Question Home Server with Laptop

yobydnub

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Sep 8, 2015
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Im hoping someone can help me out there because I have tried to find a way to do this, but not with much success with what I have at my disposal.

I have an old laptop (Windows 10), well its not that old, its probably only 2 years old, but because of a busted monitor, I don't use it anymore.
I have found an external monitor to use, and I want to use it to make a home network.
Right now, I have my current laptop with 6 external hard drives plugged into it. Its not ideal, its messy, and takes up too much space.
I want to turn my other laptop into a home server, so I can put all these hard drives somewhere else, yet still have access to all of them, with the same speed as if it were still plugged into my bedroom laptop.

Ive done some you tube research on you tube, but not specifically related to my special requirements, or my level of understanding (ie I pretty much need a step by step guide on how to do this). The laptop I want to use works fine, apart from a dodgy DVD drive, so Im hoping to do what I need via USB. The laptop has 2 USB 3.0 ports, so I understand if I want to access all my external hard drives, a couple of USB 3.0 hubs with their own power source will be a good idea for this. I also want something thats going to be pretty fast. I had a modem that you could put a USB drive into, and moving even the smallest files to and from this drive was painfully slow. I do however have a fast internet speed, my modem supports both 2.4 and 5ghz wifi. Lastly, I have nothing I need to keep on the laptop I want to use for this home server, so wiping the internal drive is not a problem. It has 8GB ram, which I'm sure will be plenty for this project.

Any advice, links, cheat sheet, or anything my friends out there can provide would be greatly appreciated.
 
Nothing really special you need to do here, connect the drives to the computer you want to use as the server, then you will need to enable sharing on the directories you want to share to the network. If you want the best speeds and less mess you can get a single large internal drive for the laptop and copy your external drive contents into it, that depends on how much data you have on those drives of course. If you can get the files on an internal drive you can use the external ones as backups. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4092694/windows-10-file-sharing-over-a-network