Thank you! Cheers!

Oh, this is an excellent set of questions, and I may have some answers. First, depending on the amount of connections on a laptop mainboard, you may or may not have room for expansion. Take my daily driver laptop: the Lenovo l340-15iwl, it has one sata connection(older laptops have at least one, newer most likely have switched to m.2) one slimline sata connection(this is where your optical media drive is plugged into) and 2 m.2 connectors(one for an ssd and one occupied by the wifi card). sata ports cannot be split so without adapters I can only have one sata drive. Using a slimline sata to sata adapter, I can now have two sata devices connected. but using an m.2 sata hba key (5 port models can be found for around $30 USD on Amazon) you can increase the amount of data connections to potentially 7, and since nobody runs servers on wifi, that m.2 2242 for wifi can be sacrificed for a small m.2 boot ssd. Keep in mind that the wifi m.2 is usually limited to 1x or 2x, possibly affecting boot times, however with something runnign full time, this wont be an issue. Energy for these drives is somewhat of a predicament, you could purchase an atx power supply and use a 24pin jump to power the drives, but I'd prefer using a smaller pico power supply and adapting the 8 pin to sata. Hope this helps!

It seems that TerraMaster has its own system and it can work just on its own. IDK if you can connect that through the USB. FreeNAS will support most of the hard drives through the USB port.

That was for a different build, which used desktop components. For your question, I believe powering it through an external adapter and connect it with USB would be better, I think the power lines for the 2.5 HDD in the laptop may not be designed to handle the power requirements of 3.5" HDD

@@qiaojiezheng5310 I see. Thanks for getting back to me. Yeah, after searching around, I have to wire in a PSU for the drives and connect them to the laptop which costs quite a bit. Looks like I'll be turning my laptop into a "Desktop TV" and get a dedicated NAS machine.

@@qiaojiezheng5310 I'm fairly sure 2.5" HDDs only use 5V anyway(why they can be powered from USB) vs 12V & 5V for 3.5", in addition to the higher power usage.

Yeah, I believe you can do that.

I wiped out mine since this one was just sitting there.

You can use a SATA to USB adapter and connect to the USB port.

That's really strange. What I would do is go to the router setting page (usually 192.168.0.1) and search for the machine and get IP from that. I would guess that the IP is not correctly attached to the machine. If you don't see one in the setup, then there's a high possibility that it has not been connected.

It will depend on your laptop, though most likely use very little at idle. Many might also support WOL(Wake On LAN) where they go to sleep when not being used. It's the same with NAS models though, some use much more power than others, and it's possible some don't support WOL. The bigger issue is probably connecting multiple disks to a laptop, along with perhaps reliability and ease of use.

I'm not sure about that. But I'm using it as a data drive for my neural network training, connected through gigabit ethernet.

You can try Pcie x1 to sata, using wifi adapter slot..

Usb 3.0 to sata and a 3.0 usb hub

I would expand on the question, how or with what do you or power these external drives?

@@littlelostchild6767 The problem is how can we get power for that external unit. I am thinking about reuse some old laptop but I have to solve that topic, because usb connection is not enough in my opinion for use your data in a secure way.

I am using the VPN feature from my router. You can search for TP-Link VPN on google

It will take USB HDD. I think the vibrations would be a bigger trouble than heat. Most of the time, it's idling, and you can buy a cheap uab fan to dissipate the heat.

If you used wake on lan, they could potentially be off most of the time, only waking when in use. I'd remove the battery, though that might not be supported on all laptops. At best, it'd pointlessly wear the battery out(unless the battery was important to act as a UPS). I think a fire hazard is unlikely though.

Please don't throw them in the trash. There are electronics recycling programs just about everywhere. Maaaaaaybe one of the early 2000s laptops could be fast enough for a NAS build like this. Anything older would probably be frustrating.

@@danieldougan269 Thank you, bro; I'll keep this in mind.

Many would also make an excellent HTPC, especially if they have low power(also means they're quiet) but fast enough cpu/apu/gpus to play the videos/streams you want. Just get a cheap small keyboard/touchpad combo. Could use either Windows or Linux(including cut down versions intended for HTPCs and such)

I am not too sure about performing a format on FreeNAS. But if you have other functional machine (mac, linux, windows), you can do a format on that.

8gb is really recommended, but you can use it with 4 gb. If you can't upgrade ram you won't be able to run many plugins at once

@Leave means LEAVE! What do you mean with that? 🤔

@@techtodayy its a tiny computer

The flash drive is only used for I installation of the system. The minimum drive in my set up is 2.

both are the same, but the one problem is that you would have to carry your usb drive everywhere and ans u wont.

Usually, you need to go to the disk partitioning tool (just search for dist partitioning in Windows search), and then create a new volume.

@@qiaojiezheng5310 thx for replying, but i've found the problem already. The drive was locked with a password and unusable

Yes. I placed my router in top of the closed lid, the lid get wrapped because the heat from router.

It can work. You can install the FreeNAS system on a flash drive and boot the system from the flash drive. You can also connect external hard drives through USB and configure them as data drives.

I think it would be possible. One of the ways you can get PCIE lane is though the WiFi card. There might be some driver issues that you need to figure out tho.

Yes you can. You would need a flash drive as the bootable drive for the FreeNAS system. And configure the internal drive as the data drive

@@qiaojiezheng5310 thanks :)

@@qiaojiezheng5310 Can you not just give the FreeNAS OS its own partition and store the data on anoother partition all on the same internal SSD/HDD?

I used a small internal SSD (60gb) as the boot drive, and another internet HDD (I replaced the CD drive) as the data drive. You can attach more through the USB. But you have to start from fresh, the configuration of freeNas will format them all and create a dedicated data format for the drives.

Curt Chase The file system is ZFS based on BSD I believe. Ha you say you don't trust this stuff? You realize that very few of the major corporations use data storage based on Windows right? Google, FB and the rest all use some form of Linux or ZFS. All of the NAS companies use some form of Linux base. It's smaller lighter, more stable as well as more secure. It works fine with windows if windows is setup correctly.

I think you can probably find a wifi to ethernet adaptor. The ethernet port must be plugged in.

Anything wireless is gonna slow the transfer speeds waaaay down. Its network attached so set it near your router and plug it in.

mrmotofy what am I supposed to do my house doesn’t have an Ethernet network I only have dsl.

@@advisedpotato8983 DSL is your connection to the outside world. Your router should have an RJ45 (ethernet) port so you just need to cable from the router to the NAS. You'll then have a direct ethernet connection to your router, no wifi required.

I cannot remember exactly, for freenas, the default should be admin

I would definitely love to connect over the WiFi if freenas support it.

Physical disks are probably unlikely to saturate gigabit speed anyway, so it probably won't make any difference unless you were using SSDs. But if using SSDs it's unlikely people would be using an old laptop to save money.