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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
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My NAS draws about 25w (without drives). Show me an old PC with 6 3.5” drive bays that draws 25w.
At idle or under normal load? Im tempted to get the killawatt out.
Idle. Under load a bit more. It’s a mobile chipset, so it is efficient. Not as powerful as a desktop for sure but totally handles my basic workloads.
Ok. R5 3600, rtx 3070, and 4 spinning drives. Idles at 62W. 80W under normal load (2 concurrent streams). This is a hilariously over specced NAS. This is all 2nd or 3rd life pc parts (outside of the spinning rust), so financially speaking I'm happy with the result.
The long term goal is to use it as a homelab separate from anything I need to work all the time. I want to try running some LLMs locally and use it to control some home automation stuff. That'll stress it.
Edit: so yeah its double yours.
That’s pretty good though! I kept reading about it how much power video cards draw. I need to get some measurements in under various load with mine. The big part is obviously drives.
The Xeon 2224G workstation with 32GB of ECC ram I got on eBay pulls 15 watts from the wall streaming 4k video on Plex.
It didn't have 6 bays but if I needed it I could move the guts to a bigger case
I've got a 12VDC Mini PC as my NAS/Jellyfin server with 6 SSD's and no monitor that idles around 30watts and runs entirely off solar. It ain't fast but it does everything I need it to do and costs zero dollars to run.
Those are good. I got tired of dealing with the unique trouble that comes of having drives attached with a USB JBOD. Also it was just a celeron and kinda melted doen if I ran motion detection with Scrypted.