I put the server and drives in another room so I don’t hear it. but all the larger drives are 7200rpm so they are a bit noisier than some of the “smaller” 12tb and 14tb drives.

on my mobo and cpu, I use the hba first as theres more bandwidth. mobo sata last as one of my two nvme ports runs through chipset and chipset to cpu is limited bandwidth, roughly 4GB/s total so sata and one nvme competes for that.

if you have a cpu/mobo thats made in the last year or two you would have more speed for that interconnect and its not that big of a worry.

TP-link wifi plugs with energy monitoring (theres a 4pack on sale right now too) and theres a github repo for a energy monitoring docker and also one for grafana that pulls from these tp-link smart plugs.