after much googling…

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LHvT2fRp7I6Hf18LcSzsNnjp10VI-odvwZpQZKv\_NCI/edit#gid=0

I’ll see if i can find it when I’m not on mobile, but there was a list floating around of low power builds. I think it was from a German forum.

I’d replace basically everything with a pair of n100 based things. They’d be faster, better at transcoding, and use less power. I’d you want a bit more grunt or ram, a i3 13100.

You have 12 hard drives, so that’s about 130watts (10-15w each). Can you consolidate down to 2 or 3 larger capacity drives?

If you are looking for marginal gains, move pihole and home assistant to containers or tiny vms on one of the other systems.

So i guess my recommendation, one of those chinese n100 firewall boxes, run proxmox, with *sense in a vm and pass through 2 or 3 nics, pihole and HA in containers. Build a i3 13100 based system with 64+gb ddr5, put 2, 3, or 4 large capacity drives along with a pair of ssds for guest storage. Virtualize everything else. My guess is that whole stack would idle at 50w or 60w, and could maybe draw 150w.

You might need more gpu than the igpu in a i3 13100, but a intel A380 would cover that.

Not the op, but… I wish there was a simple way to centralize users, uids, gids, group membership, and maybe even ssh keys across hosts. Ideally this would be as simple as install package on new host, point at server, wait. I’d settle for managing Windows users and samba separately.

It would also be really cool if there was some easy integration with proxmox LXCs to enable mapping a list(s) of uids/gids into unprivileged containers.

Really long term homedirs, and windows user folders. So my kids and i could just hot desk at any computer in the house. I’d settle for just mounting a drive with their files.