I have a 5 year old home server I'd love to replace as it idles at 40w, while an old laptop that could do the job idles at 12w. What I'd like to do is merge that and my old NAS, so ideally somethig with a few sata slots, m2 ssd, and low idle power. Any recommendations for this?
If you find something with thunderbolt, you can get an external controller in there via thunderbolt->pcie. But between that power draw, and the draw of the drives, you'll be bumping close enough to 40w that it'd be a wash.
I do this math myself every few months and ultimately, it seems for a large nas/server, 40-50W is about as low as you can idle.
