Old PC Laying around

[ManuAndrei]

So, I have an old PC laying around (well, enough parts to build one, that is); It'd be an AMD Athlon II x2 245, some 4 or 6 GB Ram, two HDDs (1 TB and 500 GB).

Now, what should I do with it?

Thought about a NAS, but to be honest, those HDDs are kinda weird. They both died on me at the same time, although after a while they go back to working, then die again, and I don't know if it's cause of windows or just a very, very weird coincidence.

Another thing I thought of would be to connect my USB 3.0 32 GB stick, maybe buy 3 more, create a nice RAID Array and use it as a server; I've looked around, but couldn't find any comparison for speed. I mean, would it be fast enough to boot off the USBs and normally use an OS ?

Maybe use it as a Media storage for the smart TV? 

Put on some webserver and do my own hosting?

Put on two VM and rent them as VPS?

Give me all your ideas, I need something to do!!!1oneone

Thanks ^^

[Djole123]

The USB idea is not bad...

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

Don't make a raid of flash drives, but a anouther hdd. Flash drives normally have the worst flash and controllers, your just asking for problems and slow speeds. You can host your own stuff

 

No one will rent a vps from you, esp with that slow of hardware.

[ManuAndrei]

2 minutes ago, Djole123 said:

The USB idea is not bad...

 

Yeah, saw that, that's where the idea came from ^^ just wondered if it's good enough for something actually useful

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Don't make a raid of flash drives, but a anouther hdd. Flash drives normally have the worst flash and controllers, your just asking for problems and slow speeds. You can host your own stuff

 

No one will rent a vps from you, esp with that slow of hardware.

I might invest in a new 3 TB drive and use it as offline storage.

The VPS was more of a joke, not only is the hardware quite slow, but hey, who'd rent VPS from a random guy on the internet with only one PC? (not even a server)

The best thing I see so far is either a media server or a NAS, although to be honest I'm not sure if it's worth the cost (those components are not the most efficient or low consumption)

I'd like to do something fun with it, but I'm out of fun ideas...

In the future I'll use it as my virtual assistant's storage and server, but I'm quite a long way from completing it, so I was looking for something to use it for in between ^^

[MightyMic]

18 minutes ago, Djole123 said:

The USB idea is not bad...

 

I feel like this is a terrible video, mainly because he has all of these connected through a single USB 2.0 cable and so has limited bandwidth. The actual performance of RAIDing eight usb flash drives together (imo) would be much greater if he didn't limit them through the single usb 2.0 connection.

 

19 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Don't make a raid of flash drives, but a another hdd. Flash drives normally have the worst flash and controllers, your just asking for problems and slow speeds.

Agreed 

[Guest]

Using it as a webserver for a few visitors could be a fun idea. Trying out some of your own scripts, playing with server thingies, learning new tech... Btw, depending on your webserver intentions, a small cheap slow drive can be good enough.

 

Using it as a media storage device can be very usefull too, but if you are talking about pirated content... Keep in mind what kind of resolution your tv screen requires for good playback. Your video card has to be good enough to decode that content. (weird things can happen, like audio/video not in sync after scrolling, or your video decoding just very laggy at high resolutions)

 

You could also try doing some mods. Think of a big case mod, painting things, maybe experiment with water cooling stuff... Try to do some overclocking. When the hardware fails, or when something doesn't work... At least you will have learned from that, without destroying expencive high-end hardware.

[ManuAndrei]

Just now, Dutch-stoner said:

Using it as a webserver for a few visitors could be a fun idea. Trying out some of your own scripts, playing with server thingies, learning new tech... Btw, depending on your webserver intentions, a small cheap slow drive can be good enough.

 

Using it as a media storage device can be very usefull too, but if you are talking about pirated content... Keep in mind what kind of resolution your tv screen requires for good playback. Your video card has to be good enough to decode that content. (weird things can happen, like audio/video not in sync after scrolling, or your video decoding just very laggy at high resolutions)

 

You could also try doing some mods. Think of a big case mod, painting things, maybe experiment with water cooling stuff... Try to do some overclocking. When the hardware fails, or when something doesn't work... At least you will have learned from that, without destroying expencive high-end hardware.

Thanks for the suggestions!

Well, I actually have a domain + webhost, but seeing how it's only a webhost, I can't go with my own J2EE or Asp services, so I might get into that. 

Media storage would be fun, but it might not be worth it; as for the GPU, given that it's a smart TV, I can just connect to it via the network and play anything from there directly, just as if it were an USB. And hey, no pirates here!

As for water cooling, it's a cool idea, but if I were to invest in water cooling I'd do it on my high-end PC (seeing how I seem to need to improve my cooling, my CPU constantly gets hot, the weather isn't particularly helpful )

Another thing that i thought of was putting steamOS on it and use it to play games using the TV, either by streaming to my machine or using that same machine (the GPU I have is a GTX 650 - not THAT bad, not particularly good either)

As for the case mods... Well, I'd kinda need to get a case for it first 

Last time I used it, the mobo was on top of insulating plastic in a modified cardboard box with a hole on top for a fan and another one in the back for the IO shield 

 

[Guest]

I know you can connect your pc to your tv. But depending on the resolution of your smart tv, your computer still has to decode the stuff. And at high resolutions, your computer might strugle. (I know this out of experiance)

 

@ case mods... Having no case at all makes things even more interesting. You could go for a scratch build! (just don't pick cardboard boxes again... :P)