I think the Define 5 is a good option as well. I bought the 6 in 2018 because it was new, was white, and only like $99 at the time and it’s served me well. Every couple of years I’d buy some more drive trays as my pool filled up and I needed more space.

I just rebuilt my whole system a couple of months ago but kept the case because it works so well and there isn’t much on the market like it without getting into fullsize cases. It’s nearly silent even with 5 fans and 9 HDDs inside. It sits about 2 feet from me on my desk and I only hear a tiny hum from the fans.

PC Part Picker has filters that will let you set all your requirements and show you what’s available. Since you want ECC and low cost, you might be better off finding options on PCPartPicker and then looking for those items used on ebay.

If you don’t have a case already, you might check out Fractal Design. They have several cases for lots of 3.5" drives. I have a Define 6 and it holds like 12 3.5" and 4 2.5" in a midtower format and it’s constructed really well. You will need to buy additional drive trays though as they only come with 4 I think.

Comcast has done some wizardry to finally allow decent upload speeds as of late. For years I’ve had 900Mbps down and 15Mbps up but with whatever upgrade they’ve done, I’m now at 900/200 which is decent enough. I honestly don’t even need all this download bandwidth and would be happy with 500/500 but most people aren’t running media servers and hundreds of torrents so they don’t dedicate much to upload bandwidth.

Technology has continued to progress but I think many cable providers are capping at around 100 mbps. I could be wrong.

I think most are offering as high as 1-2Gbps (asymmetrical) with cable. That’s what Comcast is offering in our area. With 100Mbps CenturyLink DSL being the only alternative.

How big are these ZFS snapshots compared to the stored data size? 1:1?

I would hope one would use an SSD for something like HomeAssistant. HDDs really shine as bulk media storage (music, pictures, video) not as storage for what would be the equivalent of running an OS on it.

It’s “powerful” in the sense that it has 48 PCI lanes and can use almost 800GB of memory (ECC included). This is just way overkill on most homelabs so the extra power draw isn’t worth it.