Building a libre/free NAS

[tomatopotato]

I'd like to get some opinions on building TrueNAS with libre/free hardware.

My wants/needs aren't particular great. Just mainly looking to serve files over the LAN and possibly host a few services like Nextcloud, Vaultwarden, etc further on down the road. I don't need it to do transcoding or anything super heavy. My current setup is a 5x 8TB machine running off an Intel 6700K. The main objective is migrating to something without vulnerabilities like IME or PSP.

In terms of pre-built systems, I've seen decent, albeit pricy options from Vikings, Technoethical, and Raptor. I'm wondering if I really need to go that far though, or whether I can achieve something similar by just ordering some older parts based on this Freundshafter list?

 

[Arwen]

The Raptor / Talos is off the table, as it's not x64 arch. TrueNAS, Core or SCALE only supports x64 arch at this time.

As for the other choices without IME or PSP, I don't follow those too closely. Their was a small vendor that made x64 laptops, desktops and servers where they would permanently disable IME access on Intel CPUs, (if I recalled correctly). They are in Denver, CO but their name escapes me at present.

 

[tomatopotato]

The Raptor / Talos is off the table, as it's not x64 arch. TrueNAS, Core or SCALE only supports x64 arch at this time.

As for the other choices without IME or PSP, I don't follow those too closely. Their was a small vendor that made x64 laptops, desktops and servers where they would permanently disable IME access on Intel CPUs, (if I recalled correctly). They are in Denver, CO but their name escapes me at present.

Ah, I'd forgotten to consider that. Thank you. That narrows it down a bit.

 

[Arwen]

I remembered the vendor that allows disabling Intel IME;

System76 - Intel ME info

 

[tomatopotato]

Thanks for the follow-up.

I've decided to just to separate my home server setup into two machines. One dedicated to storing and serving files locally (using TrueNAS, without internet connectivity), and a smaller, separate one for net connected services. That way it should be (hopefully) easier to achieve secure, private storage, and I won't need to put so much effort into trying to acquire open source hardware. Although it would be nice/ideal to have.