I need help to make my old laptop into a NAS

[aliath]

Hey Everyone,

 

I recently bought a M3 pro Macbook pro for video editing and now I want use my old laptop (Asus ROG GL502 VM core i7-6700HQ with GTX 970m) as a NAS. I am completely new to this topic so here are some things that I can not figure out.

1 - I have around 5 external HDDs. is USB connection enogh for the speed?

2 - I want to be able to read and write files from my macbook, Do I have to format them all and lose current files on them?

3 - I want to be able to access them both in my house and remotely. but in house I want to be able to access the files more directly. what is the best solotion?

4 - I know I am missing alot of things so I would appreciate If you could help me out with it.

[aggie113]

If you have 5 drives with their own enclosure, then not a good way to do that without a USB hub at least.  Perhaps if you took the drives out and put them into a single enclosure that connects via USB (Amazon.com: Yottamaster 5-Bay RAID Hard Drive Enclosure).  Even then, I'm not familiar enough with the open source NAS software choices to know if they would be able to use the drives.
A macbook should be able to read most modern drive formats.  If you'd like to use the drives in a raid array of any sort then the drives would need to be formatted.  
Accessing your files away from home would require setting up something along the lines of a VPN tunnel to your home network either memorizing your home IP address or using a dynamic DNS service.  At your house you would only be able to access them through the network port on your Asus laptop that is hosting the drives.