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You can do that too, I just chose to use an external drive to keep things simple and compare apples to apples in terms of NVMe performance (part of my reason for installing TrueNAS was to compare its performance to ADM built into the NAS, running with the same 12-drive storage layouts).

I was setting up FreeNAS, TrueNAS or something similar (FreeBSD-based) for a client years ago and they required utilizing all SATA ports for actual storage and booting from RAID flash drives. They made A LOT of backup copies of these USB sticks and were told to make new copies after system upgrades and reconfiguration.

Last time I had any info from that site - it worked well for them.

IMO it would make more sense to use the eMMC (even with the caveats mentioned in the article).