Which distribution to choose for the backup server with iscsi target?

Question

System administration

There is a certain Celeron with 512MB of RAM, it has several HDDs.
Used to use FreeNAS and an iscsi target that was connected to a Windows Server (which is installed on ESXi).
It was backed up by the native Windows backup service.
But here it was necessary to shuffle the HDD and for one thing I decided to reinstall FreeNAS to the latest version.
I read the requirements for the new version and, as I understand it, FreeNAS switched to ZFS by default, so 512MB is now indispensable.
What to choose, leave the old FreeNAS or switch to Free4NAS or another assembly, or to hell with the assembly, put, for example, an Ubuntu server and raise an ISCSI target?

Answer 1

How about NAS4Free? FreeNAS fork before the GUI rewrite. 512MB fits right into the minimum system requirements of
www.nas4free.org

Answer 2

You give a block device through iscsi, in fact, any fs can be there, and freeNAS knows nothing about it.
So ZFS has nothing to do with it.

Answer 3

There is an option to exchange another 1 Gb DDR1 (2) for beer and stay on FreeNAS.

Answer 4

Put clean fryu. The config for iSCSI target only takes a few lines there:
https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/network-iscsi.html