Mount disk for NAS

colettestatutory402 · December 13, 2025, 2:25pm

Hi everyone,

I’ve set up a mini PC running Home Assistant, and so far everything has been working without any issues. However, I’ve been stuck for over a week trying to achieve one specific goal and I’m getting quite frustrated.

My system currently has:

a 512GB M.2 SSD for the operating system
an additional 1TB M.2 SSD
a 1TB 2.5" SATA SSD

What I’d like to do is use the two 1TB drives to store data and set them up internally as a NAS. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to mount or configure these drives properly.

I’d really appreciate any help or guidance, because I’m slowly running out of ideas and getting desperate.

Hopefully the following information is useful:

➜  ~ cat /proc/partitions
major minor  #blocks  name

 252        1      32768 zram1
 252        2      16384 zram2
 259        0  976762584 nvme0n1
 259        1  976761543 nvme0n1p1
   8        0 1000177664 sda
   8        1 1000175616 sda1
   8       16  500107608 sdb
   8       17      32768 sdb1
   8       18      24576 sdb2
   8       19     262144 sdb3
   8       20      24576 sdb4
   8       21     262144 sdb5
   8       22       8192 sdb6
   8       23      98304 sdb7
   8       24  499393863 sdb8
➜  ~ df -h
Filesystem                Size      Used Available Use% Mounted on
overlay                 468.7G     10.6G    439.0G   2% /
/dev/sdb8               468.7G     10.6G    439.0G   2% /addons
devtmpfs                  7.7G         0      7.7G   0% /dev
tmpfs                     7.7G         0      7.7G   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sdb8               468.7G     10.6G    439.0G   2% /ssl
/dev/sdb8               468.7G     10.6G    439.0G   2% /data
/dev/sdb8               468.7G     10.6G    439.0G   2% /homeassistant
/dev/sdb8               468.7G     10.6G    439.0G   2% /share
/dev/sdb8               468.7G     10.6G    439.0G   2% /media
/dev/sdb8               468.7G     10.6G    439.0G   2% /addon_configs
/dev/sdb8               468.7G     10.6G    439.0G   2% /backup
/dev/sdb8               468.7G     10.6G    439.0G   2% /run/cid
tmpfs                     7.7G         0      7.7G   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sdb8               468.7G     10.6G    439.0G   2% /etc/asound.conf
/dev/sdb8               468.7G     10.6G    439.0G   2% /run/audio
tmpfs                     3.1G      1.4M      3.1G   0% /run/dbus
/dev/sdb8               468.7G     10.6G    439.0G   2% /etc/resolv.conf
/dev/sdb8               468.7G     10.6G    439.0G   2% /etc/hostname
/dev/sdb8               468.7G     10.6G    439.0G   2% /etc/hosts
/dev/sdb8               468.7G     10.6G    439.0G   2% /etc/pulse/client.conf
tmpfs                     3.1G      1.4M      3.1G   0% /run/log/journal
/dev/sdb8               468.7G     10.6G    439.0G   2% /var/log/journal
tmpfs                     7.7G         0      7.7G   0% /proc/asound
tmpfs                     7.7G         0      7.7G   0% /proc/acpi
devtmpfs                  7.7G         0      7.7G   0% /proc/interrupts
devtmpfs                  7.7G         0      7.7G   0% /proc/kcore
devtmpfs                  7.7G         0      7.7G   0% /proc/keys
devtmpfs                  7.7G         0      7.7G   0% /proc/timer_list
tmpfs                     7.7G         0      7.7G   0% /proc/scsi
tmpfs                     7.7G         0      7.7G   0% /sys/firmware
tmpfs                     7.7G         0      7.7G   0% /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/thermal_throttle
tmpfs                     7.7G         0      7.7G   0% /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu1/thermal_throttle
tmpfs                     7.7G         0      7.7G   0% /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu2/thermal_throttle
tmpfs                     7.7G         0      7.7G   0% /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu3/thermal_throttle

Thanks in advance!

Sir_Goodenough · December 13, 2025, 5:12pm

It is possible to mount drives on your HA server in HAOS. However it is not supported.

The reason is when you map the drives so that your HAOS can connect to them, they become part of your devices that are backed up during backup.
The backup data is accumulated in the root tmp folder. So if you have 750GB on your mounted drives, the back-up will try to push that onto your 512gb root drive and crash everything.
So this is possible and if you search, you can get this to work, but for the reason it will crash your system very easily (Ask me now I know), I do not give anyone the link to find it.

colettestatutory402 · December 20, 2025, 4:33pm

thank you again for your help in my previous thread. Since using additional internal SSDs with HAOS caused issues, I’ve now set up Home Assistant successfully on my PC using VMware Workstation Pro on Windows 11, and everything is running fine so far.

Now I’m facing a new problem:

My hardware

ConBee II Zigbee USB stick
ZBT‑2 Thread/Matter adapter
Home Assistant OS running as a VM in VMware Workstation Pro
Host system: Windows 11

The issue

I can’t get the VM to recognize these USB devices. Windows detects them normally, but Home Assistant inside the VM does not see them at all.

My question

What do I need to configure in VMware Workstation Pro so that the VM can properly access these USB sticks and Home Assistant can use them?

Before this setup I tried Proxmox, but I didn’t really like it — and during some drive‑mounting experiments I even crashed a disk and lost data. So I’d prefer to avoid trial‑and‑error this time.

Any guidance would be greatly appreciated!

ShadowFist · December 20, 2025, 6:56pm

Ask ChatGPT (or whatever AI you used to create this post) to explain to you how to passthrough USB devices using VMware Workstation Pro

colettestatutory402 · December 20, 2025, 11:56pm

Dear @ShadowFist, you are my hero. For this amazing help, you honestly deserve a Nobel Prize. I asked ChatGPT, and the answer I got was that I should select the devices via VM → Removable Devices, but unfortunately they don’t show up. I’ve also installed the drivers.

garydale · January 15, 2026, 4:53pm

My situation is similar. I have a wildcard LetsEncrypt certificate on my Debian Apache2 server that I want to on HA. HA is just one of several services that I am running on the server, most of which are not managed by HA. While HA has a decent certbot setup, what I really need is simply to mount the /etc/letsencrypt folder in HA.

The first part is simple enough - creating the NFS export. However the HA VM is an arcane collection of configurations that build all the mounts when the VM starts. The actual /etc/fstab is a stub that gets added to when the system boots.

Moreover, there is no /etc/letsencrypt folder. Instead it appears to be in /mnt/data/supervisor/addons/data/core_letsencrypt/letsencrypt.

How can I get HA to mount that as an NFS share?