There are several examples here of what people have done with their t610.
In January 2018 I heard from Attila in Hungary who was running Windows on his t610 and using it in conjunction with a smart TV. He also came up with an ingenious solution in how to provide extra (silent) cooling. more...
In January 2019 I heard from John in Cheshire who had a multimedia setup. more...
In October 2019 I heard from Jeff Witty in Canada who had expanded his t610 Plus more...
In May 2020 I heard from Simon who had set up a 'Zoom' Video Conferencing system for 94-year old to use during the Covid-19 lockdown. more...
September 2024 brought a contribution from Arek from Poland on setting up a t610 with four 2TB drives. more ...
In January 2019 I heard from John in Cheshire who had been playing around with t610s and t620s as part of his multimedia setup:
I use both t610s and t620s as multimedia front-ends to my MythTV server, the t610s having the advantage of taking cheap 8GB sata SSDs. They are running Kodi (media player) on LibreELEC (...small and very fast booting, open source JeOS [Just enough Operating System]).
With decent RAM (4GB) and the graphics forced to max memory the t610 can run BBC broadcast HD without any dropped frames. I bought all of these for prices between £30 and £45 - a good deal compared to Kodi boxes, and more flexible than them.
I also bought two t610plus thin clients. The original intention was to move the MythTV server and its 4 tuners from the HP XW4600 workstation (idling at 200-250 watts) to the two t610plus thin clients (idling ~15W each) with dual tuners fitted in each one.
Unfortunately I found the t610plus, when fitted with dual tuners, is not quite good enough to run live TV from both tuners at once and was dropping frames. As a result that upgrade is on hold and the original backend is still in place.
My existing setup also included an ultra slim desktop running OpenMediaVault server (OMV). (i.e. A NAS box). In practice this box and CPU were overkill for that application and, with two drives fitted, was contributing another 130 watts to my household electricity bills. I decided try t610plus as a lower power alternative.
I upped the 44-pin IDE DOM to 16GB to hold the OMV operating system. Sticking with the standard DOM avoided the hassles of fitting an alternative mass storage device (Compact Flash/thumb drive/whatever) somewhere in the case.
That just left the problem of fitting in two 2.5" drives for the 'NAS' storage. As this was going to be sitting there running 24/7 I wanted it to be a reasonably engineered and tidy solution. The 'plus' aspect meant there was plenty of space inside but as I looked at alternatives I found that the t610plus CPU heatsink/fan arrangement intruded on the extra space and interfered with things. The solution was to take the heatsink from a spare t610 and fit it to the t610plus. This had an unexpected side effect in that the BIOS started to complain about the missing fan and halting as the system booted. Luckily such behaviour is trivial fix in the BIOS configuration.
For mounting the drives I went with Akasa PCI/PCIe slot 2.5in
SSD/HDD bracket (pictured right). This carries
the two drives and, as it includes a dummy connector that fits in the PCI slot, forms a solid
mounting platform for the drives.
The servers sit in my basement and so overall should be cool enough. So far they are running perfectly fine with the HDD reporting 25degC temperatures.
The assembled system is shown below.
