Why would boot times matter?

Truenas appears to recommend ecc. That may dictate what board to buy.

Supermicro.

What memory do you need? Storage systems usually like ecc.

Joker costume.

The UI isn’t a priority item most of the time. The services tor NAS provides are.

I mostly use Photos Mobile, Drive. These are asynchronous applications so responsiveness isn’t really a consideration.

Smb/nfs were always as fast as the drives for me, even in their much higher end enterprise equipment, although I had 8Gb or more of memory in those.

For me the math just didn’t work out. Maintaining a 2nd nas offsite wasn’t worth it, their cloud service was cheaper.

It’s Linux under the hood.

Since the cpus are weak (compared to desktop/laptop hardware) they barely use any energy.

I bought a Synology years ago and it served me well. I bought a newer model that was smaller, two drives.

I like that I don’t need to think about it. It has a simple offsite cloud backup that’s pretty cheap, or you can set up your own. It supports docker and the software packages it supports are good enough for me.