A CSE-721TQ-350B will definitely hit your requirements regarding “quiet”.
Not unnoticeable in a perfectly quiet room, but definitely so in your average office with the NAS placed in some corner. You can even get it a bit more quiet by replacing the large case fan with a Noctua brand one.
That case fits a variety of Supermicro Mini-ITX mainboards, most prominently for TrueNAS the A2SDI, X10SDV (both pretty old … er … “proven”) or e.g. the more modern X12-STL-IF.
HTH,
Patrick
The fascinating thing is trying to source an Intel “T” series chip… Sure the “K” ones abound… but getting a lower idle powered T chip is near on impossible. Well here in Australia that is! Whenever you try do a search, the search engines ignore the “T” at the end of the parts no and steer you to the K chips (which are abundant) Grok is telling me to source a Dell micro PC and rip out the chip! Can you believe it! So what on earth is going on? Is Intel reserving these lower power consuming chips for the OEM manufacturers or something> Or is this Trump tariffs meaning folks have been prebuying them? What the!!!
Grok is just telling you what you want to hear.
Lol, AI are liars. We at least try to tell the truth. I’ve read about AI “hallucinating” and even Chatgpt needs to be told, “you’re wrong, x is actually y” sometimes. That’s the beauty of forums. We don’t have much incentive to be deceptive.
The worst thing is the AI hallucinations in this thread, on a high quality source of information, this forum, are now part of the training corpus.
Agree about AI> ! Ok. How is the best way to source an Intel “T” chip? 
Amazon’s search is intentionally broken so I’d start with that pc builder site, newegg, and microcenter. All big retailers here. Might ship to Oz, I dunno.
Also it helps to know specifics and get matrixes to obtain part numbers. Intel has a bunch of matrices based on generation, type, etc. Your potential motherboard probably has a nice pdf you can grab, and run down their matrix of supported chips. It’ll be outdated most likely but a strong starting point.
*any decent matrix should list wattage for each chip. Good to know.
Thanks for the reply and the information. I’ll add W680D4U-2L2T/G5 to my list of possibilities. Are there any advantages to going microATX over miniITX other footprint? As to NVMe storage, I’m a bit hesitant to go solid state on a NAS. Aren’t non-solid-state better for long-term storage? As to HDMI, that’s not really my use case. I stream my music via Roon server out to multiple Roon endpoints on my LAN. I also don’t want to manage the system by connecting a monitor. I’d much rather manage remotely, using IPMI for initial setup and restore.
I don’t trust AI at all. I interact with several vendors who’ve migrated to AI for their phone-answering menus, utter trash. I swear that they’re much worse than the traditional menu systems. I would much rather talk with a real human in either case.
I’ll ask ChatGPT if this is true.
Generally speaking, you want the biggest board your case will take. Reason? Bigger boards = more connectivity. More room for pcie slots and sata ports along with ram. Room to grow. The smaller the board, the more stuff will get cut to fit. For the Fractal node 804, it’ll take a micro atx. That Asrock Rack is micro-atx and so is the Asus W680M-ACE SE I mentioned, both solid choices, one hard to get apparently. The only advantage to “going smaller” is fitting in a smaller case.
Yeah the jury is still out on NVME but we have had a long time with normal SSD’s and they do pretty well long term. Problem is, they’re just not that big. I use a pair of mirrored ssd drives for my boot drives, just checked with a new app the other day and they’re 4 years old. System/boot is mostly readonly, I move the system dataset to my pools.
A hybrid system with ssd mirrored boot drives and big heavy SATA hard drives are what I know and recommend. Storage per dollar is the best with hard drives, and teaming them up in vdevs and pools often makes them faster. They do eat power and generate heat so don’t focus on rotational speed. 7200rpm drives in zfs aren’t as good as slower spinning drives for power and heat concerns. Same with noise, I have a little pool of WD’s that are crunchy. A little annoying.
I can’t guess at how big you want your pool to be, but if you choose spinning rust hard drives, make sure they are not SMR. It’s a goofy tech that zfs hates, and most really big drives will be CMR anyway, but confirm it before you order.
The primary advantage is up to 4 PCIe slots, and more space for things like ram and m.2 slots
Thanks for your input. Yes, I think the CSE-721TQ-350B is basically what iXsystems is using for their Mini-E. Supermicro may even make it for them. The Supermicro X12STL-IF is on my list; however, it only supports up to 64GB of RAM which is probably plenty for my current use cases, but I may want something that supports up to 128GB RAM for a bit of “future proofing.”
I am moving to M.2 NVME (over other forms of SSD) simply because I can get them to work easily, the new MB now support them directly (I found that awesome PCIe card) and frankly they aren’t more expensive TB vs TB than the older format 2.5inch sata
I am not saying I’d trust my critical data on them (I have another TrueNAS server with HHD for tertiary backup) but for your use case : a fast, low powered, quiet NAS that can always left on…won’t cost a fortune to run in power costs? why not?
Further than Asus MB I recommend supports 4x32 ECC RAM maybe more?? Asus is a great Taiwan company, with an awesome gaming heritage so why not? (My other NAS is a supermicro BTW)
Here in Europe, older generation T parts can definitely be found at reliable shops. Or second hand from eBay and the like.
Last generation T may be OEM exclusives for some time.
Bear in mind that an Alder Lake T CPU is a “35 W TDP” part that can actually use 125 W 
under full load…
Sure. Found one
Message to the OP’r. Do not underestimate the need for a good GUI on yr TrueNAS build. To observe and tweak to code and bios directly as you change things around and get things working smoothly. That is an advantage of HDMI on the MB right there in its own right. Sure there is IDMI … and yes VGA but ask yourself what monitors these days don’t have an HDMI port? Trust me. As you build this thing you are going to need easy monitoring for getting easily into bios (make changes) see what’s going on as TrueNAS loads etc etc. I learnt this bif time rebuilding my old server.
There is no local GUI on TrueNAS. What on earth are you talking about?
Yes, you need console access. And sure, a directly-connected monitor will do that. So will IPMI, which OP is specifically seeking. But no video port on the system will have anything to do with the TrueNAS GUI.
I know that. I am talking about before that. Changing bios. Observing true NAS load. Actually installing it the first time.
…which has nothing to do with any GUI.
Nor does this.
Nor this.
