A: I want to max ram before adding L2ARC and don't really have much need for SLOG at the moment. It's a long-term todo.

Product name is a brand's identification of a product, often a model name, but not totally unique as it can include some product variants. Product name is a key part of the Icecat product title on a product data-sheet. A “gaming” mainboard would not have been my natural choice. Neither do I really need a dedicated GPU. Unfortunately, none of the currently available mainboards for Intel’s 8th generation (Coffee Lake) CPUs are equipped with two DisplayPorts. As we will see below, this choice of mainboard and GPU negatively affects power consumption. I'm not actually looking into discussing my current build or your numbers, but lets say I don't agree with about 50% of what you wrote. With the above in mind, we can define our ideal CPU: the highest possible single-thread performance with good multi-thread performance. As it turns out, that CPU is currently Intel’s i7-8700K. No other x86 CPU matches its single-core speed, and with six cores total it is a more than decent multi-core contender, too. Component SelectionWhich leaves me at about 150W for the system itself, which isn't stressed (much) during disk spinup.

I had initially run Cinebench before any Meltdown/Spectre OS and firmware patches. Once the machine was fully patched and the BIOS firmware updated, and I had verified that the patches fully mitigated the threats, I ran Cinebench again. Encouragingly, the Meltdown/Spectre mitigation did not affect the Cinebench performance at all. The multi-core benchmark result was even 3% higher.Hardware recommendations: https://www.truenas.com/community/resources/hardware-recommendations-guide.12/ Maybe or not, surveillance does mean your disks are constantly getting data writen, which changes the chances of spin down to about 0. Which means your "idle" would include spinning disks, which is significant. This change of mind return policy is in addition to, and does not affect your rights under the Australian Consumer Law including any rights you may have in respect of faulty items.