Which distro are you using. Fedora, manjaro and few others disabled hardware acceleration for certain codecs making CPU and power spike. For Fedora you can enable RPM fusion and install the hardware acceleration versions and be back to normal .

https://rpmfusion.org/

I’ve been using this guide for ages.

https://fedoramagazine.org/automatically-decrypt-your-disk-using-tpm2/

If you’ve got an empty header on the motherboard you can get adaptors to make it a normal USB A slot inside the case or a slim profile usb stick. There’s a list of recommendations on their forum.

I ended up getting a Dell raid card that I flashed to a normal HBA/IT mode and connecting all my disks with that in a big case.

Happy experimentung. Hopefully you’ll find something that fits your needs.

Id go with what ever you’re comfortable with supporting, but a few comments.

Truenas core is bsd, Truenas Scale is Linux based. Truenas/ZFS needs direct access to the disks. you should not run it with hardware raid. Unraid loads the OS mostly to ram and the serial number on the usb stick is used for licensing.

I saw someone else summarise it as if you care about easy to use and setup apps use Unraid. If you care more about your data use Truenas.

Mini shelf for headphones that clamps to the side of my desk. Wireless charging stand that trickle charges my phone to nearly full during the day. I rarely use the cable for charging and this has the benefit of being better for the battery slow charging. I also have an alarm go off at 80% full to take off the stand. Again to save battery health. Setup WOL so I can wake my PC up from afar so its ready by the time I get to it.

Thats my quick list that aren’t OS specific.