Is an Intel N100 or N150 a better value than a Raspberry Pi?

This year I built a NAS . My focus was to optimize the price not the power, so I planned to go with a raspberry 5 or a raxda 5c because of their lower consumption. For what I gathered a RPI 5 and similar draw 3W idle and 12W at full power and a N100 based computer draw 9W at idle and 24W at full power (approximately of course).

But then I looked at the power consumption of the consumer grade HDD disks. 4 disks would add between 10 and 14W at idle and between 16 and 20W in operation, and suddenly the advantage of the arm based computers in power consumption is less striking.

Moreover you can find on AliExpress N100 mini-pc for 120€ with 16gb RAM and 512gb SSD. Aliexpress is risky but it was much less than the RPI5 with 16GB RAM or just a bit more than the raxda 5C 16GB , both without drive, case and power supply. And the raxda 5C would have been also bought in AliExpress so no almost as risky as my N100.

At the end, for cheaper to buy and not too much more expensive in power consumption I went with the mini-pc. I lost the possibility to use extension cards, especially the one that allows to connect up to 5 HDD, but a 4 port USB HDD dock proved sufficient for my needs.

>N100 based computer draw 9W at idle

That number seems suspicious. Right now my i5-6500T server is idling at <5W and an N100 is supposed to be even more efficient.

How would you guys properly measure that? I have my suspicion that my Intel processor also quite not too heavy at idling.

The easy path, as someone suggested, is a kill-a-watt that you just plug it into.

The less intrusive path for some definition of less intrusive is a clamp ammeter if you can expose one of the AC wires (you have to clamp around an individual wire, not both hot and neutral). But then you don't need to unplug the system to measure it.

The third overkill option is to have it plugged into a full-time power monitoring and control device, such as a zigbee home automation plug switch. ;)

This can actually be life threatening if done without proper tools and working fast fuses. So just use a kill-a-watt or any other such tool for safety! NB they're maybe not 100% exact but good enough to give an estimate.