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Not sure 'thin clients' are exactly perfect (in the sense of the old tiny Atom ones that just run RDP), but I have used mini PCs of similar size with fairly reasonable specs (recentish mobile i5/i7) to do loads of little compute tasks.
ks1
Unless you need x86_64 arch go with something like Rpi or any other arm board.
You can attach USB hubs to it and make it a NAS as well.
Will be much smaller in size, passively cooled and energy efficient - making it a better choice.
Check /r/homelab for some ideas too.
Yeah I’ve been thinking about that too. But I thought it’d be cool to go as low end as possible
RPi costs too much and I already use one as a homeserver so thats boring
maybe I’ll look into some other arm boards but the RPi’s cost too much now anyway.
You probably won't make much resource or power savings, it'd be low end for low end's sake (and would be pretty rough).
Lenovo thinkstation. I run one at home with i5/32GB RAM and nvme. Monster and draw only 10-30w
How low end do you wanna go?
A few months ago I bought some of those sketchy Android TV Boxes (10/100 NIC, USB2, old ass Rockchip CPUs, 1GB RAM) for around 10 bucks and flashed Armbian on them, barely usable but hey it works.
no problem, man. Get a HP thin client.
True! Considered
Thinking about this! They’re fairly cheap too.
Thats really low end! Sounds fun but I might have to pass on “barely usable” haha
Straight to the point, I like it. Needed someone to tell me to go for it
It's not gonna be good for NAS, due to hard drive spaces, but you can run proxmox, or better, get 3 of them to form a HA cluster.
use tinycore
my personal fav
wow it looks awesome, gonna give it a try.
it is! I use it on several of my KVMs
Nice.
Though, seeing a 11 MB distro called "tiny" when you used to be able to run Linux on a floppy disk is still kind of funny to me.
ik. OpenWRT is smaller, but it really works very good
Thin clients can be passively cooled and energy efficient too. One example:
There's a whole load of recommendations on ServeTheHome.
I've not particularly looked at them, but the video about the low-end-PC with 4x2.5GbE which I ultimately ended up buying for my home router was probably the biggest influence, but the few videos / articles I've seen all seem reasonable and they have a whole chunk of articles on various "thin client servers", so I think it's a good starting point to look at. I also appreciated the fact that they have article forms for most of their videos too.
Ultimately, it depends what you're going to use it for, but for instance my router is also now an additional storage destination for my server-originated borg backups. It may be low end, but e.g. its single core GB score is double the multi core speed of my KS-1 and its multi core speed is 7x, so it's good for a lot of things and completely silent.
I have a lot of experience with this.
I used an Igel (which was later bought by HP) thin client with VIA c7 passive cooling, 1 cf card and USB ports to make a NAS out of. It worked reliably for that time (many years ago when 100 mbps home networks were still a thing) I have also used 1 GB SODIMM on it so it also doubled as internet radio receiver for my late aunt, she only needed to push the speakers' power button.
At the time, 40 Watt was still OK as power consumption, now I am using a TV box for thin client, Tor node, 1 disk NAS with an USB gbit card, it uses something like 6-7 Watt and I can still load up netflix and shit on it after replacing android with armbian.
Something like this: https://www.amazon.com/Android-Allwinner-Quad-Core-64bit-Dual-WiFi/dp/B09C7K8M4R/ref=sr_1_8?keywords=x96+mini&qid=1658920404&sr=8-8 But be careful with CPUs, armbian is not supported on all x96 boxes.
I got a Dell Wyse 5070 of ebay recently. It's a good little machine. Since it's a thin client it has many Display Ports that I won't need. I got the extended version so I can fit a low profile pcie card with 4 NICs if I really want to. It's a Pentium j5005, that's plenty for a lowend Home Server I guess. It takes SATA M2 drives if you have one lying around somewhere.
I have GL.iNet AR750 home router, running OpenWrt.
I added 2TB USB HDD and installed
ksmbdfor network storage.It's USB 2.0 so speed is 5MB/s.
GL.iNet has higher models with USB 3.0 port and faster speeds.
I purchased a chromebox CN60 and installed crouton to get ubuntu running on it. I've had no issues with it other than the fact that it has a single m.2 2242 slot and two usb 3 ports. Depending on how much storage you need I would personally recommend this path.