How to build a nas out of an old laptop

[cadabri]

Hello, Recently I bought a old broken laptop from my school, but it turned out that the only thing that was wrong was the screen so I removed the screen so now I just have a portable computer with a built in keyboard. What I was wondering is, is it possible to build a NAS out of it? If so, how can I do so? And will I need a raid card to use raid 5 or 6? My final question is will this computer even be able to run this NAS, it has a Pentium processor (unsure which exact which one) and two gigs of ram.

[TheKDub]

You're probably not going to get much of a nas from a laptop due to a lack of sata ports and expandability.

[cadabri]

You're probably not going to get much of a nas from a laptop due to a lack of sata ports and expandability.

I would be using usb to sata cables

[TheKDub]

I would be using usb to sata cables

 

Then you're not going to be getting all that great of speeds, I'd assume that it's only got USB 2.0 ports (Cause school laptops tend to be old and shitty), so you'd max out at around 60MB/s, whereas most hard drives are able to reach upwards of 120MB/s or greater, and with a gigabit connection to the nas, you'd only be able to get roughly 125MB/s from it..

 

You can easily set up a raid array in windows, so you shouldn't need to worry about that a ton.

 

 

I'd say have at least two drives, put them in a striped raid so you get better performance from it, raid 5 would work fine, so would raid 10. (That way it's at least somewhat redundant.)

 

Raid 5 requires at least 3 drives, and raid 10 requires at least 4.

 

I personally prefer raid 10 for redundant performance, if you're using 4 drives, its basically two sets of two drives, each set is in raid 1, then the two sets are put together in raid 0. (Or you can do it the other way around and get raid 01, which is two sets, each in raid 0, then both are together in raid 1)

[KemoKa]

If the laptop has an optical drive, you could pull that out and replace it with another laptop hard drive. Have AntiX Linux or a NAS software on a USB drive plugged into one of the ports and then you should be good to go.

[cadabri]

Then you're not going to be getting all that great of speeds, I'd assume that it's only got USB 2.0 ports (Cause school laptops tend to be old and shitty), so you'd max out at around 60MB/s, whereas most hard drives are able to reach upwards of 120MB/s or greater, and with a gigabit connection to the nas, you'd only be able to get roughly 125MB/s from it..

 

You can easily set up a raid array in windows, so you shouldn't need to worry about that a ton.

 

 

I'd say have at least two drives, put them in a striped raid so you get better performance from it, raid 5 would work fine, so would raid 10. (That way it's at least somewhat redundant.)

 

Raid 5 requires at least 3 drives, and raid 10 requires at least 4.

 

I personally prefer raid 10 for redundant performance, if you're using 4 drives, its basically two sets of two drives, each set is in raid 1, then the two sets are put together in raid 0. (Or you can do it the other way around and get raid 01, which is two sets, each in raid 0, then both are together in raid 1)

Well is there like a sata and sata power splitter? I just want to figure out what to do with the computer

[Just curious]

if this is possible (old laptop to NAS) is there a risk on its battery (like fire)?