I ended up just adapting my composes to run commands, on my desktop I don’t mind having to manually start them at boot, I could easily make a simple thing to just run at boot and just say podman run <container> as most of my containers depend on others so I can just start the child-most container and it’ll start them all. I just have some shenanigans where I use one container as a VPN for the other ones, which is a bit messy if using rootless. I’ll have a look into the links and see if there’s anything new in there I haven’t seen before but yeah, nothing unsolveable I’m just needlessly putting things off lol

I more mean replacing the runtime etc, I’ve got some running on another machine and had some difficulty wrapping my head around the subuid and subgid stuff, so in theory I should be fine but it’s an irrational worry lol

I’m eternally sitting here putting off migrating my homelab from docker to rootless podman due to some rather janky patterns I use. It might be super smooth or it might not so instead I just wait in endless decision paralysis

I did the opposite and used it as an excuse to upgrade my main PC, with the parts that got replaced being inherited by the new server.

Perhaps an unwise move due to it not being optimised for power savings, and looking at your particular use case it wouldn’t be a smart move.

Depending in where you want to have this NAS, one of the more important factors to consider is how quiet you can make it. If you only have a few HDDs they’re not too loud, but ssds are silent. It can also be worth getting some good fans and making sure you can mount them in a way that doesn’t cause unnecessary vibration to have it be real quiet.

I believe the RAM calculation is less important for ZFS these days. I capped mine at 16GB for 64TiB useable pool and had no issues. (This was zfs on linux which i think Truenas Scale is based off anyway).

Regardless unless the same data is often being accessed the caching aspect may not be that important.

General consensus ive been seeing recently agrees with you that you really can get it running on surprisingly low end hardware these days, and finding less than 8gb of RAM in the ddr4 or 5 era is perhaps difficult enough that my above point is moot