Configuring a NAS from an old laptop

Brouw3r on 18/08/2014 - 11:56

My brother has recently bought a new laptop and I want to turn his old one into a NAS running freeNAS with plex. I basically want it to be a dump for all the videos our house has spread over 4-5 laptops in one place, accessible to our chromecast, laptops, tablets, etc.

The guides to freeNAS say the OS can run from USB, HDD, CD, etc. What I don't understand is if it is like windows in the sense that it can be installed. Ie, if I write the ISO to a CD, will the CD need to stay there? Or is it possible to run it from the same HDD ("installing" the ISO) that all the data is going to be stored on?

I will format the HDD that is in the laptop currently, what is the best format to use for this setup?

Is there anything I'm overlooking?

Thanks in advance.

Computing

Comments

  • ESEMCE on 18/08/2014 - 13:15
    +1

    FreeNAS has an installer, so worst case you can partition the hard drive to install there, or potentially install to a USB drive or SD card.

    Is there anything I'm overlooking?

    Yes, longevity… a Laptop and it's Hard Drive isn't designed to be plugged in and running 24/7 and usually don't have capacity for more than 1 Hard Drive.
    That means no redundancy on a "NAS" that is likely to break down within 24 months.

    • knk on 09/12/2014 - 11:25

      Get an adapter to use the cdrom drive as a 2.5" drive slot.

      Then get 2x 2.5" western digital red drives, made for this kind of application, soft raid them. problem solved :).

  • xyron on 18/08/2014 - 15:05
    +2

    admirable idea but too hard. buy a basic mATX system (with a Haswell Celeron and 8gb ram) and load it up with HDDs, then run FreeNAS off that. at best you'll be plugging in external HDDs via USB which is flakey and slow at best.

    i've recently done that with FreeNAS (running off a USB drive plugged into the back of it) and a microATX P55 Clarkdale system with 12gb RAM, 3 2tb drives and 2 4tb drives, Plex installed and all drives formatted with UFS. works well. :)

    • superm86 on 08/12/2014 - 17:14

      Cool - any idea of total cost?

  • WalterPPK on 18/08/2014 - 15:20
    +1

    Laptop hard drives really aren't designed for this kind of thing. Yes, it'll work - right up until it doesn't. Without RAID the data will be lost when the hard drive fails (and it will fail).

    Either build a FreeNAS/Plex box yourself as per Xyron's idea - but make sure you set up RAID, or save your money and invest in a Synology. It'll cost more, but you'll be glad you did.

  • Brouw3r on 18/08/2014 - 15:32

    Thanks for comments so far. I plan on building a budget NAS in about 9 months, once my house is built and everything has settled down. This will almost serve as a test of sorts to see if I prefer it to plugging my laptop into my TV which is what I'm doing currently. In terms of data integrity, it's probably doesn't matter if it eventually dies. There's not that much going on it, most of it will be TV shows and movies that we've watched or are about to watch.

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