Worst is the Western Digital Red drives that are SMR. They are branded as NAS drives but should not be used in anything ZFS. WD caught some heat for making this switch without telling people a couple years ago, even got some legal trouble I think. WD red pro is the one you want. At one point they were swapping them out for CMR drives for folks.
Must be a bios reset jumper somewhere
TrueNas for hosting an SMB, PiHole container and a couple VMs. My proper home lab is on another Proxmox server.
My only beef with running free ESXI in a homelab is you need a raid controller if you want to use more than one drive. Proxmox and even TrueNas Scale both support ZFS and you can still use a raid controller in IT mode if you like.
Just running TrueNas on old consumer hardware I have retired from gaming. I only run mirrored pairs, SSDs for VMs/container and HDDs for bulk storage.
It’s cheap because you will pay with the power bill.