Old Laptop As NAS?

[YashP]

I have a ancient laptop lying around, a compaq laptop with P3 processor and 256mb of ram. so im planning to run nextcloud and nas off it. will be using lubuntu. is it a good idea? or i should buy raspberry pi 3?

 

[boosted1g]

PI makes for a bad NAS. The reason being is that it is limited to a poor USB bus then at BEST case secanrio you are going to get 10MB/s speed from it.

You can try out the laptop running ubuntu and if it does not have gigabit ethernet I would try to get an external adapter for it.
Otherwise I would get an ODROID C2 https://www.amazon.com/ODROID-C2-Project-Board-Quad-Gigabit/dp/B01CQBRXOQ, while it does not have USB 3.0 it at least has gigabit ethernet.

Make sure this is setup in a safe place because if external drives are one fall off the desk from utter failure.

 

[noidea_77]

I guess a P3 Laptop with 256mb ram will give you extemly bad perfomance. On one hand the HDD in it for sure is horrible slow and in addition the ram is to small, so the OS will swap to the the slow HDD. ut hay, as long as it's sitting around you can load Windows on it and try it out with a smb share.

 

[YashP]

Dropped Idea of Raspberry Pi Made New Thread at http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-3345971/cheap-nas-build-suggestions.html