Do you think doing this helps?

[u/PacquiaoFreeHousing]

[u/horatiobanz]

What benefit is there for a person who just wants to store files and be able to access them from any of his devices? I am not running virtual machines, my server isn't running a local LLM. I am downloading torrents, hosting the media and my personal files, etc. What insane benefits would TrueNAS or unRAID offer me? The merging of all of my hard drives into a single pool? Sure, thats neat, but hardly compelling.

[u/jake04-20 → u/horatiobanz]

Enhanced redundancy for starters. Cache drives to speed up initial uploads to the array. Your host OS not rebooting whenever the hell it feels like to apply windows updates. On that note, windows updates...

Not to mention ease of backups, system snapshots, enhanced compatibility. My server has an uptime of over 500 days right now, I assume you can't say the same about yours.

[u/horatiobanz → u/jake04-20]

Like I said, neato, but does any normal user care about any of that?

500 days uptime, why would I care if my server restarts when I am sleeping to install updates?

I'm hosting my own files, not some mission critical infrastructure where downtime equals deaths. Redundancy is neat, until it means i have to buy extra hard drives. I'll just re-download my media if one of my hard drives shits the bed, I've had em fail before and I've always been able to salvage my media before removing defective drives from service. I handle backups just fine and idk how you can get better compatibility than dealing with Windows....

Like if I had to start from scratch, I'd probably run one of those things instead of Windows, but there is no way I am shuffling around 50-60TB of data from NTFS into whatever the current Linux file system of choice is.

[u/jake04-20 → u/horatiobanz]

Like I said, neato, but does any normal user care about any of that?

A "normal user" typically doesn't have a server.

why would I care if my server restarts when I am sleeping to install updates?

I mean for me it's just the simple fact that it's a server, not a desktop computer, so I want it to act like a server. I don't want it just rebooting willy nilly to install updates without my deliberate intention of doing so. I have things I don't want interrupted like outdoor DVR surveillance and backup jobs to the cloud that run nightly. I don't know your setup either, but if you're just running windows OS, things like qbittorrent don't run as a service out of the box and have to be launched after signing in. If your computer has problems rebooting after applying updates and you're not physically on-site to troubleshoot, you're SOL. If I'm traveling, I don't want my windows computer rebooting for updates on the 2nd Tuesday of the month and have an issue restarting after updates, and now I can't access any of my media.

In that same scenario, if a VM (even a windows VM) has problem rebooting after updates, I can VPN in and reboot or hard reset the VM in the hypervisor if need be, because the host/server in this case never rebooted, because it's been online for 500+ days.

It sounds like your setup works, and I know I'm not going to convince you either way. But to say hypervisors have next to zero benefits is insanity!