For project A, I’d look into tailscale. I’d advise against having home assistant open to the internet otherwise.

Don’t know anything about your other project, sorry.

Yeah it’s relatively easy to reuse most webcam cameras, you just have to get them connected to a USB cable, then most computers will immediately recognize them as cameras.

I usually just harvest usable parts like the hard drive and camera and call it a day.

Alternatively, if you’re able to plug an external monitor in and get it to work for setup, you could install some sort of Linux distro on it and run it headless for lots of different purposes.

I’ve got a homemade NAS running unRAID and my arr suite/Jellyfin/qbittorrent, and an orangepi running the orangepiOS (flavor of Ubuntu I think?) Which handles home assistant and associated containers .

Yeah do it there is basically no downside. I agree with others that you may have trouble with the ads in streaming services. On my android TV, YouTube ads, for instance, aren’t blocked by pihole.

I use a fractal design node 304. It’s pretty cool, but has all the limitations and problems you would expect from a case that size.

I don’t have a ton of experience with NASes but I’ve just recently set up my first unRAID server and had similar requirements.

Totally agree with the USB annoyance. It technically serves as the boot drive but the OS itself runs on the RAM once started. I have a 500gb ssd which I use as a cache drive, then an array of 2x4tb HDD plus another 4tb parity drive, with plans to expand; ultimately that’s why I chose unRAID over TrueNAS because I read that it was much easier to add drives to your array in the former.

As far as docker, I run 9 containers 24/7. Most of them are *arr media acquisition software and Jellyfin. I don’t think I’ve ever had to do CLI with those with the exception of installing a cloud flare tunnel. The native docker support works well. Some people prefer spinning up a Linux VM then using docker on that but I’ve never found a reason to try that (plus I can’t get VMs working correctly. Not sure why).

As a comparison, I’ve also got an orangepi5 which I run home assistant and associated containers via docker compose, and the unraid system is definitely a lot easier.

A piece that I don’t have the knowledge to address is which platform would be the easiest to import your data into. From my limited experience, I had to add drives to my array, format them to the desired file system, add my data over the local network, then physically add the remaining drive. With as much data as you have, that strat could be problematic.

I set it up as a docker container and the installation was very easy.

HOWEVER the data input and actually getting it off the ground is very complex and intimidating. I havent really gotten deep into it yet.

I’m working on putting together an unRAID NAS for media acquisition and storage right now. My initial plan was to use trueNAS scale, but from my research it’s a lot less tolerant about adding drives to your array whenever you want, and I didn’t want to drop a zillion dollars in HD space straight off the bat.

So far docker containers work well on it, and are relatively easy to configure. I’m planning to still leave my home assistant and associated docker containers on the orangepi where they live now though.