Definitely not less; used mini PCs typically idle at 10-20W on the low end (and some, especially older AMD, at 30-40W which seems insane!).
Even the better low-end N100's usually idle at 5-6W, which is double the Pi 5.
SoC idle temperature depends on environment and cooling solution; the N100 would quickly thermal throttle if you don't have a comparatively large heatsink attached. The Pi 5 will actually give you full performance for a minute or two before throttling (assuming no heatsink).
Other Arm chips are much better, efficiency-wise, but the Pi 5 is still more efficient than any low-end x86 build, especially used.
Hi Jeff, I feel that for just a few watts idle extra you get a much more capable, and much more complete, easy-to-handle computer, at this time the Raspberry Pi starts to feel like, why do we still even care? let the industry customers have them.
I’m sure you have many more topics and a ton of other gear to explore to explore and many pi-related videos are fun entertainment (which is fine for it’s own sake) but it always practical.
That 4-SSD nas looks fragile as hell and I think it’s definitely worth exploring alternatives.
My NUC11 with 8 GB of DDR4 and Ethernet idles at 3-4W when I tell it to not power any status LEDs. Can be power-limited in BIOS so that it runs off of a USB-C power adapter with a fixed 19V negotiation cable.
But it is not low-end for sure. I'm kind of wasting the computer on this use case. It's just what I had after Pi 1B turned out not being enough.
