I have no idea about the rest, but this statement is incorrect. ZFS can run on 2GB RAM systems without problems, just like the other file systems.
It will run on 2GB, but not well. A rule of thumb is 1GB RAM for every 1TB of disk. So if you don't have that much NVME storage, then it would indeed be possible to use ZFS on the Mini ME. There is also some ZFS tweaks to make it use less RAM, but those are above my pay grade.
1. No matter how many times I tried, I could never get 3, 4 or 5 of those, brand new, Crucial 4TB NVMe SSDs to live in a RAIDz1 array
This is a very common problem. I don't have a real solution, but I would point out:
1. The vast majority of complaints I see are about failures with Crucial NVME drives.
2. The voltage for the 3.3V rail in BIOS is excessively high, like 4.2V.
3. People claim that while they see a problem with TrueNAS Scale, they don't with TrueNAS core. I think the latter uses BSD not Linux.
4. The BeeLink Mini ME only has 12 GB of RAM which is insufficient to run ZFS, which would include RAIDz1. btrFs might be a better choice, which is easier on the RAM.
