[Ao7bei3s]

Who said anything about magic - a) they don't use x86, b) they use boards with few unnecessary peripherals, and c) their vendors are perfectly fine with proprietary drivers (-> can't easily reuse their HW).

Good luck doing a build with an overall 10W consumption target with x86 and what is essentially desktop HW, especially if it should be affordable (relative to a ~250€ commercial solution) and maintainable (no, no custom kernels with weird patchsets that rot away in 6 months, and having to recompile the world).

We have used PCEngine boards. They're fine as network appliances. But even the latest ones only have 1 SATA port (fine, 2 if you count the mSATA port).

[dom0]

I ran an E-350 (20 W TDP) based board for many years and without the idling drives (each about 0.5 W; only system SSD connected) it consumed about 7 W idle. That's well within your 10 W figure - and boards with lower TDPs are available as well (though a lower TDP does not generally imply lower idle power).

The replacement system (Sandy Bridge i3) pulls about 25 W in the same scenario, which is fine by me.

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Now you're saying that 10 W with desktop hardware is not possible, and yeah, that'll be difficult. But it's a false dichotomy: the "10 W commercial NAS" doesn't have anywhere near that capable hardware. You can absolutely achieve these power consumption levels with similarly spec'd hardware.

[floatboth]

They do use x86 rather often.

I have a Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ rev. 1 (got it for free from work) with a 200mhz SPARC processor. Revision 2 of the "same" product is based on ARM. Modern ReadyNAS desktop lineup though? Atoms and Pentiums!