Hello,
After a discussion over on the TrueNAS Community Forum, I started thinking about this. As a home/SOHO user, trying to teach yourself what components to use to build your first ZFS-based server is extremely difficult, because … to put it mildly … before you can even start asking questions you have to learn how to ask the right questions. ZFS’s learning curve is a fairly sheer cliff, even discounting all the years of outdated information that looks like current gospel if you don’t know any better yet.
I think this would be more of a general ZFS topic. ZFS tends to drive hardware requirements more than the OS that’s using it, I think.
Paraphrased a bit from the discussion over there…
I always encourage people to ask for help. I almost always learn something when I try to help them–particularly when I struggle to explain something and realize that I don’t know something as well as I thought I knew it–and we’re all here to learn.
Having a searchable collection of known working systems–particularly those put together by people in home/small office environments without huge budgets–would be an amazing, constantly updating teaching tool.
A template for how to describe your build (what hardware/software, optionally: intended performance, actual performance, warnings, etc.) could be useful as well. Again, what could we steal from PC Part Picker’s templates? 