I happened to be in the same situation recently :) I'll list everything, in case other people find it useful. If you want to go really low power, ARM is probab

I happened to be in the same situation recently :) I'll list everything, in case other people find it useful. If you want to go really low power, ARM is probably the best choice. The smallest choices are something like a Raspberry Pi, Ordroid C4, RockPi and the likes. Some of these have SATA-Ports, so if your only concern is SD-card corruption, this is the way to go. For more power on ARM, the current options get expensive fast, unfortunately. There are some servers coming out, but 5 digits is probably not what you're looking for ;) The mid-range is pretty empty as well (compared to x86), but you can go with a NVidia Jetson or HoneyComb LX2 [0]. When you need to have virtualisation, run proprietary software (or Kodi+Netflix, as I have found out) or run PFSense/OPNSense, you probably want to go x86. Luckily, the x86 space is not as small. The low end is filled by J1900-SoCs [1], which you can get quite cheap. The Odroid H2/+[2] is pretty powerful as well and is comparable to an RPi in size. I can highly recommend these low power boards - they consume 10-20W max, can be run with a MiniPSU [3] and yet they can provide good speed and double-digit amounts of RAM. Also, they're very cheap and even cheaper second-hand. Only drawback is that Ryzen embedded SoCs seem to be in their infancy. If you need even more compute power, you can go for a Mini-PC. These are available in small form factors on AliExpress [4], but you can also build them yourself quite easily by choosing a MicroATX/MiniATX board and some low-power CPU, combined with a passive heat sink and a small case. These usually come with more ports than the option above, but, depending on what you put in there, the power use might go up quite a bit. It's the least expensive way to get ECC, though. Intel NUCs are also an option, but these don't come cheap. The last option is a small desktop PC. You can easily cool it passively in a large enough case, just take a large heat sink and a low-ish TDP CPU. Modern CPUs might idle at 20-40W, so it's not that bad. Try to get a very efficient PSU and a low-feature mainboard and you should be fine. The advantages of these builds are probably the best $/performance ratio and the most variation and extendability, but at the price of comparatively high power draw. A honorable mention goes to the Epyc Embedded [5]/Xeon D [6] SoCs. These are quite nice, providing an abundance of enterprise ports (like SFP+) and ECC in a small form factor, but they're also priced for enterprise - so, unless money is not a problem, these are probably not an option. [0] https://www.solid-run.com/arm-servers-networking-platforms/honeycomb-workstation/ https://www.solid-run.com/arm-servers-networking-platforms/h... [1] i.e. https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-J1900N-D3V-rev-1x https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-J1900N-D3V-rev-1x [2] https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid-h2/start https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid-h2/start [3] https://www.ebay.de/itm/Mini-ITX-PSU-120W-DC-DC-Rev-2-bringt-Energie-in-Ihr-ITX-Gehause/383701033337 https://www.ebay.de/itm/Mini-ITX-PSU-120W-DC-DC-Rev-2-bringt... (for example, not this specific offer) [4] https://www.aliexpress.com/category/70803003/mini-pc.html https://www.aliexpress.com/category/70803003/mini-pc.html [5] https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=EPYC3251D4I-2T#Specifications https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=E... [6] https://www.servethehome.com/supermicro-x11sdv-16c-tp8f-review-network-cpu-galore/ https://www.servethehome.com/supermicro-x11sdv-16c-tp8f-revi...