Is it technically possible to permanently mount external harddrive to Home Assistant OS?

I have HASS OS on a RPi 4, which I was hoping to make into a central hub for:

  • smart home
  • torrents (transmission)
  • media server (jellyfin, plex add-on)

I have made lots of progress in setting it up according to my needs, and the only bottleneck I’m still struggling with is mounting an external hard drive (accessed by transmission and jellyfin) for the torrents/media side of things.

I have combed through similar topics on this portal + google, but I have not managed to successfully mount it. The closest I got to make this work is:

  • access the hass os docker container with docker exec -it homeassistant /bin/bash
  • mount the external drive with mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/external-storage
  • confirm the mount is successful via df -h and cat /proc/mounts
  • copy the sda1 entry from /proc/mounts into /etc/fstab to make the mounting permanent, even after hass restart

This last step does not seem to work, as after the hass restart the mount is still lost. Now depending on the source, I read that this might not be possible and that hass is not supposed to support that. This seems like a fairly common feature and I find it hard to believe that it’s not possible.

What am I missing?

If this turns out to be impossible, the only choices I see (and correct me if I’m wrong) are:

  • run the media server together with the torrent daemon on a separate RPi, keeping the concerns separated between the two RPis. There would be no connection between HASS and the media server this was, which goes against my initial idea of having a central hub for everything
  • wipe the current hass RPi out, and set it up in the alternative way (the HASS Supervisor, the dockerized version) which is a bit of a nuisance.
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I make no claims on if it’s working or not, just posting the link.