After all that... my business partner is afraid of what he doesn't know, so for now I got another DAS for work.
I still want to set up a TrueNAS Core system at home and bought an inexpensive Supermicro board with Atom E3940. Originally I was going to use some RAM I had lying around that I thought would work, but alas it is 4GB. I'm going to order this RAM stick if it looks right, I haven't heard of the brand. Any reason this is a stupid plan? I have 4x 4GB HGST Deskstar NAS drives installed for the pool.