Laptop NAS

[SmartRobot]

I have some computer hardware lying around:

- old Acer laptop (e1-531-4806) with a pentium processor

- two 2.5" 1TB Hard drives

So, I was thinking of building a home NAS server, spending little to no money. I thought: since a laptop has a screen, keyboard, trackpad and a ups (battery) built-in, it should make for a good budget NAS. All I want to use it for is storing files (backups etc) and accessing them once in a while. At most, 1-2 people will be accessing files simultaneously, so I don't need a very powerful processor. However, I have not heard of people using a laptop as a NAS which is why I am asking here to make sure that I am not making a mistake.

So, should I use this laptop as a NAS? If not, why?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Yep you can do this. It will work fine. Just seutp file shares and your good to go.

[SmartRobot]

Is this what you mean:

 

Would the performance be better I were to use freenas? what are the pros of using something like freenas?

[LunaP0n3]

 

41 minutes ago, SmartRobot said:

Would the performance be better I were to use freenas? what are the pros of using something like freenas?

FreeNAS is dedicated NAS software, meaning there's nothing else running on the system to impact the NAS functionality. Just make sure you've got 1GB RAM per TB of disk space and GbE on the laptop and you should be fine.

[SmartRobot]

On 12/25/2018 at 11:42 PM, LunaP0n3 said:

 

FreeNAS is dedicated NAS software, meaning there's nothing else running on the system to impact the NAS functionality. Just make sure you've got 1GB RAM per TB of disk space and GbE on the laptop and you should be fine.

Is that ratio for Windows or FreeNAS?

[LunaP0n3]

5 hours ago, SmartRobot said:

Is that ratio for Windows or FreeNAS?

FreeNAS.