TrueNAS is how I got my homelab start! What’s great is once you creat your zfs pool it’s pretty portable. Over the years I went from FreeNAS to Truenas Core to Truenas Scale and then back to Core but now as a VM. Never had any problems with migrating.
Does a pi4 do that much better with nvme over usb than a sata ssd over usb (what I use)? All my high performance storage is in x86 boxes now because I only have gigabit networking so the speed advantage of nvme is really useful for local storage.
Half of the useful stuff I do with my homelab is home automation/home services so I’d say it counts!
Is that one of those ARM servers with like 64 cores?