Question regarding these mini pcs: how do you connect them to plain old hard drives ? Is thunderbolt / usb these days reliable enough to run 24/7 without disconnects like an onboard sata?
I've run a massive farm (2 petabytes) of ZFS on FreeBSD servers with Zraid over consumer USB for about fifteen years and haven't had a problem: directly attaching to the motherboard USB ports and using good but boring controllers on the drives like the WD Elements series.