The SkyLake does not transcode very well compared to 7th Gen and newer but if you aren't concerned about transcoding then they work well. N95/N100 are very comparable to Skylake I5 for processing power but have much better transcode performance and even lower power consumption. The hard part with any low power build is the power supply. Typically available power supplies are way to big and wasteful at the lower end of their output curve. All of the SFF and mini computers are to small for 4 drives but have very nice, small power supplies. A bit of a catch 22. My own N95 is a 4" form factor and uses a wall wart and is super power efficient but it only has room for an NVME and a single 2.5" SSD.
Thanks!
I think the Fujitsu motherboard I'm looking at can support 6th or 7th gen Intel CPUs. So I might look around. But I'm not really concerned about transcoding.
I really appreciate your messages! I looked into the Beelink S12 following your message and it looks very nice, but a bit more expensive then what I'm looking at, and I'm looking at having more drives than it has SATA ports. Given I'm not too interested in transcoding, then I think I like what I'm looking at.
But the power supply issue is a real doozy. I've been reading that Corsair RM550x are amazing from a power efficiency perspective, but I just can't find one