I put together a tiny server with power consumption in mind, it consumes 15W and has i3-8100, that's enough to run just about everything I can be bothered to run: kubernetes, owncast, homeassistant, pihole, etc.

Generally, a laptop or Intel Nuc will give you a good low power server, much better platforms for development than a PI.

Then if you decide you need a RAID array, that's a different ball game.