Way back at the beginning of 2015 I tasked myself with building a gaming PC for the living room. 12 months later and finally—after coming to work for Ars, travelling halfway around the world a few times over, and patiently waiting for someone to release a console-like case that didn’t suck—it is done.

As is usually the case when embarking on some half-baked idea to use technology to improve your life—or in my case, provide a prettier way to procrastinate—there’s a tendency to over-complicate things. Case in point: I already had a PC in my living room; a very old, very loud, but still perfectly functional HP Microserver that I used as a NAS and media player. The gaming PC could replace the media player part, but what about the storage?

So I needed a gaming PC, and some sort of network-attached storage (NAS)—either one built out of old parts, or something shiny and new from Amazon. Then I remembered that thanks to my recent acquisition of various bits of IoT gear, adding two new devices instead of one would leave me short an Ethernet socket—and no, even with a router capable of 802.11ac, Wi-Fi still doesn’t trump good ol’ fashioned cables for speed and reliability.