The other poster said it’s about convenience but that’s not really true. The claim to fame for NVMe drives is speed: While SATA SSDs can theoretically run at up to 500 MB/s, the latest NVMe drives can hit 7000+ MB/s.

It’s for this reason that you should pay attention to which NVMe drive you choose (if speed is what you’re after). SATA-based M.2 drives exist – and they run at SATA speeds – so if you see a cheap M.2 drive for sale it’s probably SATA and intended for bulk storage on laptops and SFF PCs without room for 2.5" drives. Double check the specs to be sure what you’re getting.

If you’re practicing 3-2-1 backups then you probably don’t need to bother with RAID.

I can hear the mechanical keyboards clacking; Hear me out: If you’re not committed to a regular backup strategy, RAID can be a good way to protect yourself against a sudden hard drive failure, at which point you can do an “oh shit” backup and reconsider your life choices. RAID does nothing else beyond that. If your data gets corrupted, the wrong bits will happily be synced to the mirror drives. If you get ransomwared, congratulations you now have two copies of your inaccessible encrypted data.

Skip the RAID and set up backups. It can be as simple as an external drive that you plug in once a week and run rsync, or you can pay for a service like backblaze that has a client to handle things, or you can set up a NAS that receives a nightly backup from your PC and then pushes a copy up to something like B2 or S3 glacier.

Most people set up a reverse proxy, yes, but it’s not strictly necessary. You could certainly change the port mapping to 8080:443 and expose the application port directly that way, but then you’d obviously have to jump through some extra hoops for certificates, etc.

Caddy is a great solution (and there’s even a container image for it 😉)

The great thing about containers is that you don’t have to understand the full scope of how they work in order to use them.

You can start with learning how to use docker-compose to get a set of applications running, and once you understand that (which is relatively easy) then go a layer deeper and learn how to customize a container, then how to build your own container from the ground up and/or containerize an application that doesn’t ship its own images.

But you don’t need to understand that stuff to make full use of them, just like you don’t need to understand how your distribution builds an rpm or deb package. You can stop whenever your curiosity runs out.

You don’t actually have to care about defining IP, cpu/ram reservations, etc. Your docker-compose file just defines the applications you want and a port mapping or two, and that’s it.

Example:

---
version: "2.1"
services:
  adguardhome-sync:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/adguardhome-sync:latest
    container_name: adguardhome-sync
    environment:
      - CONFIGFILE=/config/adguardhome-sync.yaml
    volumes:
      - /path/to/my/configs/adguardhome-sync:/config
    ports:
      - 8080:8080
    restart:
      - unless-stopped

That’s it, you run docker-compose up and the container starts, reads your config from your config folder, and exposes port 8080 to the rest of your network.

If anything, containers are less resource intensive than VMs.

I just had a db corruption a couple weeks ago, immediately after a server update. Easy enough to fix, but super annoying when you want things to “just work”.

Like the OP, I’m getting tired and wary of Plex. The fact that they have a native app on most major TV brands is nice I guess, but I’m at the point where I’m seriously considering buying a handful of RPi compute modules now that they’re available again and just changing all my TVs back into “dumb display” mode and running all media via the rpi.

I tend to get trigger anxiety on these things though, so I’d love to hear how other people are handling their self hosted media/streamcutting setups.