TrueNAS / Unraid is not too difficult to use.
TrueNAS has a toxic community tho, a bunch of elitist that say you need X hardware and ECC ram, but for home applications, its pretty moot.
TrueNAS can be run on almost anything, so Bonzai is bound to have a spare board cpu and ram to setup TrueNAS software OS on.
And lastly again, this is Bonzai were talking about.
I bet he will have more fun trying to learn truenas then actually having the need for it.
I still recommend TrueNAS
Aigo -- you're the man! I'll explain how I spent my day, and how it looks for a future of a few months.
I moved the Super-Micro 8-port controller card and the four pool drives to my old HTPC box. That is still running an i7-2700K and a P8Z68-V-Pro Gen3 motherboard and 20GB of RAM. DDR3 -- I think. I'd stripped it down to only the 480GB ADATA SSD boot drive. The ADATA only has 26 TBW. But even there, that's old hardware, and I can expect failure or a high risk of something going bad eventually.
Ran into a snag when I realized I needed to download the Win 10 drivers for the controller card. The web-site didn't even make it look as though there were drivers for anything later than VISTA, but following the download link, I found a zip file labeled "Windows 10 driver". Once I got that squared away, I installed Stablebit with my ten-year-old license key, which the tech-support guy sent me. All good!
Then it was just a matter of resetting the security permissions. Then I moved my most important files, plus the server's "Software" folder share after pruning the latter of stuff you would never ever need again. Put it on an NVME-to-USB device, ready to move to my workstation. I could've restored the shares on this HTPC box, but I'm just not that eager.
As you say, I have a new, spare Z170 board and i7-6700 processor with Trident-Z RAM -- all perfect. I could probably put TrueNAS on it, as you say. Would not that be possible? I could scuttle the 3TB Hitachi HDDs of the drive pool, and create a new pool using dual or quad NVME expansion cards. I could get four gen 3 NVME SK Hynix 2TB cards, just over $100+ each to build a pool or otherwise use with TrueNAS, could I not?
Point being -- there's no sense in spending money on more hardware that I might not really need. Do I need a new workstation desktop? Not immediately. Do I need a Synology NAS right away? I don't think so.
I was actually thinking to buy a $60 Win 10 Pro new in shrink-wrap -- still available on EBAY. But what you're saying is I don't need to do that, if the TrueNAS will work.
There's no hurry about this. The Corsair Vengeance C70 "ammo-box" case from the old 2012 server is still tip-top. I can gut it, buy a new PSU, put in the surplus (but new) hardware, and -- that could work.
I'm open to ideas.
The worst part of my day came when I was sorting through the Users folder that included my departed brother's files. Reviewing his stuff, I sort of had butterflies in my stomach, and it made me think back over the last 20 years.
I spoke to my surviving brother over the phone, and we're not going to throw those digital mementos away. I'm just going to pour myself a stiff drink tonight and call it a day.