I have a cheap Fujitsu Futro S920 running a bunch of services here, but I noticed, that for some tasks its rather weak (and old) CPU simply can’t keep up. The lack of SATA is another weak point.
Is there any machine out there that can compete with its 5W idle power draw and offers better performance for a reasonable price?
ITX boards seem to draw often double what the Futro needs and here in Germany power is rather expensive.
Maybe HP 800 Mini with i5-6500t? I had this, and now it is available in Poland for around 500 PLN (~112 EUR). Something like: https://allegro.pl/oferta/hp-800-g2-dm-i5-6500t-8gb-ssd-120gb-w10p-mini-13752172316?fromVariant=13752110554 I had the same model but G3 (different chassis) Power consumption was low. With a 1TB USB HDD connected, power consumption was 7-8 watts.
That’s a pretty neat device, but it looks, like there is pretty much no space inside, right?
I kind of need some way to attach HDDs internally.
It has place for two drives - one NVMe 2280 and one SATA 2,5". If you want something bigger, but still Mini, You can buy Asrock X300 DeskMini with AM4 socket. I have this with Ryzen 7 5700g. It offers two slots for 2280 NVMe drives and two slots for 2,5" SATA drives.
What are you running on your S920? I’m using mine for OPNsense and Node Red both virtualized in Proxmox and they run ok