I have ZBOX MI571 with an i7-6700T and 16GB (SODIMM) RAM laying unused. And I want to make a personal backup/archive server, for which I think TrueNas will work best.
The box has more than enough computational power for running TrueNas. But as far as I could find it has only one SATA and one M.2 SATA port, so not enough to have a boot-pool and a redundant storage-pool. And it doesn't have any spare PCIe ports.
So I'm wondering what's my best option here? Can the drives be somehow reliability attached through USB for example? Or will it be best to buy a used mobo and ram and replant the CPU? Or should I just sell the whole thing and build a server from scratch?
I'd start over. A mobo, decent CPU, lots of ram for ZFS, and a used LSI storage adapter from eBay would get you far on a budget. USB won't have the performance or reliability and you'd need a handful of drives to make it worth it. You could install an M2 SATA adapter, I don't know if it would even work, and drive drives with it but they would still need power and you couldn't put the case back together without cutting holes in it.
Thanks for a good advice. I have a system with 4770K and ZFS and it can handle it fine for Gigabit Ethernet (I don't need more), so I believe 6700T should do. What's the purpose of LSI storage adapter, I haven't heard of this device yet?
Disk redundancy. Let's you plug in many drives. I have eight 16TB drives in a raid z2. I can lose some drives and not lose data.