Cheap server for home NAS need help

I am looking to buy something like a Dell R710 to make a home NAS out of.
8TB should be plenty enough for the foreseeable future so I am looking at 4x 4TB new 3.5" WD Red drives.
Planning on running FreeNAS so ZFS mirror vdevs, so I might also need a couple of SSDs for OS and ZIL/SLOG.

I might fool around with VMs in the future.

What should I be looking for in terms of CPUs and RAM?
What is the deal with the RAID cards? Are there versions of the R710 with HBA cards? What should I look for there?

Is a 2U chassis going to be loud? Anyone running an R710 that can tell me how much power it consumes?
Any other brands or models that I should be looking at? (I don’t want DDR2 stuff)
Any cheap higher than Gigabit solutions for networking? (Not necessary but a would-like-to-have) My PC is going to be quite far away from the machine so I don’t have any high hopes for that.

Any advice will be much appreciated!

Check out my thread here.

It might be loud, but after you update the firmware the system cooling profile is not that loud at all.

I have two redundant 870 W PSU’s and two xeon X5675’s in my 710, and at idle it draws around 180W. IIRC that’s what it was with some light networking equipment too, YRMV. But its by no means “break the bank” in terms of power draw. Where i live it costs around 10 dollars a month to power this server.

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