Fedi, talk to me about thin clients and low-power computing.
I've got two raspberry pi's in my basement, a 5 running Kodi with an external hard drive and a 4 running Home Assistant, they each draw usually under 10 watts. I'm leaving my upstairs desktop computer turned on while I'm recovering from surgery, purely because it's got apache etc for my testing server (improbable island etc) and personal dokuwiki for me to access from my front porch on my laptop, and it's a hundred damn watts, and *Liz Truss voice* that. Is. A. Dis. Grace.
I've been meaning to offload the local-website-serving and some other little always-on computerytasks to something more appropriately-powered for ages, and I've got a few Pi 3's, but having three computers doing a thing seems like silly territory.
Plus this Kodi Pi doing its thing through an external USB hard drive gives me the heebiejeebies honestly, so what I want is either 1) some kind of Actual Computer with enough room inside it to put several big hard drives on SATA wires but which still draws less than maybe 20 watts idle, or 2) a low power motherboard and processor and I'll just buy a hard drive cage and screw it all to a big sheet of plywood because I work in coin-ops and that's how we roll.
Does that exist? A low power computer that can be my media player box (not media SERVER, this'll be plugged straight into the projector, I don't want a computer to hold videos and another computer to play them, that's sillytown) and is cheap and very very very low-power?
Let me know about your tiny cheap low-power computers setups pls, my budget is <$100 not counting hard drives and by all means assume I can fiddle with things
(don't reply if you don't have a tiny low-power computer setup or just want to tell me to use an old laptop or ask google or AI or whatever thx, I want actual recommendations from people who can put their actual hands on the actual machines in question)