First NAS hardware

[A_special_case]

So I have an old Asus aspire 5742Z laptop that has just been kicking about for years with an intermittently working screen and i’m trying to repurpose the system.

So I upgraded the storage to an SSD, and have installed POP OS and attempted using it as a media player hooked up to my living room TV for youtube etc but its not powerful enough to play 1080p videos and above from youtube so that is kind of a no.
With it not being capable enough to be a media PC i’m thinking about hooking it up to 4 8TB drives (in Raid 10) over USB 2.0 and using it for a mini NAS set up. The planned use-case for this would be so that my SO and i can upload our pictures/videos directly from our phones to the NAS, downloading photos/videos (including movies) from the NAS to our phones/tablets/computer (for local viewing/playing), accessing documents/spreadsheets using libre office on the NAS from out phones (as a replacement for google drive). I would likely be looking at running TrueNAS as i can’t afford to use Unraid and i also believe that TrueNAS will fit my needs better from the little that i know, and i can’t afford to build another PC to set up as a NAS, but i dont know if a 2 core 2 thread laptop processor (Intel Pentium P6200) would be capable enough to perform this.

So to eventually get to the question, i know it wouldn’t be fast but would this laptop have enough performance to meet these requirements, or will i need to find another use for it?
I kind of feel like a raspberry Pi would likely have more power than this laptop and wonder if id be better saving for a raspberry pi 3/4 until i can afford to build a new system?

TIA

As a heads up the system has a Intel P6200 CPU, 4GB DDR3 RAM, Intel HD Graphics, 500GB Gigabyte SSD.

[wertigon]

For that use case even a potato could do it, pretty much. You already have the hardware, so why not give it a shot? All you have to lose is a bit of time, yes?

If you should find it does not hold up to your needs though, a cheap step up could be a 5600G + A520 + 16 GB of RAM for like… $300-$350 ish? Add a PSU and cheap case and you have a nest egg for $500 that is quite good at low power idling, then just deck out with storage as the needs for it rise.

But that is step two for sure. First, get what you have up and running and take it for a spin.

[FinOxy]

@A_special_case Hi
Just wanting to let you know this. Getting good USB-drive enclosures is the best thing to do. As already mentioned, I think your PC is adequate for this use case. But I have had a friend do simular setup with NUC’s and attaching HDD’s through USB. He had problems with them dropping out due to bad USB-controllers.

I don’t want to discourage you from going ahead with your project, but try to do your research ahead of time.

Have an awesome project!