rabbitburger

Are there wifi drivers on the Asrock site?

Have you gone to Realtek's site and downloaded & installed the current drivers?

Pretty old; I think you can do better. Watch for a few weeks and you should see something more modern.

Then you can probably get away with non-ECC, but if it has to be rack-mount, like you said, anything you buy used likely has ECC anyway. Stay away from DDR2, and you're going to want 8gb minimum. Regarding CPU, one of the i3s or Pentiums that support ECC is just fine. If you live in or near a decent sized city, you can probably pick up everything except storage for $100 - $150 used.

It depends on how much risk OP is willing to take. ECC RAM plus ZFS scrubs comes as close to guaranteeing data integrity on a pool as anything you can get these days. Use non-ECC, and you may never realize that data is corrupted until all of your backups have the same errors. It's not like used ECC DDR3 is terribly expensive. Is this box for a customer, or is it a project to play around with? That's the difference.

I have no experience with PfSense, but I run a FreeNAS box at home. This link takes you to freenas.org, where the plain-spoken FreeNASer named cyberjock holds forth on recommended hardware. The upshot: Supermicro is good, server grade is necessary, and ECC is non-negotiable. cyberjock knows what he is talking about, and his posts on freenas.org are the besg starting place.