Zfs and truenas core do this fine

It's still a one time purchase for the license. It's only OS updates that would need to be paid for yearly after the 1st year

Good point. I got 1 year of ultimate, with the plan to upgrade to perpetual if it was good (it is!).

The cost of that is still less than the cost would have been to buy new matching drives.

Yep they changed this somewhat recently I believe? Like a year or two back, not sure - before my time.

Last I checked I think it's now like $50 or $60 for the first year, and renewals are half that, so definitely not terrible.

I've always found it helpful to use the time stone and yell "IOMMU I've come to bargain" until it works.

It just needed the AMD compatibility plugin, lots of time wasted until someone pointed that out though.