I am looking for some advice on hardware to support the following new build server:
A basic home backup server - just a reliable share for storing backups. Only serving a few computers at home, but looking for high data integrity. About 4TB data all up, will grow only slowly over time. Probably using Veeam or Duplicacy for the backup clients to push data to/from the NAS.
ECC memory, ZFS
Gigabit Ethernet
Running TrueNAS Scale probably
Low power draw if possible.
4 nas sata hard drives (8TB each - already have them)
Small footprint, maybe mini-ATX?
keeping costs as low as practicable
on the quieter side if possible
I have been doing some reading on the forum, but still confused on options that aren’t overkill for the intended purpose.
How important is a small form factor server (micro-ATX, mini-ITX, etc) to you? There are lots of small form factor motherboard options, and lots of options for more server oriented boards that will support ECC memory. Small form factor server motherboards that support ECC do exist, but your options are going to be much more limited and will likely cost more. You will likely have much better luck finding a micro-ATX than a mini-ITX board that supports ECC.
For small form factor there are lots of good NAS / network application oriented N100 boards that will be inexpensive, draw very little power, and generate very little heat so they can be very quiet, possibly even fan-less. However you probably won’t get ECC.
At least on the Intel camp there are lots of ATX server boards and at least a few micro-ATX server boards that will support ECC.
For Intel I would look for something with a C246 chipset that supports 8th / 9th gen intel CPUs. This will basically be a NK 6.0 build. The boards will likely advertise support for Xeon E-21xx / E-22xx CPUs, but you don’t actually need to use a xeon CPU. They will support any 8th / 9th gen Intel CPU and in that generation Intel Core i3 CPUs support ECC, but i5, i7, i9 do not.
If you don’t care about running a media server and doing video transcoding for Plex / Jellyfin then you might have better luck with AMD. I would recommend the AM4 platform. AMD is a little better about not playing the market segmentation games that intel does. As far as I know all the AM4 CPUs support ECC, except for the certain “APUs” which are the CPUs that have integrated graphics which is annoying.
That said AM4 was not really a server platform so even though the CPUs support ECC the actual support from motherboard manufactures is spotty at best. You will need to research carefully to find a consumer small form factor AM4 board that does support ECC. A few of the manufactures erroneously advertise ECC support but most just don’t mention it at all. In my experience most Asrock AM4 boards do support it and probably other manufactures as well.