What my setup will soon be for hardware:
Gen 2 AMD epic 16 core CPU,
Supermicro motherboard with lots of pcie slots,
128g ram,
Intel arc a40 GPU,
HBA card attached to a super micro disk shelf
Software:
Proxmox for host is,
Truenas Scale (just NAS) in VM with HBA card passed into VM,
Plex in VM with Intel GPU passed in,
3 VMs for docker swarm (headless Debian)
Other thoughts:
Cloud flare will only be helpful for things you want exposed to the internet. If you do that make sure you have a reverse proxy. This is how I expose services for non-tech family.
VPN will be more secure, but can also be more of a pain. I generally only do that for things only I need or only techy savvy people will use.
Your biggest potential bottle neck is if your NAS and App server only have a single 1g network port. This may not be a problem depending on your usage, but it is a important consideration to keep in mind.
It depends on what your doing. Caffeine, exercise, diet, and sleep are all reasonable. But if your using stronger drugs without doctor supervision, that's a bad idea.
For HDDs the best way is to think of them like shoes or tires. They will eventually fail, but they also may fail prematurely. I always recommend having a spare drive ready.
You don't want hardware raid. Some options you can research:
Mdadm - Linux software raid
ZFS - Combo raid and filesystem
Btrfs - A filesystem that can also do raid things
Some OS options to consider:
Debian - good if you want to learn to do everything yourself
Truenas Scale - Comercial NAS OS. I bit of work to get started, but very stable once going.
Unraid - Enthusiast focused NAS OS. Not as stable as Truenas, but easier to get started and a lot of community support.
There are probably other software/OS's to consider, but those are the ones I have any experience with. I personally use ZFS on Truenas with a lot of help from this YouTube channel. https://youtube.com/@lawrencesystems?si=O1Z4BuEjogjdsslF
If you want to get things working then never "tinker" with things, maybe it's not worth it. But if you want to learn and be able to try new things it is really helpful. Having a new VM not breaking existing VMs reduces risk when trying something new.
I think GPU passthrough has improved since you have used it. Some command line prep work is still necessary, but the passthrough config is done in the GUI.
I am running an Arc A40 on an Ubuntu VM for Plex. They only problem I have is VM not booting after it is restarted. Restarting the host fixes the issue.
I am running Plex with an Intel A40 in Ubuntu server. Worked well for me as Ubuntu had the drivers baked in before they made there way into a Debian release.
What my setup will soon be for hardware: Gen 2 AMD epic 16 core CPU, Supermicro motherboard with lots of pcie slots, 128g ram, Intel arc a40 GPU, HBA card attached to a super micro disk shelf
Software: Proxmox for host is, Truenas Scale (just NAS) in VM with HBA card passed into VM, Plex in VM with Intel GPU passed in, 3 VMs for docker swarm (headless Debian)
Other thoughts: Cloud flare will only be helpful for things you want exposed to the internet. If you do that make sure you have a reverse proxy. This is how I expose services for non-tech family.
VPN will be more secure, but can also be more of a pain. I generally only do that for things only I need or only techy savvy people will use.