Taasz/Woof

Its just called a matrix server, you don’t need to tell anyone the specific kind.

Yes mirrors are the fastest to rebuild I believe, it’s also to give you a backup, as any kind of raid or mirror is not a functional backup, it only provides redundancy.

I would not do raid 10 for the same reason of no backup that way.

What about 2 mirrored pools of 2 drives each, then back up the main pool to the other with either ZFS snapshots or a tool like Restic.

Ideally you also need an offsite backup of important files too, but that gets you part way to a robust system that can handle corruption or accidental deletions.

There’s not much point in sending it to be manufactured when it would fail DRC and a quick visual inspection. Experimenting is fun but there was no point wasting the money to make it when it clearly isn’t a working PCB.

Mini PCs are even less usually, mine are around 2W idle which is less than my Pi! (i3-7100u CPUs)

Newer hardware that has lower idle consumption mostly. I’ve found there’s not much to do on a typical setup as far as software optimization, as most OS’s are already set up for pretty low power usage while idle.

HDD sleep can work if you don’t have anything accessing the drives, but with all the stuff running on my server there’s basically always some kind of activity going on so they never sleep. Less HDDs is the answer for me, I just have 2 large drives in a ZFS mirror.

My HP box with an i5-7500 idles around 15-20W which is decently low, but I also have 2 PCs with i3-7100u mobile chips that idle at 1-2W with 32GB of RAM and an NVMe SSD, which is wild.

Avoiding enterprise gear is key, it’s extremely power hungry.