Unfotunately, I can help you with that. The machine is not running any VMs.

It’s possible, but you should be able to see it quite easily. In my case, the CPU utilization was very low, so the same test should also not be CPU-bottlenecked on your system.

I’m seeing very similar speeds on my two-HDD RAID1. The computer has an AMD 8500G CPU but the load from ZFS is minimal. Reading / writing a 50GB /dev/urandom file (larger than the cache) gives me:

• 169 MB/s write
• 254 MB/s read

What’s your setup?

With version 2.3 (currently in RC), ZFS will at least support RAIDZ expansion. That should already help a lot for a NAS usecase.

That system also sounds a lot more capable than mine. How did you end up with 25 VMs?

I’m running it in a regular mATX case (Node 804) but I think you can also get AM5 motherboards in rack-mount cases.

Perhaps my recent NAS/home server build can serve as a bit of an inspiration for you:

• AMD Ryzen 8500G (8 cores, much more powerful than your two CPUs, with iGPU)
• Standard B650 mainboard, 32 GB RAM
• 2 x used 10 TB HDDs in a ZFS pool (mainboard has 4x SATA ports)
• Debian Bookworm with Docker containers for applications (containers should be more efficient than VMs).
• Average power consumption of 19W. Usually cooled passively.

I don’t think it’s more efficient to separate processing and storage so I’d only go for that if you want to play around with a cluster. I would also avoid SD cards as a root FS, as they tend to die early and catastrophically.

It’s an Apple Silicon Mac Mini. Do you have a particular reason to think the new one is less efficient?

I don’t have one (and I don’t want one), but Anandtech measured the M1 version at 4.2W in idle. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested I think you can also get that from other Mini PCs (e.g. NUCs).

I would disagree with idle power not being important for a home server. Most of the time, your system will be doing very little and wait for something to happen. I also don’t think a typical server has a display attached. Wolfang explains this quite well: https://youtu.be/Ppo6C_JhDHM?t=94

One way to do it is have a small Python (or any other scripting language really) script that performs text replacements in the Latex source file. This is much easier in Latex because it’s plain text. I don’t know of a solution that doesn’t involve writing your own code (apart from LO/Word serial letters).

Is using Latex an option? I’ve done that and it works quite nicely. You can easily populate a template e.g. using Python.