Intel Core i5 CPU 750 @ 2.67GHz with 16gb ram 165TB of storage. Motherboard is a Asus Delux 10+ years old. And a 10gb NIC. All inside a fractal Design XL case.
The hardware is by all means not top of the line, but you dont need much for a NAS.
I personally run truenas on a standalone system to act as my NAS network wide. It never goes offline and is up near 24/7 except when I need to pull a dead drive.
Unraid is my go to right now for self hosting as its learning curve for docker containers is fairly easy. I find I reboot the system from time to time so its not something I use for a daily NAS solution.
Proxmox I run as well on a standalone system. This is my go to for VM instances. Really easy to spin up any OS I would need for any purpose. I run things like home assistant for example on this machine. And its uptime is 24/7.
Each operating system has its advantages, and all three could potentially do the same things. Though I do find a containered approche prevents long periods of downtime if one system goes offline.
I would also argue “intent” needs to be taken into account, otherwise the general public would just be walking around destroying public and private property.
For example if a person walks or rushes through a door, and somehow the door falls off or breaks. Then that person should not be responsible for the damage, this would just be standard “wear and tear”.
If that same individual intended to break the same example door with physical force, such as smash the glass, or rip the door off the hinges, then this would be property damage.
Anyways, in no way should a worker have to kneel and beg in any situation, especially when they fear losing their job if they dont make the next delivery.
This article IMO shows a lack of worker protections and on job support within the gig economy. Workers should not have this fear, especially for minimum wage. If something happens to a worker during their shift they should have a direct support line, with support staff ready to assist.
Comes down to personal preferences really. Personally I have been running truenas since the freebsd days and its always been on bare metal. There would be no reason you could not virtualize it, and I have seen it done.
I do run a pfsense virtualized on my proxmox VM machine. It runs great once I figured out all the hardware pass through settings. I do the same with GPU pass through for a retro gaming machine on the same proxmox machine.
The only thing I dont like is that when you reboot your proxmox machine the PCI devices dont retain their mapping ids. So a PCI NIC card I have in the machine causes the pfsense machine not to start.
The one thing to take into account with Unraid vs TrueNAS is the difference between how they do RAID. Unraid always drives of different sizes in its setup, but it does not provide the same redundancy as TrueNAS. Truenas requires disk be the same size inside a vdev, but you can have multiple vdevs in one large pool. One vdev can be 5 drives of 10tb and the other vdev can be 5 drives of 2tb. You can always swap any drive in truenas with a larger drive, but it will only be as big as the smallest disk in the vdev.