I have a desktop PC with two SSDs—one with Windows installed and the other currently empty, which I plan to use for Linux as I migrate to it. Additionally, I have two 4TB HDDs I intend to configure for NAS storage.
Since I can’t afford a dedicated NAS setup just yet, I’m considering dedicating a portion of the empty SSD to run a NAS solution like TrueNAS or Proxmox for self-hosting. Ideally, I’d like the NAS portion to operate continuously in the background, while allowing me to boot into either Linux or Windows as usual.
Is it possible to set up the NAS environment this way, so it’s always running and accessible, even as I switch between Linux and Windows on my main system?
Not in a way you’re probably going to like.
You could set up a bare metal hypervisor on the system and set up a VM for your NAS, Windows, and Linux and swap between them as needed, but uh, that’s not really an exceedingly pleasant desktop use case, for a number of reasons, one of which is that you really won’t have the normal ‘sit down, and use the computer’ desktop experience.
Alternate option: run the NAS and either the Linux or Windows install in a VM, and keep it booted into, say, the desktop Linux environment with everything else being a virtualized setup.