Can I easily make a old laptop a NAS ?

[max2]

It supports 2 drives.

If I get two 4 TB SSDs 2.5 would it work ?

It does have a SSD now but much smaller and that was like 3 to 4 years ago when SSDs were still kinda expensive.

The other drive in it is a 7200 rpm laptop hard drive.

 

[macfacts]

get a raspberry pi to make a NAS. much cheaper.

 

[max2]

get a raspberry pi to make a NAS. much cheaper.

Thanks.

 

[DaveFromCampbelltown]

get a raspberry pi to make a NAS. much cheaper.

Second this.

1. Use a RPi 4 (you won't get better performance for this task from a RPi 5)
2. Install the standard RPi OS Bullseye (not the current Bookworm).
3. Install Webmin for remote management.
4. Use raspi-config to turn off the graphic interface.
5. Enjoy

The RPi 4 can read and write to the drives at up to 120 MBytes/s, which is faster than the normal home network of 1Gbit/s (100 MBytes/s). The RPi 5 can read and write at up to 400 MBytes/s, but can't serve the files on a normal 1Gbit network any faster.

You also have a wider range of other operating systems if you don't want to use RPi OS Bullseye.

 

[max2]

Can I use it as a portable wifi hard drive too ? With a battery power bank of course for at least 8 to 10 hours.

Like this use to be?

https://www.westerndigital.com/en-ap/products/portable-drives/wd-my-passport-wireless-pro-hdd

 

[max2]

rPi 5 is $5 cheaper!

Amazing.

Which one should I get?

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/search...rue&iht=y&usc=All+Categories&ks=960&keys=keys

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=raspberr...prefix=raspberry+pi+,aps,118&ref=nb_sb_noss_2

 

[max2]

Neither raspberry pi can do 4k video streaming / playback

 

[macfacts]

Neither raspberry pi can do 4k video streaming / playback

What bit rate are you encoding your videos at?

 

[pshufd]

I've used various Windows and macOS systems to do this and currently use my Studio. Ideally you want something efficient with at least USB 3 speeds as USB 2 is pretty painful. Speed limitations are your home network which is likely gb or 2.5 gbps at best.

 

[pacmania1982]

What I would say is it depends entirely on your use case which you have not stated here. So to answer your question: yes, yes it is entirely possible to use an old laptop as a NAS. But it depends on what you plan on doing with it. If it's simply to store data, then fine, it should be demonstrably fine for that. However if it's something more complicated like housing a media library that may need transcoding, and streaming perhaps not. If you plan on streaming to say Plex or something, you haven't stated how you want to connect to it either. Will it be plugged in via Ethernet or do you plan on accessing it via WiFi?

When asking such questions, I'd suggest giving as much info so a more informed answer can be formulated.