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.