What to do with old 2011 MBA?

[Borjan]

Hi there, with the new Haswells out, I'm tempted to upgrade.

First off... I have a 2011 MBA, 11inches with 4GB of RAM and 128GB SSD. I would have sold it, but its got a noticeable knock on the side of it where I have dropped it, and the fan its a fair bit noiser than when I first got it (used to be basically silent but now I can hear it even under light load). And if it was in A1 condition I would have probably got... £600 for it maybe? But given the knocks it will probably be significantly less, which almost makes me think its not worth it.

So this leaves me thinking what I should do with the machine. Should I use it as a home media or file server? The problem is the port selection means it is pretty limited. Its on USB2 so attaching hard drives won't exactly be rapid, and I'd have to use the thunderbolt port for ethernet anyway.... Although perhaps for a 'simple' media server I could just attach a whole bunch of hard drives to a USB2 hub and hope the speed is alright...

What have others done?

 

[Bear]

USB2 speed is fine for streaming media unless you're talking about a lot of streams at once.

You could get a thunderbolt dock which has an ethernet port and some USB3.0 ports. This would get you more connectivity and faster disk access with USB3.0 drives.

 

[techguy20]

A media server would be cool if you can use that, but check out what you can get for it on eBay regardless. There are quite a few completely dead machines that fetch more than you'd expect.

Or, there's always the route of selling it for cheap/giving it to a friend or family member.