A used SAS card can be found on ebay for $20-$30. You just need a PC with an open 8 lane PCIe slot and a few drive bays. An older 6gbps card is fine for a few mechanical hard drives.

Is your GPU reducing the VRAM frequency when it’s idle?

If the vertical timing is different between the monitors, the VRAM will have to run at maximum speed all the time and that can add 20 watts or more to your idle power consumption.

Sometimes that works, it depends on how the server is set up. For DNS blocking, you just switch to a different DNS server or run your own DNS resolver.