It's amazing how cheap these mini PCs have become. I bought this to replace a 10-yr old Intel i5 NUC that I've been using as an always-on file server. The NUC was still working but was starting to act up at times, and feeling pretty slow. This thing cost less than half as much as that one did, is even smaller, twice as fast, uses less power and after spending the evening getting everything set up, I never even heard the fan (the old one would get noisy even when just running background tasks sometimes).
Don't necessarily expect this to last as long as my last one did given that was an Intel product, but so far very happy.
For those interested, I run this with Windows and a 4-bay QNAP RAID 1 USB enclosure to store/host my main file storage. This is shared on my local network and mounted as a network drive on my main PC (which is quite power-hungry so I only turn on when I use it). By having my important files (mainly family pictures/videos) on an always-on PC, I can have them back up to the Cloud without having to worry about keeping my main PC on long enough for the upload to finish. And by running Windows instead of Linux, I can back up my full 8TB (and growing) of personal data to Backblaze Personal for $7/mo (which they only offer to Windows/Mac users with direct-attached storage). Windows may not be the typical choice for a file server, but this is the least expensive and easiest way to back up this much data to the cloud that I've found. I also run SyncBack to maintain a local backup to a second external HDD. It took me all of a couple hours to get everything set up and migrated over to this from the NUC and so far it's working great.
Processor | 3.6 GHz none |
---|---|
RAM | DDR4 |
Hard Drive | 500 GB SSD |
Graphics Coprocessor | Intel UHD Graphics |
Chipset Brand | Intel |
Card Description | Integrated |
Wireless Type | Bluetooth, 802.11ax |