Turning old PC into "NAS" via thunderbolt 4

[Schiggy]

I am currently using a Lenovo Legion 7i with an i9, 3080 mobile, 1tb main drive (m.2 gen 4), 1tb scratch disk (1tb m.2 gen 3) and a 64gb ram update in a couple days.

 

My profession is video editing, and I travel enough that having a laptop like this is more practical then a desktop (i have a custom dock at home to keep it cool enough for the 3080).

 

I have a bulldozer build with 8 cores and 32gb of ram running primo cache as a NAS at the moment. I use the NAS specifically to hold games and other applications like UE5 or blender as I don't have enough room on the laptop for both my video projects and Unreal projects or games.

 

I would like to connect this pc to my laptop via Thunderbolt 4, that way I don't have to saturate it's network connection if I want to play games while my NAS is syncing footage at night.

 

My plan was to buy a thunderbolt 4 pcie card that would allow me to connect the 2 computers together. But, the one I found was by asus and required an asus motherboard to function properly (I think?).

 

If anyone has a suggestion on how go about this please let me know. There might be a switch/pcie nic or raspberry pie combo that could get the job done just as well, but I really want my laptop to load at the same speed as just having a standalone desktop. Maybe even faster since the NAS is using its own resources to write/read/cache...

 

I plan to continue researching this but I figure there are some people here who could stop me from wasting time on a bad solution.

 

thanks!

[SupaKomputa]

if im not mistaken you can't use TB on old motherboard. the chipset must support TB.

[Kilrah]

Correct, TB needs mobo support and if not built-in the add-on card has to be the one designed to work with the mobo by the same manufacturer.

[Alex Atkin UK]

52 minutes ago, Schiggy said:

I would like to connect this pc to my laptop via Thunderbolt 4, that way I don't have to saturate it's network connection if I want to play games while my NAS is syncing footage at night.

The right way to do this would be to upgrade the bit between your laptop and NAS to 10Gbit and use a thunderbolt 10Gbit adapter on the laptop.

[m9x3mos]

4 hours ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

The right way to do this would be to upgrade the bit between your laptop and NAS to 10Gbit and use a thunderbolt 10Gbit adapter on the laptop.

I agree this is probably the best option to use in this is case. 

[Schiggy]

Hey thank you guys! I guess I didn't consider chipset compatibility. I'll look into setting up a 10Gbit switch and a card for the desktop to handle that.

[Bdavis]

4 hours ago, Schiggy said:

Hey thank you guys! I guess I didn't consider chipset compatibility. I'll look into setting up a 10Gbit switch and a card for the desktop to handle that.

No need for a switch if it's just between two computers simply connect a thunderbolt 10gb NIC of the laptop to a 10gb card on the desktop manually assign them each an IP address on a different subnet than the one you use for internet and your set. This will also accomplish your goal of not interfering with gaming during transfers.

[Schiggy]

Will do. That saves a ton of money to. The thunderbolt nic and 10gb card are going to be expensive enough on their own lol.