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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: October 25th, 2023

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  • The hardware controller bit is something i do. So I run Proxmox. I think you can do it in Esxi, but proxmox might be worth at least looking into. Plex is in a VM and TrueNAS is in a VM. My SSDs attached to my motherboard have my OS and VMs. My nas drives are connected to an HBA PCIe card. In my case that’s a Dell H740 but a H310 is good to if you need to buy one. They are like $30. The HBA card connects either to a Backplane for hot swap drives or you can get sas to 4x sata breakout cables. All of your NAS drives, probably rust spinners, would connect to the HBA card. In Proxmox we can configure to give the HBA card to the TrueNAS VM so the virtual machine has direct control over the physical PCIe card. This is called PCIe Passthrough. In this configuration Proxmox does not have control over the HBA card hence why the OS drives can’t be connected to it as any drives connected to the HBA card are also controlled by the VM the HBA is passed through to. Once in TrueNAS shares can be setup be it for personal files or Plex media. This give you best of both worlds between having 1 server to do everything and being able to run TrueNAS with physical hardware access.




  • A while back a bought a UNVR-PRO second hand and the idiot seller shipped it in a 1U Unifi network switch box with a few scraps of cardboard but plenty of room to bounce around. I was vocal about how terrible the packaging was, but ultimately ended up keeping it as somehow there were no signs of damage. Fast forward almost a year and the device bricked up. Was investigating the issue by asking questions on the Ubiquiti Discord and a UI employee reached out and told me to RMA it. Told me to hang onto it until they had one to ship out. Had to wait about a month and they sent me a new one, but never asked for the old one back. Sat on the broken one for a few months. Opened it up but there wasn’t anything obviously broken, took some photos, and put it on ebay for parts. Couldn’t believe how fast it sold. So while my initial packaging experience was terrible it worked out to me owing a UNVR-PRO for a net investment of about $150. Can’t complain too much.


  • At the bare minimum, or at least to start get data in a raid that losing a drive or 2 won’t cause you to lose everything. You’re not out of the yet. If you can’t lose your files you want 2 separate copies in different machines, preferably at different locations. Be that a cloud service or a remote server.

    My files are on my local NAS server that are also backed up to my remote NAS server at my dad’s house over a VPN. Essential files (not my plex media) are also in a 1tb cloud service. 3-2-1 backup plan is probably ideal but I’m pretty happy with my 2.5-2.5-1.5 approach 😅. 3-3-2 for critical stuff and 2-2-1 for everything else.



  • Used prices:

    Dell T320 - $150

    500gb to 1tb enterprise ssd - $50

    4x 10tb sas drives - $100 each

    Makes a very capable little server for pretty cheap. If you don’t get the ideal cpu or ram amount neither of those cost much. Can even make it really quiet with a Noctua fan. A second SSD for OS and VMs to mirror the first would be better. An icydock 4x 2.5in drive cage to 5.25 bay is really nice. For the t320 im assuming 8x 3.5in hot swap bays and like a H310 HBA. Anyways you can reasonably get started for $600 including storage. Can share more ab9ut configuration if you want to go this route. This is basic my secondary server behind my T440.