If you want low effort high value then get a synology 2 bay. If you want full control over the host OS then run Debian/arch with zfs

I used shotcut for light video editing and it worked great, no complaints

I went down a similar path as you. The entire proxmox community argues making it an appliance with nothing extra installed on the host. But the second you need to share data — like a nas — the tooling is a huge pain. I couldn’t reliably find a solution that felt right.

So my solution was to make my nas a zfs pool on my host. Bind mounting works for CTs but not VMs which is an annoying feature asymmetry. So I decided to also install an nfs server that exposed my nas.

I know that’s not what you want but just wanted to share what I did.

The feature asymmetry between CTs and VMs basically made CTs not part of my orchestration.

Here’s my homelab journey: https://bower.sh/homelab

Basically, containers and GPU is annoying to deal with, GPU pass through to a VM is even more annoying. Most modern hobbyist GPUs also do not support splitting your GPU. At the end of the day, it’s a bunch of tinkering which is valuable if that’s your goal. I learned what I wanted, now I’m back to arch running everything with systemd and quadlet

It is being rewritten using swift