(Alternative below) Buy 5 - 7 years old computer with decent specs (i5 i7, 16 gigs ram, don’t care about hard drives but prefer ones with ssd) for about 60 - 100 bucks. Buy 250 gigz+ ssd (if it’s not included) and any desired number and sizes of nas grade drives (this is where you don’t want to save money if you want this full fledged nas). Don’t forget UPS! Install TrueNAS. Profit… Ok not profit but enjoy. For movies definitely jellyfin (keep your distance from plex really). Audiobookshelf for audiobooks but also ebooks! Amazing software that one.

Alt. Buy raspberry pi, two usb hard drives, install open media vault and same apps as above. Setup data duplication from one drive to the second one with rsync (directly in omv ui). Omv is not as polished as true nas but its cheap and it lets you dip your feet in homelabbing first, in two to three years you will gain experience and vision to do your dream homelab (or at last try 😀) if the pi is not enough.

Yes community edition. If I can recommend do it without proxmox, play with it and then you can decide either way. Good luck!

If I may ask, what do you want to use proxmox for?

They switched kubernetes for docker in 24.10 so it is quite new. And it works realy well. I didn’t have to tweak one thing, I was impressed.

Hi, I finally set up tailscale on my raspbery pi, in exit node mode so I have access to my whole network. I also set AdGuard an the very same pi with dhcp. I finally bought home assistant voice device, didn’t arrive yet, but cant wait to experiment with it.

I still have to setup Authelia for sso, I want to setup a device on my network as a (proton) vpn gateway (zero knowledge right now) and then I want to start learning about pfsense to properly segment my network (into subnets) and have more control.

I have been using open media vault for years, I switched quite recently to trueNAS and I don’t agree with your statement, trueNAS was easier to setup, with encryption, and is easier to maintain. Installing docker compose apps was a learning on omv, but is so simple on trueNAS for there is plenty of apps out of the box (in the store). And yeah, TrueNAS scale doesn’t use kubernetes, it uses docker now.