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.
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?
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)
Probably not very good. I selected large spinning hard drives because I could get them at a good price for 2TB each and I wanted to setup a RAID5-like system in ZFS and btrfs (lesson learned, btrfs doesn't actually support this correctly) and I wanted to get at least 10TB with redundancy.
I don't know how much each of those SATA disks take up, but probably more than a single Raspberry Pi does.
Likewise it has a few case fans in it that may be pointless. I would prefer it never has a heating issue versus saving a few "whurrr" sounds off in a closet somewhere that nobody cares about.
It's also powering that Nvidia 1060 that I do almost nothing with on the NAS. I don't even bother to enable the Jellyfin GPU transcoding configuration because I prefer to keep my library encoded in h264 right now anyhow as I have not yet made the leap to a newer codec because the different smart TVs have varying support. And sometimes my daughter has a friend come over that has a weird Amazon tablet thing that only does a subset of things correctly.
The 1060 isn't an amazing card really, but it could do some basic Ollama inference if I wanted. I think it has 6GB of memory, which is pretty low, but usable for some small LLMs.
