I know the ML10 only has a 300W PSU, but I haven't bothered to take a kill-a-watt as the ML10 itself would be outshined by the rest of my lab gear. The E3-1220

I know the ML10 only has a 300W PSU, but I haven't bothered to take a kill-a-watt as the ML10 itself would be outshined by the rest of my lab gear. The E3-1220 is usually idle and frequency scaled back unless something like a ZFS scrub is running, I've got ~45W of PCIe cards (SAS HBA, 10GBe NIC and 4x1GBe NIC), 4x8GB sticks of DDR3 UDIMM's probably uses 12W. I'd say without drives it probably draws no more than 150W on average, unless I'm doing something CPU intensive. My drives all sit in an external SAS enclosure, since I wanted more than 4 drive bays that the LFF expansion bracket provided. Anyway, the ML10 is pretty decent for light-medium work. It's got 4 really fast cores and 32GB of RAM is adequate for most home server use (this was why I got the TD340 though, I've got 72GB in it) - just beware that the Gen1 units don't include the drive bracket so if you want more than a single HDD you have to purchase one or get an external SAS enclosure. EDIT: the ML10 is basically silent too, even under load - I can't hear the fans unless I try (though my SAS enclosure makes up for this by being the loudest bit of kit in my lab).