So I have a ts-653a qnap six bay nas that is having a harder and harder time with each update so I think it is time to give it a easier job and just be used for backups.  I have enough puter parts laying about to put together a decent home built nas that will have 8 12 to seagate nas drives plus a nmve drive for the os.  It will have a core i5 4 core cpu running 32gb of memory.  This by far would be a beast compared to my gap that has a quad core celeron and 16 gb of memory.  My only issue is setting up the drives for raid and then configuring is si for my home esxi lab (I’ve tried truenas before and it wasn’t successful). Does anyone know of any really good walk through on setting up Truenas from beginning to end?

What part of Truenas setup did you get stuck on?  Just installing the OS shouldn't be too bad.  I'm no expert now but I did need some reading to learn how it labels things, pools, datasets, zvol etc.

ECC is nice to have if your proposed hardware can do it.  I also repurposed my old system as the basis for my Truenas box.  
I ended up getting an HBA like this: https://www.ebay.com/itm/134338327797?itmmeta=01HX9V4C891JDKBJ8N8CQVCCR5&hash=item1f473034f5:g:hcAAAOSw0phmB5t7&itmprp=enc%3AAQAJAAAA4Iyvmv8AEg7qN03glxJ%2BiN1w%2BUbvL4lvSY1LRhJqLUSxfBaxkV2z5mYbe962KosJe6ezFUv8L7lHk2WKUMcPYkgy9M5J3stR9M7fdtBt0wQr57ib6Cqhrd4ZJlNWUPvPy2cU6WiE%2BU3ImeRNuwpWffU8WBFpqb%2BRoF70PJHVgomaPeO0L0EU4WXeL4--hkiTiE8PeQ%2B2SniFNiDrFbIyi%2BUMSJ5Bebf%2BnUvGZdbqYSz6fPqT0VuagW2E7yiNa%2FM2C%2B75iVjfITyQ2NsG6PHOv%2B6NhUqFj4FvXgQrZ4%2BfjQ0G%7Ctkp%3ABFBMsMSRu-pj

Not sure if that ebay link will work, but its just an OEM LSI SAS3008 type 4x PCIE HBA card.  They're often RAID cards turned to "IT mode" so there is no hardware RAID going on.  ZFS wants to talk directly to the drives so you don't really want hardware RAID in the way.  But one of those will let you hook up 8-16+ drives depending on the model.

I'm sure there are newer and better choices for an HBA card these days, thats just what I bought a couple years ago.  Here is a hardware guide by STH: https://www.servethehome.com/buyers-guides/top-hardware-components-for-truenas-freenas-nas-servers/

I dicked around with all the home/FOSS NAS solutions and ended up with an 8-bay Synology.  Sometimes, you really do get what you pay for.

This right here. I had a NAS running TrueNAS on a older Supermicro server. It worked pretty well. But unless you REALLY like playing around with FreeBSD and making jails talk to the right thing, it's a pain and overkill.

I have a QNAP 8 bay running Plex and a few things and it's easy-peasy. I do enough tech at work. I don't want to do it at home.