Digital Downgrade: Turning My Old NAS into a Minimalist Desktop

Back in the golden days of 2020, I built myself a custom Network Attached Storage (NAS) for my home lab. My goals were humble and pragmatic:

• Small form factor
• Wallet-friendly
• Low power consumption

Massive storage space and blazing-fast speeds? Not a priority. I just needed a convenient dumping ground for smartphone photos from time to time.

The Old Guard

Specs? Think “retired grandpa who enjoys gardening.” It was built around an ASRock J5005-ITX motherboard with a 4x1.50GHz Intel Pentium CPU. It wasn’t a powerhouse, but it handled its duties reliably for years - until I replaced it with a shiny new Synology unit.

Then came a different kind of experiment…

I was diving into minimalism and it got me thinking about my daily driver PC:

Do I really need a 16-core CPU, hyperspeed RAM, and a GPU that could realistically simulate the heat death of the universe?

Probably not.

So, in the spirit of digital downsizing, I decided to give my retired NAS a new life - as my primary desktop PC. All I did was leave in a single 256GB SSD and slap on a fresh install of a desktop OS. ✨ I use Arch, btw ✨

Life on the Downshift

To my surprise, daily life wasn’t all that different. My usual apps loaded a bit slower, but nothing unbearable. That is… until I opened a web browser.

It started off innocently enough — slow page rendering, a slight delay here and there. Then I got cocky: Google Docs, ChatGPT, YouTube, and a few online shops. Tabs multiplied like rabbits. Suddenly, my RAM usage shot from 50% to “Houston, we have a problem.”

Temps spiked to 80s, CPU throttled, and somewhere deep inside the case, you could almost hear the silicon begging for mercy.

A Quick Fix

Thankfully, old RAM is practically free these days, so I upgraded to 16GB. Problem solved. Mostly.

Web browsing was smoother, multi-tab use tolerable. Performance bottlenecks still existed, but for such a low-power setup, it held up surprisingly well.

Coding? Same Old Struggle

I coded on it using VSCode, which means I’ve already mastered the ancient art of waiting. So really, what’s a few more seconds here and there?

So yeah, this little underdog of a machine still kicks. Low spec. Low noise. Totally usable.