508
Don't throw away your old PC—it makes a better NAS than anything you can buy
(www.howtogeek.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2025
508 points (96.9% liked)
Technology
77090 readers
2811 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Stuff designed for much higher peek usage tend to have a lot more waste.
For example, a 400W power source (which is what's probably in the original PC of your example) will waste more power than a lower wattage on (unless it's a very expensive one), so in that example of yours it should be replaced by something much smaller.
Even beyond that, everything in there - another example, the motherboard - will have a lot more power leakage than something designed for a low power system (say, an ARM SBC).
Unless it's a notebook, that old PC will always consume more power than, say, an N100 Mini-PC, much less an ARM based one.
in my experience power supplies are more efficient near the 50% utilization. be quiet psus have charts about it
The way one designs hardware in is to optimize for the most common usage scenario with enough capacity to account for the peak use scenario (and with some safety margin on top).
(In the case of silent power sources they would also include lower power leakage in the common usage scenario so as to reduce the need for fans, plus in the actual physical circuit design would also include things like airflow and having space for a large slower fan since those are more silent)
However specifically for power sources, if you want to handle more power you have to for example use larger capacitors and switching MOSFETs so that it can handle more current, and those have more leakage hence more baseline losses. Mind you, using more expensive components one can get higher power stuff with less leakage, but that's not going to happen outside specialist power supplies which are specifically designed for high-peak use AND low baseline power consumption, and I'm not even sure if there's a genuine use case for such a design that justifies paying the extra cost for high-power low-leakage components.
In summary, whilst theoretically one can design a high-power low-leakage power source, it's going to cost a lot more because you need better components, and that's not going to be a generic desktop PC power source.
That said, I since silent PC power sources are designed to produce less heat, which means have less leakage (as power leakage is literally the power turning to heat), even if the with the design having been targetted for the most common usage scenario of that power source (which is not going to be 15W) that would still probably mean better components hence lower baseline leakage, hence they should waste less power if that desktop is repurposed as a NAS. Still won't beat a dedicated ARM SBC (not even close), but it might end up cheap enough to be worth it if you already have that PC with a silent power source.
All true, yep.
Still, the clocking advantage is there. Stuff like the N100 also optimizes for lower costs, which means higher clocks on smaller silicon. That's even more dramatic for repurposed laptop hardware, which is much more heavily optimized for its idle state.