> I’m torn between going for overkill on wattage or staying around 500W for better efficiency at idle. Reliability is definitely my top priority here. Just sharing my experience: I went through this last year when I was setting up my own unRAID box. Honestly, I was sooo stressed about the wattage cuz I didnt want to waste money on power but also didnt want some cheap unit killing my drives!! I ended up going with the Corsair RM550x 550W 80 Plus Gold Fully Modular Power Supply and it’s been basically perfect for 24/7 uptime. Most home servers like ours lowkey idle at like 30-60W, so if you go for a massive 850W or 1000W unit, ur efficiency at that tiny load is actually pretty bad. Basically, the 500-600W range is the sweet spot for these builds. Another one I looked at was the Seasonic Focus GX-550 550W 80 Plus Gold. Seasonic is basically the goat for reliability imo, and they usually have like a 10-year warranty which gives a lot of peace of mind. I’ve had my Corsair running for over a year now without a single hiccup, and my electricity bill barely moved. I think staying around 550W is definitely the way to go unless ur planning on adding a massive GPU for transcoding later. Its just way more practical and cost-effective. Good luck with the build! 👍

TIL! Thanks for sharing