I've been repurposing enterprise grade servers for years, first one was a based on an i386, various Pentium 3/4, most recently Dell R710 with dual Xeon, redundant psu, loads of RAM etc.
The Dell R710 idles about 70W with 5 x HDD, 10GBe and a PERC card. It goes up a lot more when I get it to do more stuff, but 98% of the time it's idle or doing very little. I don't mind it ramping up when required, but idle much lower.
Being in the UK, electricity costs about 43c USD per kWh. You can see how that would scale up for something running 24/7/365
The issue is that they're power hungry, noisy and take up a lot of space.
But they are cheap to buy, have loads of space and reliable.
I'll keep the firewall separate, that's a N5105 with a quad 2.5Gbe which works well for my fibre connection. That is usually around the 7W mark for the whole box. My home network uses a 10GBe backbone.
I'm thinking of either proxmox running TrueNas or Unraid on it's own, I can make use of Unraid's containers/VM functionality.
I'd like to run Pihole, Home Assistant and a streaming server for music and UHD
I'ii have approx 5 x 18GB HDD, I've got plenty of NVMe SSD for caching
Option 1
N5105 soft router type mb with 6 x SATA, 4 x i226, there are some with 10G SFP+, 4 x i226 (2.5Gbe), a few with gen 9 i5/i7.
Reading the threads on here sounds like these N5105 are quite constrained by the PCIE IO, though with spinning HDD, it may not matter. Some only have the one SATA port, but 3 or 4 USB 3 ports, some even have gen1/2 ports
Option 2
Ryzen 5600H mini PC, much more powerful CPU, plenty of RAM, plenty of bandwidth 2.5GBe, 4 x USB3 gen1/2
Use USB3 HDD instead of SATA 3
Option for 64GB ram and NVMe with PCIE3
Still low power when idling
Option 3
Not sure??
What I really want
Ideally I can get a mini ITX board with a low power i5/i7 with plenty of E cores or similar Ryzen CPU, minimum of 4 cores going uptown 12 cores, with at least dual channel DDR4 (DDR5 would be better), idle of no more than 8W and ramp up to 65W if needed, with the option to limit to 20,30,40W in the bios
8 x SATA 3 at full speed
2 x i226 or better still 2 x 10GBe copper or at least SFP+ with sufficient PCIE bandwidth
4 x USB4 or at least 4 x USB3 gen 2
1 x DP
1 x regular 19V input or USB4 input
What are your thoughts or suggestions?