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Maybe you could pickup a old workstation and drop a few drives in it. It is fairly affordable and would allow you to get your feet wet. For ZFS you really want lots of ram so make sure you get enough.
How are you going to mount the storage? Do you need some sort of shared authentication? I personally would either use software Nextcloud or Synching or an active directory deployment via Samba.
I planned to use nfs, since it is one of the options of TrueNAS and it works on both windows and linux.
I use my old desktop. It's totally overkill, but it's also free since I was going to throw it out instead.
I really like my Synology NAS, but if I had to do it again, I would roll my own with one of the Mini-PC's from Amazon. They're essentially just as expensive as the Synology hardware and you can make due by installing Rockstor or something similar. You won't get the same experience as the Synology setup, but IMO it's not really worth the underpowered hardware. I would much rather have something significantly more powerful like the Mini-PC to be able to run containers on without having to worry about system resources.
Probably just go with SSD storage because 2T is fairly low for hard drives these days. Still a pretty good idea to do a mirror.
Pretty much any CPU that isn't a raspberry pi will comfortably max out a gigabit Ethernet connection.
If you are really sure about the disk space requirements you can easily get one of the endless mini PCs with a N100 or a small Intel on it and chuck two NVMe's in it and let these run as RAID1.
Have a decent backup plan,though.
2TB is insanely small for a NAS. At that point, you could honestly just run a Pi 5 with M.2 HAT and a 2TB SSD for something like $200 total. Could always buy a second Pi for mirroring and even locate it in a friend or family member's house for mirroring and backup.
I use a Pi 4 with 7 TB of external SSDs just fine at home. It also hosts a pi.hole ad blocking server, my 1TBish jellyfin music streaming collection, my network share for kodi, an always-on VPN for my phone and laptops, and a few other small services. I'm sure I could upgrade for better read/write speeds. But everything is performant enough as is, and it's completely silent and fan-free in my living room by the router. Honestly for most services a Pi with a passive cooler will perform admirably.
2TB is perfectly fine for a NAS. Not everyone needs high capacity
Of course, nothing wrong with it. In fact it makes OP's quandary a lot easier! I'm looking into something with 20TB or so of capacity myself, and that's given me an appreciation for how much simpler it is to solve this problem at 2TB.
If you're set on TrueNAS, then just build a box to do that.
If you want a low power solution, go with Synology or Qnap.
Consider how the NAS will be used. Is it just file storage, or will you want to stream from it?
If just file storage, you can use lighter hardware.
I'm running a 5 year old Dell Small Form Factor desktop as my NAS/media server. It's power draw is under 12 watts unless I'm converting files. There's room for 3 data drives (boot drive is M2). It has no problem streaming, unlike my consumer NAS. And it cost way less.
If you want to roll your own, I've had good luck with ASRock Rack motherboards.
I have a UGreen NAS (6800 Pro) and the hardware on it has been great. I added a new system drive and have been running Proxmox since day 1.
The install process would be the same, enter bios, enable boot from other drive, disable UGreen OS drive, and then reboot to install whatever OS you want.
NASCompares did a video review of the UGreen NAS with TrueNAS installed and had nothing but good things to say.
I got mine during the Kickstarter campaign, but I still think they have some good value at retail vs competitors.
I’ve owned QNAP and Synology, the one area that has been an issue has been around the CPU being the bottleneck and slowing down transfers. This was on the lower end models.
I really really would love them...if only they would allow ECC RAM and more RAM in total. Then they would have built a killer device.
I did the opposite and used it as an excuse to upgrade my main PC, with the parts that got replaced being inherited by the new server.
Perhaps an unwise move due to it not being optimised for power savings, and looking at your particular use case it wouldn't be a smart move.
Depending in where you want to have this NAS, one of the more important factors to consider is how quiet you can make it. If you only have a few HDDs they're not too loud, but ssds are silent. It can also be worth getting some good fans and making sure you can mount them in a way that doesn't cause unnecessary vibration to have it be real quiet.
My TrueNAS setup uses a used Ryzen 3200G and mATX motherboard I got off of ebay for about $100 total. Honestly, any CPU with integrated graphics should be fine, so maybe something like the Intel 8500T, which was specifically a low power SKU could also work. Unless you plan on doing a lot of video transcoding, then you might need something more powerful (or a low end GPU like the Intel Arc A310 or a Radeon 6400 to go with it)
I'm not so sure how TrueNAS Scale determines how much RAM to allocate for ZFS, but at least with Proxmox, the wiki says you want to have at least 2GiB + (1 GiB/TiB of storage) of RAM to be able to be allocated.
If you're looking to use 2TiB of storage, that would be at least 4GiB of RAM dedicated just to ZFS cache, so 8GiB of RAM would probably suit you. You might need to get more RAM in the future if you want to go with more storage at that time.
As for a case, anything will do as long as it can hold however many hard drives you ultimately wish to put in it.
I believe the RAM calculation is less important for ZFS these days. I capped mine at 16GB for 64TiB useable pool and had no issues. (This was zfs on linux which i think Truenas Scale is based off anyway).
Regardless unless the same data is often being accessed the caching aspect may not be that important.
General consensus ive been seeing recently agrees with you that you really can get it running on surprisingly low end hardware these days, and finding less than 8gb of RAM in the ddr4 or 5 era is perhaps difficult enough that my above point is moot
Consider something like the aoostar R1 with Intel N100. Small and low power like a commercial consumer NAS but cheaper and you can chuck whatever OS you want.
For the CPU: I have a AMD Ryzen 5 8600G in my TrueNAS Scale box, I use the integrated graphics for hardware transcoding in Jellyfin. If you don't need transcoding it's probably overkill.
For TrueNAS you'll also want a lot of RAM, as ZFS (the filesystem) gets faster with more ram by using it as a cache. My box has 32 GB, but 16 GB should also work, especially if you're going with SSD storage.
And don't go cheap on the power supply, get an efficient one from a good brand (I prefer BeQuiet).
I couldn't really tell you about which hardware to get, but its worth considering a 35w CPU as this machine will be on all the time. Also adding a network card, having more bandwidth is really handy for a NAS
I agree with using TrueNAS, I currently have a Fujitsu Futro S920 that can host two mirrored SSDs, it is a cheap build if you don't have to host any services, you can found details here: https://pietro.in/en/posts/futro-s920-proxmox/
For more powerful hardware but still staying in a cheap build take a look at an HP 800 G4 mini or a ThinkCentre M910x both can host two NVME disks