Comment by nirav72

Dedicated NAS hardware is often pretty efficient. The Synology DS224+ (a 2-bay model) for example claims to idle at 4.41W when the drives are allowed to hibernate. That's within spitting distance of a Raspberry Pi, and a lot better than most people will be able to achieve with repurposed desktop/server hardware. Lots of desktops will idle at tens of watts.

If you keep your spinning rust drives spun up all the time, it's another 5ish watts per drive.

Thanks for the response, that's a legit reason I hadn't considered.