Turning a Used Tiny PC Into Your Personal Cloud Server

Recently, my friend told me that he has an old thin client PC lying around and want to turn it into some kind of "google drive" like server. I said "Sure, send it to me" and hence, I got my hand on this tiny thin client computer. In this instructable, I will be showing you my steps to upgrade this to a fully usable mini server for hosting your own web desktop cloud system. This will make streaming movie and music from your home to your devices without the needs to install any Apps. Lets get started!

There are a lot of different type of thin clients out there. Most of them are from HP or other large companies that made them for business and they can be easily found on ebay or your local recycling shops for cheap. The one my friend gave me was from China. It has an AMD G-T40N dual core 1.0Ghz processor, 2GB of RAM, 8GB SSD and consume a bit less than 7W while operating.

From the front side, there is a power button and 1 USB port with two audio in and output jack. From the back, we can see a 12V power input, some useless ports and most importantly, 4 x USB 2.0 ports and one Gigabyte Ethernet jack. We will be attaching hard disk using SATA to USB adapter at the back of the device later. But for now, we need to install Debian into the machine and later ArozOS Cloud System. So, let tear it apart and see whats inside?

In most of the thin clients, we will not expect to see any kind of upgrade-ability. Some thin client offers an internal USB port where you can insert a bootable USB and allow the device to be booted from there. However, this is not the case for this thin client.

One the bright side, this thin client has an detachable 8GB SSD and RAM slot (on the bottom side of the machine). On the dark side, the SSD is in special format and connected to the motherboard using some kind of special connectors. That means there is no way I could replace it with a standard 2.5 inch SSD or mSATA drive, and 8GB is obviously not enough to fit in a full installation of Debian 11 + ArozOS core system.

Later on, I notice from the website of this thin client, this device has another version that build in WiFi. After some searching, I notice there is an mini-PCIE (aka mPCIE) slot on the bottom side of the motherboard. So I decided to do it the "Raspberry Pi Way" -- Boot from a Micro SD card

I found an amazing adapter that can convert mPCIE port into dual Micro SD card slot online. After receiving it, I insert it into the bottom of the motherboard and inserted a 32GB Micro SD card as the boot drive and installed Debian 11 onto the SD card. For the internal 8GB SSD, I formatted it with fdisk and use it as the tmp buffer for the ArozOS system. For detail of the installation of ArozOS and how to customize the tmp folder location, check out the source repo on Github over here: https://github.com/tobychui/arozos

After booting into Debian 11 and wait for the ArozOS to be started by systemctl, I logged into the ArozOS with my browser and everything work perfectly!

From the image, you can see the CPU, RAM and storage has been correctly identified, and by playing back some music, it also confirmed the system is working and start serving as a private cloud server with its web desktop interface.

As the setup has been completed, I am sending it back to my friend and hope he got a wonderful experience with this tiny NAS / Personal Cloud Server :D