Seeking advice regarding various aspects of storage within a NAS and in Proxmox

PyraChase

New Member
Aug 22, 2024
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I’m looking for some general advice regarding storage in the setup I am making - if you can give any advice on any part of this, I would love to hear it!

I am setting up a small home server/minilab, primarily using a Lenovo ThinkCentre M720Q with an i5-8500T and 16GB of RAM (which I will upgrade if needed/wanted later), and supplemented by some Pis that can run independently for some redundancy on important services like Pi-hole & Unbound, for simple always-on tasks, and for location-specific implementations (e.g. one connected to a servo motor).

I am new to Proxmox, and am running it on the M720Q, within which I intend to run (amongst other things) Jellyfin, a NAS solution such as TrueNAS/OMV - I have yet to choose (please feel free to make suggestions based on the rest of the post), and Home Assistant.

I have Proxmox installed on a 256GB SATA SSD and I intend to add a 2TB NVMe SSD for running the VMs/containers. I also have a healthy but not new 5TB external (USB) HDD that I can devote to it. I am looking for advice about a few main things, both to do with storage media:
  1. For running a NAS, for now I intend to use my 5TB USB HDD, but I intend to eventually get some high-capacity 3.5in HDDs and a multi-drive enclosure for them. I have a good idea of what drives to get, but am less informed about the enclosures. What should I look for, and are there any specific models/brands you would suggest when on a budget? I understand that USB-connected enclosures are not ideal - what other options would work well here?
  2. How useful would it be in the long run to spend the extra money for a dedicated NAS enclosure or otherwise to offload the data processing, compared to running the NAS within Proxmox with the drives in a basic enclosure as I currently intend?
  3. Regarding Proxmox storage architecture, what best-practices should I follow, and what should I know specifically regarding managing data storage for Jellyfin and for NAS solutions (if I’m correct, the storage I dedicate to the NAS should be passed through directly to the NAS container)? I’m aware it’s a good idea to run Proxmox itself on two SSDs in parity, though I don’t think that’s easily doable at the moment.
Please feel free to add any other suggestions too!
 

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