nolo_me

• Pfsense: 71 days
• Switch: Racked it a week ago
• Proxmox: 42 days
• TrueNAS: 42 days

TrueNAS will be fine for what you're describing, there's no need to virtualise those services. You can install them from the app catalogue and they'll run on the host machine.

Generally speaking the important functions on storage systems are on add-in cards. HBAs, RAID cards etc.

I've always been a fan of running a router/firewall on bare metal. Don't like the idea that bouncing my hypervisor for maintenance or a kernel upgrade takes down my whole network.

Configure the new one while the old one's still up, then swap the cables over.

Why not Epyc, since that's what they're actually built for?

You're going to lose out on performance running game servers on lower clocks. I'm running mine on 2690 v2s until I can find a good deal on something a bit newer and that's about as low as I'd suggest going for clocks.

Do you need the game servers to be part of the cluster? You could dedicate one box to them, install some higher clocked CPUs for that workload then use something lower powered in the other two boxes for services that don't need so much grunt.

Everyone should at least give it a try, if only so your decision not to is well informed instead of following cargo cult advice.

£60

Guessing UK.

You can plug SATA disks into a SAS backplane, but consumer disks are built for lighter usage than enterprise and will wear out a lot quicker than something built with more write endurance in mind.

I'm running WiFi 5 (is that what we're calling 802.11ac these days?) Omada gear, works pretty well.

Where's your bar for "not too noisy"? I have a rack case and the disks are the loudest things in it.