I am thinking that I will need a hybrid solution:
40+ TB archive for long-term storage (think dumps of digitized old family videos and photos, backup of some parts of the readily accessible storage)
And 4+ TB SSD for readily accessible media, backups, any VM storage etc.,
The long-term storage would almost never be accessed, mostly when digitizing new stuff
The short-term storage would be accessed often, and host a few services like Home Assistant and so on
Would this best be put together as one system, using e.g., the Aoostar WTR Max, or should I set up two systems?
For one system, it would be a requirement that I can put the hard drives to sleep, due to power consumption and noise in my apartment. According to this thread, that should be possible?
If that doesn’t work so well, I could rather have two units and power off / use wake-on-lan? Can a file share be woken up if accessed?
You can’t wake-on-LAN to power on, you’d need a server with a BMC, send a command to power on, and wait for TrueNAS to be up and running.
So a single system with two pools should be the easiest way to go—although you might have to prevent some services from spinning up the HDD pool.