Is your upright the one with all the little compartments? That one looked to me like the most efficient upright design I’ve ever seen.

I bought a protectli awhile back. Mines 4 port 2.5 gbps nics, and it runs opnsense out the box.

You should take a look at their sfp+ model, if I were in your shoes that’s what I’d be looking at. It’s all in one, works nicely, is incredibly customizable, and is lower power usage than basically anything you’ll build yourself.

I use that for my router/firewall, then I use an off lease dell thin client to run my home assistant server, and a standard off the shelf buffalo nas. If you’re into immich, I’ll recommend jellyfin over Plex. I used it for years but they started collecting more data, sticking their own junk in etc. Jellyfin is open source and works great.