Prebuilt, SFF options?

[TM2222]

Hi guys,
Looking for advice and/or options for building a SFF Freenas or Truenas system. My previous system went down during a move and I don't have the time to build or the space for the mid-tower I was using before.
My bad if this is a dumb question, but something like an intel NUC or of that form factor would be great. I'm got 20TB of data on 5.25" red HDDs for it (I have a caddy for them to be plugged externally), and I mainly use it for storage and Plex.
Looking over the specs on the recommendations pages, could definitely use some advice.
Cost isn't really a worry atm.

Options or recommendations would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks

 

[Yorick]

People haven’t had great success with USB caddies, so I’m reluctant to recommend that.

Do you have room for a Node 304? It’s likely not much bigger than your caddie, has room for six drives, and you can build in it with an ITX board like the X11SCL-IF-O (-O meaning retail SKU). Add an i3-9100F and some ECC RAM from supermicro, and an atx power supply, and you are up and running for up to four drives, as that’s how many SATA ports that board has. The Node 304 does allow expansion cards, so you could add a HBA if you ever need those additional two drives.

A larger idea is a Node 804 and X11SCL-F, for 6 drives, or x11SCH-f, for 8 drives. If you’re really keen, the X11-SCH-F can be paired with an i3-9100 (no F) for eventual hw transcode in Plex, via TrueNAS Scale.

Yes you’d need to build, but you know it’ll work.

If you do want to go the NUC route, any NUC8 should work. But again, people have had abysmal results with TrueNAS and USB storage, mostly to blame on the USB implementation.

 

[TM2222]

@Yorick Thanks very much. Can definitely work with this.