[paulsmith]

Yeah this is what keeps me from considering old PCs for NAS.

Maybe stating the blindingly obvious but seems like there is a gap in the market for a board or full kit with a high efficiency ~1-10W CPU and a bunch of SATA and PCIe ports.

[keyringlight]

Then you've got to consider what are you optimizing for. Is the power bill going to be offset by the cost of a Pi plus any extras you need, or a cheap second hand PC someone wants to clear out, or free if you can put an old serviceable PC you have already back into use. Is it heat? Noise? Space that it needs to hide away in? Airflow for the location?

[vizzier]

https://www.minisforum.com/pages/n5_pro

Minisforum sort of working on it, I'd imagine the AMD "AI" processors are pretty low power at idle as they're mobile chips. Obviously has the downsides of other minipcs tho (high cost, low expandability)

[dontlaugh]

That one's quite expensive, but there are others from Ugreen and Aoostar with less powerful CPUs.

I think they generally idle at 5-10W, like modern laptop parts do in general.

[samuelbrian]

I've been eyeing off the Radxa ROCK 5 ITX with the Rockchip RK3588. There are two variants, one gives you 4x SATA, the other gives you 1x PCIe.

[bpye]

There’s also the Orion O6 if you need more IO/perf - https://radxa.com/products/orion/o6#techspec

[c-hendricks]

I'm using a retired 4790k build for mine, idles at 60W and I really need to do something about that.