Fair, I’ll try to get my kill-a-watt plugged in to check next time the server powers down and report back. Power is fairly cheap where I live, and I’ve got solar, so that’s never been a huge concern for me. I’d have to check, but I’ve always assumed it’s pulling ~10 watts per drive at normal times, and as far as I know my power bill is pretty much reflecting this. (Due to how my data pool works all drives need to be spinning when in use, and my drives get basically zero down time).

And that’s good, when I first got into self hosting I was greedy for storage and didn’t have the money to pay for redundancy, and I got bit a few times. Now my media server is running on 2 8-drive pools, each with two drives of parity. Ends up being around 200TB of useable space. I don’t have backups on my media pools, as right now I’m using 24TB drives and the cost to back that up just doesn’t make sense. I do however have my personal cloud on mirrored drives with a backup at my brother’s house, also on mirrored drives, so it’d be pretty unlikely for me to lose the important stuff.