In this video I finally did the thing I’d been procrastinating on for way too long: I downsized my 2025 homelab to stop burning power for no good reason. My 45Drives HL15 has been an absolute tank—never failed me, looks great, and has more horsepower than I know what to do with. But between that server, three NAS boxes, and my networking gear, my rack was idling around 350–400W. Then my utility company announced surge pricing, and that was the kick in the pants I needed. I dusted off a ZimaCube Pro that had been sitting in the bottom of my rack for about 10 months, dropped in an Intel A310 for Plex transcoding, added a couple more 8TB drives, and built out storage with ZFS. I installed Proxmox (because, yeah, I’ve got an affinity for it), restored my VM/LXC backups from the HL15, and migrated everything surprisingly fast. I also tried something new for me: running TrueNAS as a VM, passing through four 8TB drives, and building a RAIDZ1 pool with datasets—then moving just under 11TB of media off my Synology and mapping it back into Plex. End result: with just my switch, the DS1621xs+, and the ZimaCube running full time, I’m sitting around 225–250W. That’s roughly 125–150W saved, and I can still fire up the HL15 if I need big-project power.