Purposes which we know nothing of.
Less attitude and more listening on your side would help us come quicker to suitable answers.
Use case and size are generally useful for… sizing the system, and thus for hardware recommendations. But it seems you’re actually not asking about hardware or recommendation, you’re fixated on 520/528 byte sectors, which you designate by a terminology that hardly anyone understands and want confirmation of some AI hallucinations.
And since you decline to explain, we’re not going to guess why, or how you manage to associate this fixation on a very specific specific firmware feature of enterprise-class hardware with
“Lean and energy frugal” normally points to not using an unecessary HBA in the first place.
If you drop Grok for a moment and search the (old) forum about 520 byte sectors—not using “T10” or “T13” as keywords—, you’ll find out that the only way these appear in relation to TrueNAS is in
“How do I reformat 520 byte sector drives to 512 so I can use them?”.
ZFS checksums everything that goes in or out. All on CPU without relying on dedicated datacentre hardware: That’s exactly what it was designed for—and comes very neat for a homelab.
ZFS would ignore 520 B sectors in any case. If the underlying OS had suitable drivers, I suppose that the drive would do its own work and further checksum the checksumed ZFS blocks and ZFS checksums, but no such support is provided in TrueNAS.
Does that answer your questions?
By the way, TrueNAS middleware is written in… Python.