TrueNAS is how I got my homelab start! What’s great is once you creat your zfs pool it’s pretty portable. Over the years I went from FreeNAS to Truenas Core to Truenas Scale and then back to Core but now as a VM. Never had any problems with migrating.
Do you have a home automation ecosystem picked out yet? Ie habitat, home assistant, etc? That will be where the logic of your automation lives. Seems like most tech savvy folks choose home assistant, but that will involve setting up a server on your home network, figuring out whether you want to use zigbee or zwave or something else. Is this the only automation you want to do or are you wanting to be able to grow into automating other stuff?
Does a pi4 do that much better with nvme over usb than a sata ssd over usb (what I use)? All my high performance storage is in x86 boxes now because I only have gigabit networking so the speed advantage of nvme is really useful for local storage.
Half of the useful stuff I do with my homelab is home automation/home services so I’d say it counts!
Man that elf company pulled off an incredible marketing coup.
I have some of both. Started building a hue collection when I was a renter, now I own and I still use hue but also some zigbee switches from Inovelli. I use home assistant and zigbee2mqtt so I don’t need a hue hub at all, and my smart switches and hue bulbs all join the same zigbee mesh. The inovelli switches do not require neutral wires, but they may require you to wire in a dummy load if the switch is only connected to one or two bulbs (this is a tiny $15 gadget that you wire in behind your light fixture) the smart switch was especially great for my dining room chandelier because it would have been like $250 to buy all the little hue candelabra bulbs whereas with the inovelli switch I can just use regular dimmable LED bulbs from Home Depot.
This is what they’re doing to make up for the money they lose when people like me buy their cheap cameras and then use them on a vlan with RTSP so we don’t see the ads or send eufy any data.
My security is basically if they get past an updated opnsense firewall I could be highly inconvenienced, but everything irreplaceable is backed up in the cloud and offline in my basement.
Is that one of those ARM servers with like 64 cores?