[SOLVED] Latitude D630 as NAS?

[dizztortion]

Hi everyone,

I have a 2007 Core2Duo Latitude D630 running win 7 on 4 gigs of RAM. Until recently, this was my backup PC. I'm now thinking of swapping out the stock 160 gig HDD for a 2TB unit and also install another 2TB with a HDD caddy into the optical bay and use this as a NAS.

This should work, right? Is there any reason for this laptop to not support 2TB drives?

Sorry to be a bother but I couldn't find anything conclusive on the webs.

Thank you.

 

[Grobe]

I also have the same computer model (Linux Lite installed), but as a backup computer I'd only installed a 500Gb hdd - so I can only confirm that at least 500GB should work.

For the question, No - there are no particular reason a 2TB drive shouldn't work.

Some information here:
https://uefi.org/sites/default/files/resources/UEFI_Drive_Partition_Limits_Fact_Sheet.pdf

For larger drives than 2TB this may be an issue.

 

[ohio_buckeye]

That said, a nas may be easier. Thing about the PC will be if you have a drive go down, likely you will need to power down the PC, pull 1 drive at a time, and use a software tool on a separate PC to determine which drive acted up. Vs a nas, if they operate anything like our Dell servers at work, if a drive goes down, usually the lights on the front panel start lighting up and show you which drive is out. Then typically you can just hot swap the drive with a new replacement, the array rebuilds if no other drives go out depending on your raid config, and all is happy again.

If you don't want to go nas and you've got a little cash, I would suggest that you might be able to find a Dell poweredge server or similar that's used for not much coin. Many of them that use sas drives will accept and work with sata drives. Would cost a little in drives maybe, but you could find something that had say 8 bays and populate with 2tb drives (have seen used ones on eBay for under 30 for sata), but go for a raid 6 which would allow 2 drives to go out before you lost data. I think 8 2tb drives in raid 6 would allow for 12tb of storage. But you could do 500gb or 1tb drives to. Just giving for instance.

Depending on your level of expertise might be a fun project. But you would want to make sure once you were set to back up somewhere to be safe.

 

[Alabalcho]

We're using couple of D610's around running XP (probably last Dell series with native serial and parallel ports) as well. There are two concerns about turning them into NAS:

• Ethernet port is 100mbit only;
• Havent tried HDD into CD bay, so I can't tell whether it will work.

 

[dizztortion]

Thanks, guys, much appreciated! I will give this a shot and update here.

@ohio_buckeye really interested in trying this out before I plonk money into a something new, but your idea is interesting because I can find used PowerEdges for cheap locally.

@Alabalcho 100mbit is something I had overlooked but since it's only going to be 2 of us using the NAS (mainly mkvs and music) it should be fine? Shall update soon.

 

[ohio_buckeye]

I know at work we bought 2 poweredge r710 systems from eBay with a today of 12 cores with hyperthreading and like 148gb of ram each plus I think around 6tb hd space by the time we configure raid 6. We use them for hyper v if we need to spin up a vm.

Thinking again, the thing you'd have to put money down for is an os. But if you started learning a server os, you could expand later into doing active directory etc as you grow if you're a small company for example.