TrueNas on a 2018 Mac mini with external storage

[gTjpvnbdbpoG3XQY]

Hello friends,

I need some help to decide if I keep or sell a mac mini I have here.

I got a mac mini 2018, i7 6 cores, 36Gb memory, but... only 256Gb SSD.

I've been playing with TrueNas using VirtualBox, reading the documentation, setting it up and having fun. Then I've decided to make it a real thing and to do so, I would need some external storage.

I've been reading for days now, and the more I read more confused I am.

I have seen people saying that they are using mac minis with external enclosures with no problem. Others said that mac mini's memory isn't fit for TrueNas or that using an external enclosure will fail because the external disks wouldn't be recognized individually. Also, RAID of any sort doesn't play well with TrueNas, etc.

So the question is, should I sell this mac mini and use the money to get my TrueNas running on top of appropriate hardware or is it possible to get an external non-raid thunderbolt HDD stack?

Thanks!

 

[Etorix]

Use it as desktop or sell it and get server-grade hardware.
ZFS needs direct and reliable access to the disks. USB is unsuitable ("reliable"). I'm unsure if Thunderbolt is even supported in TrueNAS; even if it were, there would be the question whether it allows direct access to each drive, and the cost of a Thunderbolt enclosure would likely dwarf the price of a full server built, with proper ECC memory…

 

[gTjpvnbdbpoG3XQY]

Use it as desktop or sell it and get server-grade hardware.
ZFS needs direct and reliable access to the disks. USB is unsuitable ("reliable"). I'm unsure if Thunderbolt is even supported in TrueNAS; even if it were, there would be the question whether it allows direct access to each drive, and the cost of a Thunderbolt enclosure would likely dwarf the price of a full server built, with proper ECC memory…

I think this is a straight enough answer to what I was suspecting.
Thank you!