Old notebook turned into a NAS

[GabrielBP]

Hello everyone, my wife just changed her old Inspiron 14 for a new notebook.

I just got myself thinking in a way to turn It on a NAS.

 

The main problem to solve is making an RAID controller to work with the hardware.

 

My plan at the moment is to use one of those EGPU adapters that goes into the Wi-fi adapter slot and an PCIE RAID Controller, any thought if this is possible?

 

thanks!

[Electronics Wizardy]

Do you need a raid card? What drives do you plan on attaching? 

 

Id just get a few usb hdds, and use software raid if needed. No need for a pcie raid card here, usb should be fine.

[GabrielBP]

My plan is to use 02 4gb HDDs in redundancy... with room for expansion in the future

[Quantum Noisemaker]

+1 for software raid here, using a raid controller like you described could work, but may be somewhat convoluted.

 

Another option besides software raid would to be to use an OS that supports ZFS and Raid-Z (i.e. Truenas). This may have better results when working with USB HDDs, since ZFS works a bit deeper at the file system layer, which may be useful in this context.

 

Whichever approach you take, it may end up being a bit funky, but certainly a fun experiment!