Looking for a cheap board for a home NAS

I will be running freeNAS on a new home server, and I'm hoping to keep it relatively cheap.

Here is my current draft:

https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/user/Jallen3000/saved/#view=QJZgXL

I've heard a lot of musings about non-ECC boards/DRAM with freeNAS, but it seems to be overwhelmingly expensive to find an ECC-capable motherboard for ITX, and if I can't do so then I'll have to stick with what I have currently.

So my challenge is this: Recommend a board that does the job for the same price or within a reasonable margin (+£20-30) with ECC capability. As far as I know, the actual DIMMs aren't that much more expensive, so the board is really holding me back.

Also saw paul make a video about his NAS and sue non-ECC, and say he had permission from Wendell. Is this worthy of consideration for me?

The reasons to get ECC memory, is that it keeps errors from happening in memory and writing a 0 instead of a 1 to the disk. There is to integrity check once the files are written to the drive. It will work without ECC, but like with any system, you chance having bit-rot.

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