What Would You Do? Keep Laptop, NAS Killer, DAS,?

Hope the server has been working out for you. If transcoding for Plex / Jellyfin is something you are interested in you might want to consider keeping the HP laptop as a standalone Quicksync box similar to JDM’s Quicksync guide: [Guide] Hardware Transcoding: The JDM way! QuickSync and NVENC

I think he even talks about laptops in there. Your server is beefier and is way more expandable, but unless you have a dedicated GPU the laptop has a more modern iGPU that will decode / encode more formats in hardware. Plus its engineered for power efficiency.