@toe @TheGibson Yeah I tried to do that, I bought this Awow system, and it refused to boot any distro except this one Debian I tried. It was such a pain that I gave up. I just hate spending money on hardware. If I was willing to put like $800 into a decent NUC and USB hard drive I could do it. But at that point, I'd just build a new gaming desktop and use my old one as the designated cheapo backup server.
@babble_endanger @thegibson You can get a used Fujitsu Futro for less than 30 USD. That's x86 hardware with low power consumption (~10W), which even has PCIe and SATA connectors. May be significantly cheaper than consistently burning electricity for an old gaming machine.