Well I have been using an old gaming PC as NAS after it’s GPU died, and even though it has served me greatly, it’s a power hog. Also CPU is pretty old to do any transcoding or AI stuff. I have scored a mini PC with Intel N5105 for free, and its quite power efficient. Also it doesn’t have SATA, but two nvme m2 slots, one of which can work with these m2 Sata adapters (asm1166 chip with 6 SATA ports). Now minipc obviously can’t power up the 5 hardrives, all 3.5" SATA, so I need an external power supply. minipc got it’s own adapter brick, so is there a similar adapter that can work for drives, or I have to get a PSU. But then again, If I am getting a PSU, I wonder if I could power the MiniPC off it as well.

I did came across this , and was wondering if this could be that would work for me.

  • DigitalDilemma@lemmy.ml
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    2 days ago

    You could do it for free. Take the guts out of your old PC, leave the HDD’s in there and the existing PSU. Extend the sata cables through to your MiniPC.

    If the PSU won’t fire up, then there’s a couple of pins in the main block you can jumper - or fit a momentary switch to - to act as a switch.

    The old PSU will still be reasonable efficient, since power is not wasted except as heat, and it shouldn’t get hot running just the hdd’s. 3.5 hdd’s use around 8-20watt each, depending on spindle speed, so at most it’s 100w at startup, but probably settle down to ~40 for the drives.

    Or - yes, those things you linked will work too, but they’re basically doing the same job as the above.

    • atk007@lemmy.worldOP
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      2 days ago

      Not a bad idea, but I was thinking of giving my PC to a younger sibling with a cheaper GPU, so get them into PC gaming so they stop bothering me for switch 2.

      The only reason I am tempted by the above is because of their smaller brick size.