I own both a passively cooled 2016 Mini PC OLOEY Intel Core i7-7500U (as a home media center) and a 2023 Minisforum UM690 (for work and it's amazing btw), and they both use about 7 watts when idling (screen off).
How op is using 43 watts for an idling media center is just beyond me, he must be using a 1978 Intel 8086, right?
Anyhow, 4 watts is still far better than 7 watts and this is a great achievement, but those 43 watts are really sketchy imho.
On the other hand, if you can, please consider using a more energy efficient alternative (and/or ensure you're getting the electricity from green sources) - the planet will warm up regardless of whether the electricity was cheap or expensive.
My total household usage averages around 4.5KWh/day so adding that 45W 24/7 server would add about 24% to overall load! It would need to be an important little server to justify the increase.
Laptop CPUs are, however, really well optimised for very low consumption when idling and that's what you should be using for a mediacenter.
Also, IMHO, ASRock Deskmini would not be a good idea for a media center since it's using desktop CPUs. The idle power draw will not be as good as mini pc with a laptop CPU.
My desktop server uses 50W at idle. ASRock Z390 motherboard, Pentium G5400, 32GB RAM, no GPU. There are 15HDDs, but 50W is with all of them spun down. It hits 120W will all disks spun up and CPU under load. I've come to the conclusion it's the motherboard, because the parts individually shouldn't draw that much power.
I do this math myself every few months and ultimately, it seems for a large nas/server, 40-50W is about as low as you can idle.
I have not yet found any LGA 1700 motherboard were the total idle power would be less than 25W, for example. I find that the power supply inefficiency by itself, even on standby , is usually already 2W -- larger than some of the alternatives discussed here. I have to go to Intel's soldered solutions to find <10W idle consumption (and even <2W). Forget about last decade's desktop AMDs either, they have very high idle power, with the exception of some APUs that may go down to 10W. They may also have custom solutions that idle at significantly less, though.
[0] https://www.hardwareluxx.de/community/threads/die-sparsamste...
[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LHvT2fRp7I6Hf18LcSzs...
Some of the hard drives do not advertise their sleep capabilities over SATA, and hdparm ignores these drives unless you force for sleep.
Interestingly, one of my wireless routers with a USB port had a bug, and allowed a disk to sleep and cause it to wake afterwards. This made the disk overflow its SMART start/stop counter (so it's >65536, possibly double that number), yet the disk is still working at full performance to this day, and shows no performance degradation either. It's a Seagate notebook hard drive converted to an external drive (Seagate Expansion Portable, or something like that).
Think 2/3 out of them died in a year, we preemptively replaced the rest.
My parents' PC has a 1.5TB Green for backups for almost a decade now, and that drive is fine, too.
Looks like it's mostly a horses for courses matter.
I guess CPUs have gotten better in the last 10 years ;)
and I use it like this also for 10 years now. It works great. Only consumes ~4W in deep sleep/system hibernation (the wording depends on from which year you find text mentioning the above nas. Synology decided to reword the function back in some year), and automatically wakes up whenever it is needed. (also not this is not only HDD sleep, it is full system sleep)
Op should just run more services on his server, but that probably won't be 43W at idle, when the box would actually be doing something ...