
@MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

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.

melmi ,
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

A lot of people like having a NAS VM like OpenMediaVault or TrueNAS that handles their drives via passthrough.

It sounds like you would prefer a lighter weight option—the way my storage is set up is ZFS pools handled by Proxmox itself, then bind mounted from the host into containers that handle the actual file sharing portion. I have separate, self-configured containers for Samba and NFS, but there are turnkey options in the proxmox template menu if you’d prefer.

alexrmay91 OP ,

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

phanto ,

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.

alexrmay91 OP ,

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 ,

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.

Nawor3565 ,

How come the folder share you currently have isn’t sufficient? Most systems should be able to access Samba, so what particular goal are you trying to accomplish?

alexrmay91 OP ,

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.

Nawor3565 ,

Ah, I see. If you’re really looking for a beginner option, I might just setup a Samba share for the drive. Then you can get into more advanced options once you get more comfortable.

alexrmay91 OP ,

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?

melmi ,
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Ideally, you’d spin up a dedicated container for every service. Combining services somewhat undercuts the advantages of having them in containers to begin with.

alexrmay91 OP ,

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.

acastcandream ,

[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

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    alexrmay91 OP ,

    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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