I have a mini-PC running windows. On that, I run home assistant in virtualbox, have plex installed, and a cheap USB harddrive plugged in to keep my plex media. I've turned on sharing for a folder in this drive so other devices on my network can access it.

I've watched some videos and read some tutorials. I have a pretty good idea on how I'm going to run HA and Plex, but I'm unsure about turning my USB drive into something the rest of my devices can access as well as something Plex can directly access too.

What would you recommend as the most beginner friendly, easy way to accomplish this? I keep seeing TrueNAS pop up, but I'm not convinced this isn't way overkill for what I want to do. So what would you recommend I look at to start out? The amount of information and things I don't know yet is a little overwhelming.

After I get more familiar with the system, I'm totally happy to branch out and try more advanced things that most people prefer, but that's down the road for me now.

Edit: to be clear, I'm planning on completely ditching windows and setting everything back up in proxmox