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’re set on TrueNAS, then just build a box to do that.

If you want a low power solution, go with Synology or Qnap.

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.

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.

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.

If you want to roll your own, I’ve had good luck with ASRock Rack motherboards.

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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).

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.

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 use my old desktop. It’s totally overkill, but it’s also free since I was going to throw it out instead.

I personally use a dual core pentium with 16GB of RAM. When I first installed TrueNas (FreeNas back then), I only had 8GB of RAM, but that proved to be not enough to run all the services I wanted, so I would suggest 12-16GB. Depending on the services you want to run any multi-core x86 CPU that allows 16GB of RAM to be used should be adequate. I believe TrueNas recommends ECC RAM, but I don’t think using consumer grade RAM and hardware has caused me any problems. I’m also using an old SSD for the system drive, which I is recommended now (I used to use 2 mirrored USB thumb drives, buy that’s not recommended anymore). Very importantly, make sure the HDD(s) you get are not shingled drives; made that mistake initially, and performance was ridiculously bad.