u/walke27

I wanted to ask for some advice. I’m planning to build a new home server, but I’m not sure what the best approach would be.

What I need is:
Proxmox as the host OS,
4 HDDs in a ZFS RAID,
a small SSD (prefer sata) for the boot drive,
16 GB of RAM is more than enough.

I was thinking about using a ThinkCentre Tiny/Mini PC as the “brain” and connecting the 4 HDDs through an external enclosure. However, I’ve read that running ZFS over USB isn’t really recommended, and I’m not sure how reliable or performant it would be. The array mainly stores media, and at most it serves 1–2 simultaneous streams.
Do you have any recommendations on how you’d build something like this? I’d also like to keep using my existing ZFS pool if possible.