I bought a stack of older Dell Thin Clients a while ago,they are pretty small,light on power requirements,but have 2x DDR3 slots,have 64Bit CPUs and a graphics card,2x SATA connectors
Originally to play with a Kubernetes home lab but they ended up becoming media players and Dietpi machines
Hardware description of the Wyse Z50 (Z50S,Z50D) and Wyse Z90 (Z90SW, Z90DW, Z90S7, Z90D7, Z90DER7 ) thin client hardware
www.parkytowers.me.uk
I have the exact same Wyse model (Z90D7), about 5 of them I got in bulk.
I have an old SATA 2.5" 500GB hard drive I mounted with mirror tape to the outside cover, connected to the second SATA port on the motherboard. I get power (5.5v?) from a pinout on the motherboard as well, using connectors from an old fan (pinouts on the ParkyTower website you mentioned). I kept the 4GB flash card in the primary SATA port, on which I boot DietPi. The HDD is secondary storage.
There's a 12v pinout as well, on which I connected an old power supply fan to cool the heatsink when I ran Windows, but I no longer use it like that and removed it.
On DietPi I have PiHole with DHCP, using CloudFlare as primary DNS (but others or that self hosted one is probably fine), and SMB. The SMB share is mounted to the secondary HDD.
On two android phones I have SMBSync2, which is a free sync tool. With that I back up photos and whatsapp (database, media) every second or so day. On three laptops I use the default Windows Backup function to back up documents (ala File History) to the SMB share. Originally I tried to give each device it's own username and password (r/w permissions), but couldn't figure it out. SMB users being other users than Debian users and so on... Maybe in the future I'll try again, but everything works 100% without a hitch using the 'dietpi' user and my custom password.
It's not on backup power, but every time Eskom resumes power they booted up without ever giving an issue.
I did run Windows XP - 10 on them (I experimented a lot) on them successfully, but they're slow and can overheat easily (no fan, only heatsink). They came with 2GB RAM, but I had 4GB in them at a time. Now back to 2GB as I don't need 4GB. The CPU includes a little video acceleration (think APU instead of CPU), and it does help with up to 720p video, but struggles at 1080p. But I guess it also depends on the codec, as it needs to have the ability for hardware acceleration.
Overall I'm very impressed, and am looking for uses for the other ones I have.
The one in use is never taxed, CPU and RAM is almost always idle, and power consumption is something like 5W - 25W.
Sorry for the long post - I got a bit excited to see someone else doing the similar things with the same hardware I have. That ParkyTowers website also helped a lot!
Edit: You can SSH into it using just PowerShell, no additional software needed. Just type ssh root@hostname, trust the certificate and log in. No Putty needed. On android, I use JuiceSSH to connect to it.
