Since posting part 1 of reducing power, I received the order of my ASRock and have re-used the hard drives from the previous Shuttle I had. The Shuttle wasn’t loud by any stretch, but the ASRock is incredibly quiet. To the point where I have to check it’s still running!
After previously being impressed with how long my hard drives have lasted, one went pop during a power failure. That’s a bit disappointing, but the drives are only Western Digital Blue’s which are just generic consumer desktop disks.
Anyway, back to the point. The Shuttle was consuming roughly 2kWh per day, but the ASRock is consuming less than 1kWh per day. I’m happy with that!
I did originally think that I’d reduce power consumption by around 85% (so around 0.3kWh consumption per day), but I’ve only reduced it by around 60%. I guess that spinning rust uses more electricity than I thought.
In the future, I might think about replacing the disks with some SSD’s or some specifically low powered magnetic disks. We’ll see.