Can I use a old Laptop as a NAS?

Is it possible ?

What do I need extra? Just two or more portable hard drives ?

I know it won’t be pretty.

By the way sorry if I posted in the wrong section I wasn’t sure where to post this :frowning:

welcome to the place.

not that sure how software wise. But in theory you could have USB attached hard drives. and if I recall there are a few modules that use USB3+ and an additional power supply to let you read multiple hard drivers (bare sata drives) in the enclosure.

things like that.

BUT. I wouldn’t do it. Not sure how well that would pass through and how it would control it.

I think this would be the right section but I’m not sure. To the machine it would be DAS so there is that.

Thanks.

Oh well.

what is the laptop though - it might be a good option for a plex/jellyfin server and transcoder.

might - I don’t know. I’ve heard of people doing this but I’ve no experience in that realm. I plan on using a small form factor box - but a laptop of same vintage with the right processor etc seems reasonable too.

The spec of the laptop is the most important bit.

The fact that it’s a laptop and not a desktop doesn’t really matter, other than it has no room for hard drives. You can use external HDDs, but I’d caution against that.

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HP Elitebook 2570p. It was upgraded to 8 GB of ram and a small 40 GB SSD.

I would add 2 portable hard drives to it. Not sure what size.

In my personal opinion, some “gaming” class laptops usually have pretty good internal expansion. Example, a unit I recently picked up has a full fat desktop CPU socketed in it (i7-6700K), has two NVME sockets, and two SATA ports internally. could theoritically hold a good amount of storage, but to get anything over 4TB/5TB, you’d need SSD, and that can get expensive, pretty quick. I mean, if it would even physically fit, and you have EXTREMELY deep pockets (I know I don’t), the largest production SSD is 100TB…LOL

That being said, I think that a laptop with enough expansion options you need would be a pretty good build overall, especially I would think it would absolutely sip power compared to a full desktop system.