Let’s say that yes, you pointed them to “networking”. The issue is that they have a specific problem and you are pointing to a topic so broad and deep with no specific direction. But you also say “it’s basic”. Well if it truly is basic and they still don’t get it, this would be a clear indication that they need some level of hand holding. Last if your feeling “that is a lot of work, I don’t want to do that” no problem you don’t have to. But in that that situation I would suggest reviewing before commenting: is it going to get the person closer to a solution? Is encouraging to the person? Am I indicating I also have this problem indicating someone else could step in and help multiple people at once? Is it funny? If it’s no on all those, maybe don’t comment.

I think the important factor is that you have contributed nothing of value to help this person learn. You could have linked to a useful resources, you have suggested Google searches to point in the correct direction. But you basically said “This is easy, RTFM”. Next time at least send them the manual they should read.

For HDDs the best way is to think of them like shoes or tires. They will eventually fail, but they also may fail prematurely. I always recommend having a spare drive ready.

You don’t want hardware raid. Some options you can research:

• Mdadm - Linux software raid
• ZFS - Combo raid and filesystem
• Btrfs - A filesystem that can also do raid things

Some OS options to consider:

• Debian - good if you want to learn to do everything yourself
• Truenas Scale - Comercial NAS OS. I bit of work to get started, but very stable once going.
• Unraid - Enthusiast focused NAS OS. Not as stable as Truenas, but easier to get started and a lot of community support.

There are probably other software/OS’s to consider, but those are the ones I have any experience with. I personally use ZFS on Truenas with a lot of help from this YouTube channel. https://youtube.com/@lawrencesystems?si=O1Z4BuEjogjdsslF

I am running Plex with an Intel A40 in Ubuntu server. Worked well for me as Ubuntu had the drivers baked in before they made there way into a Debian release.

In general checkout LearnLinuxTV on YouTube. Lots of good guides.

If you want cheap new drives check out https://shucks.top/.

You can get used Enterprise drives on eBay if you want to got that way. Look for a seller with lots of sales, a good rating, and a reasonable return policy.

Same

I would stay away from kubernets/k3/k8s. Unless you want to learn it for work purposes, it’s so overkill you can spend a month before you get things running. I know from experience. My current setup gives you options and has been reliable for me.

NAS Box: Truenas Scale - You can have UnRaid fill this role.

Services Hosting: Proxmox - I can spin up any VMs I need and lots of info online to do things like hardware passthrough to VMs.

Containers: Debian VM - Debian makes a great server environment as it’s stable and well supported. I just make this VM a docker swarm host. I managed things with Portainer for a web interface.

I keep data on the NAS and have containers access it over the network. Usually a NFS share.