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glad i could help

the jonsbo n4 case has ventilation holes all along the top of the case the 70mm coolers wouldn't really be chocked and would likely be bringing in fresh air from outside of the case

they work better for transcoding video in jellyfin or plex. if that doesnt matter to you feel free to use amd. they are garbage hardware with even worse linux drivers. Ive seen so many problems from them from system crashing to straight up not working. the most common 2.5 and 5gb nics are realtek because they are cheap but straight up disabled by truenas/hexos because they cause data corruption. networking more important. you can survive using amd for transcoding. gen 12 doesnt have that issue only 13 and 14 does. you don't need more than 32, heck you don't need more than 8 but the more you have the better itll perform. you can find it for a fraction of the price on ebay, there are fakes so i tend to avoid things being shipped directly from china. that said i've heard the fakes work fine. i would also avoid the 9300 and go with either 9200 or 9305 because 9300 has overheating problems. so for this i would just check the description and see if it has already been flashed to "i.t. mode" or i would ask the seller if it has been. these cards have 2 different modes and "i.t. mode" is what is compatible for us. while they can be manually flashed at home, its just not worth the effort since a large amount of them come pre-flashed. this looks not bad to me. since it comes with 2 sata break out cables each worth around ~10-12 usd

use the link i made for the build click edit this list remove the motherboard i picked then look for a new motherboard set sata 6gb slider to minimum 6. this will give you the models with 6 sata ports but majority of them do not have pricing so you will have to look for pricing yourself. also avoid any with realtek network interface cards. cache drives are barely a thing in hexos/truenas you are far better off allocating that budget for additional ram. if you do go with expansion cards like the lsi hbas they do support both sata and nvme on one expansion card depending on the model but im not too familiar with how to connect nvme drives to them. depending on the model the expansion cards are not expensive and might be a lot less expensive than different motherboard. if you start with a pool of at least 3 drives it is as simple as clicking add new drive and waiting. at this time until you change out all the drives in a pool all drives will be treated as the same size as the lowest capacity drive. once you finish changing them out, it should automatically increase in capacity. in the distant future we will have a feature called zfs anyraid which will let you mismatch drive sizes and still have use of the full capacity. That said its likely years away and may not be compatible with existing pools.

your best bet would be to jump up to a case that supports atx motherboards since matx motherboard with enough sata ports are rare. the jonsbo n4 can support 6 3.5" drives and 2 2.5" drives, which would require a total of 8 sata data ports to take full advantage of the case. There are motherboards that have 6 sata + 2 m.2 but they would likely be outside of your budget. any reason why you don't want to use a sata expansion card? for a homelab i would go with which ever of the 2 are cheaper. we have something similar but its not fully automated. hexos will warn you that a drive is problematic. you would then need to replace the drive and then tell hexos that the newly added drive is for the purpose of taking the place of the bad drive. then hexos will take care of the rest.