NAS Noob Looking for Guidance

[Hackentosher]

Hey guys, I have a bad idea on how to make a NAS but it sounds like a lot of fun. I have a Yoga 720 13ikb sitting around not doing a whole lot and I think it would be more useful as a server. It's not the most powerful thing in the world, it has some 7w 7th gen i5 and 4gb of (soldered) memory. Importantly, it has a mini PCIE slot for the wifi card and an NVME slot, which as we all know is a PCIE 3.0 4x slot in a compact formfactor. So, my bad idea is to rip the logic board out of the laptop and break out the NVME slot and maybe the PCIE 1x slot to full size PCIE slots. Then, bolt all this to a sheet of plywood and mount up the assortment of harddrives I've collected over the years for the world's jankiest NAS.

 

So there's the concept, but I don't really know what I'm doing. The general plan was to buy the breakout cards from amazon and a RAID card like this but I have an assortment of drives in different capacities (1-4tb). I wouldn't have any unbacked up mission critical data on this thing, so I'm not too worried about redundancy, so I think JBOD is the right call right now (that might be nice in the future, but idc right now). So, my main questions are

1. What RAID/SATA expansion card should I buy, and how cheap could I get it?
2. What software should I run on the machine? Stick with Windows? Go with Linux? FreeNAS?

I'm open to any and all suggestions because I have no idea what I'm doing in terms of server stuff, but I'd like to learn. This is just an idea I've had kicking around the back of my mind for a little while now.

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 minutes ago, Hackentosher said:

1. What software should I run on the machine? Stick with Windows? Go with Linux? FreeNAS?

 

wht softwre do you know? What protocols? Id personally just run debian on it, but its really up to you. 

 

3 minutes ago, Hackentosher said:

• What RAID/SATA expansion card should I buy, and how cheap could I get it?
•  

That hba you listed should work. But be warned some of those laptops won't work with anything else in their wifi/pcie slots, so its kinda a luck of the draw here.

 

Id probably just run the drives via usb as its garanteed to work.

 

[Hackentosher]

4 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

wht softwre do you know? What protocols? Id personally just run debian on it, but its really up to you. 

I think I'd want to use this as a learning experience, and I've wanted to not be as much of a Linux noob for a while so Debian or Ubuntu might be the move.

4 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

That hba you listed should work. But be warned some of those laptops won't work with anything else in their wifi/pcie slots, so its kinda a luck of the draw here.

Oh that's interesting, I'll see if I can find any information on that for this specific machine. I imagine it will work, but I have no supporting evidence for that.

4 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id probably just run the drives via usb as its garanteed to work.

I don't love that idea, but you're right it's the simplest solution. It's more costly to get a bunch of USB 3.0 to SATA adapters. This particular laptop only has 1 3.0 type A port, 1 thunderbolt 3, and 1 type C (I think it's USB 3.1, not sure). 

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, Hackentosher said:

I don't love that idea, but you're right it's the simplest solution. It's more costly to get a bunch of USB 3.0 to SATA adapters. This particular laptop only has 1 3.0 type A port, 1 thunderbolt 3, and 1 type C (I think it's USB 3.1, not sure). 

Does it have wired networking?

 

Id just have a usb hub and usb 3 to sata adapters, then boot from the internal nvme drive. They won't limited your speed as your gonna be gigabit ethernet limited anyways.

[Hackentosher]

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Does it have wired networking?

The only other port it has is a headphone jack, I was going to buy a type C to gigabit adapter.

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id just have a usb hub and usb 3 to sata adapters, then boot from the internal nvme drive. They won't limited your speed as your gonna be gigabit ethernet limited anyways.

That's a good point, I didn't consider that. It'll probably be as much of a cable spaghetti as the pcie breakout method, but I suppose USB 3.0 is 5 gigabit right? And 3.1 is 10, regardless both are way faster than my current network infrastructure. I'll do some poking around on which is cheaper, I have a feeling they'll both be pretty close.