The lenovo “tiny” hardware recommended in the article is really ideal. Its essentially laptop components in a micro case (no hid/battery/screen), they even are powered by a laptop style external DC adapter.
They are affordable, quiet, powerful (modern x86_64 with basic gpu) and light on power usage.
The downside to these small form factor kit PCs is that then you are very connectivity limited. You can't use it to build a NAS directly or GPU connected VMs, etc.
They are quite good as a cheap thin client that you use to access your more powerful hardware. As hardware ages it tends to lack some of the nice feature's like dual 4K@60Hz output, thunderbolt, etc. so having a new but cheap/lowpower machine helps.
Thats true. This model has just one small expansion slot so you have to be clever. But its fine for general purpose compute.
Yeah realistically NAS is out, but thats probably ok. I mean NAS is not a great fit for most general purpose computers. In a pinch you could go usb-3 jbod or something. But personally I think it’d be better to go with either specifically storage oriented hardware, or a scale out filesystem on top of a cheap cluster, something like odroid-hc2.
Personally I like to keep things compartmentalized even at home. So my NAS is a dedicated (off the shelf) system, and the lenovo mini servers mount it via NFS/CIFS.
They are affordable, quiet, powerful (modern x86_64 with basic gpu) and light on power usage.
I run a pair of m92p myself.