Maybe you could pickup a old workstation and drop a few drives in it. It is fairly affordable and would allow you to get your feet wet. For ZFS you really want lots of ram so make sure you get enough.

How are you going to mount the storage? Do you need some sort of shared authentication? I personally would either use software Nextcloud or Synching or an active directory deployment via Samba.

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

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.

2TB is insanely small for a NAS. At that point, you could honestly just run a Pi 5 with M.2 HAT and a 2TB SSD for something like $200 total. Could always buy a second Pi for mirroring and even locate it in a friend or family member’s house for mirroring and backup.

I use a Pi 4 with 7 TB of external SSDs just fine at home. It also hosts a pi.hole ad blocking server, my 1TBish jellyfin music streaming collection, my network share for kodi, an always-on VPN for my phone and laptops, and a few other small services. I’m sure I could upgrade for better read/write speeds. But everything is performant enough as is, and it’s completely silent and fan-free in my living room by the router. Honestly for most services a Pi with a passive cooler will perform admirably.

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

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

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

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.