Is there any reason I shouldn't buy a used laptop for a home file-server?

Is there any reason I shouldn't buy a used laptop for a home file-server?

>cheap
>small
>low power and quiet
>free backup power via the battery
>don't need good specs because it's just a simple file server

why not a raspberry pi

when i get my t43 a new PSU brick, i'm probably going to use it as a telnet / ssh server

odroid

From what I understand you need an external power source to power the hard drives and it turns into an ugly mess.

I'd prefer something self-enclosed.

This. If all you're doing is hosting a file server you could reasonably go cheaper than what you might spend on a used laptop with decent specs and still get a machine with a gig of ram and enough processing power to manage remote file hosting

>laptop for a home file-server
>don't need good specs because it's just a simple file server

it will be incredibly slow. The bottleneck will be your USB 2.0. You'd be better off buying an old Optiplex, putting in a $7 gigabit NIC and cramming as many HDD's as you can into it.

That way you'll have good overhead from your CPU and gigabit NIC for your SMB shares.

But if you want to cheap out, sure why not. 25MB/s might be good enough for you.

Laptops have had USB 3.0 for years and years

>Is there any reason I shouldn't buy a used laptop for a home file-server?
No, as long as it has enough storage/usb-ports for external drives, and fast enough ethernet. And doesn't overheat or something. For light home use it should be fine. If possible, turn off the screen's backlight to reduce heat/power consumption.

Also, a USB HDD would only be used for backups. Any networked files would be contained on the main hard drive.

no they work fine, but I would try to get multiple drives so you can RAID mirror

Biggest reason not to use a pi would be slow as fuck ethernet, not to mention no SATA

some laptops can fit 2 or 3 hard-drives in them. also, all laptops can fit 1 hard-drive in them

I don't think I'm going to bother with RAID. One main hard drive with incremental backups to one secondary hard drive. I'm willing to change my mind but this seems like the best solution in terms of simplicity vs. effectiveness.

make sure you can try befor eyou buy op
otehwerise you are going to leave yourself to be duped

Are nucs a meme? $130 doesn't seem that bad.

i still don't like it. I'd rather use an old desktop PC with lots and lots of HDDs

You could literally just shove it in a tub and it'd still take up less room.

The cheap ones are slow and defeat the purpose of having a PC for flexibility.

Thoughts on using a laptop as a router?

1. you need USB3
2. battary will die soon
3. 3`` HDDs cannot work 24*7 long time

an rpi is cheaper and less power consuming

the J3455 one is GOAT

1. I don't even think I do. The only thing the USB HDD would be used for is backups, which can run at night

2. It just needs to last 10 minutes in case of a sudden power outage. Still better than nothing.

3. It will be idle most of the time. I just want to consolidate most of my files in one place.

I'm not opposed to something like the rpi but I'd prefer one that doesn't need an external power supply to power two hard drives. The perfect one would have an enclosure to fit it all into.

like a raid enclosure
there was a really nice and cheap looking one on amazon a while back, it was just four sata slots on a usb line without plastic around it all. maybe it was faulty.

>1. I don't even think I do. The only thing the USB HDD would be used for is backups, which can run at night
>2. It just needs to last 10 minutes in case of a sudden power outage. Still better than nothing.
>3. It will be idle most of the time. I just want to consolidate most of my files in one place.
IF YOU OK WITH ALL THIS
RASBERY PI + USB POWER BANK WILL BE MORE CHEAP AND RELAIBLE

I'm running my old C2D Toshiba satellite with a half-dead HDD for over a year now without problems.
Just don't expect it to be faster than 100Mbps

>ugly mess
have you even seen the OP pic?????

And really slow for a file server

- won't auto start in case of power loss (and if battery runs out

- hdd's cooking with no air flow

I'm running hdd off $10 orange pi with no external power supply.

Works really nice, quad core so it's fast, will saturate 100mbit link through iperf3 with 50% load on single core. Only drawback is usb2.0 for connecting drives.

And get overpriced 10 mins UPS for power backup?

Exactly. Odroid HC-1 or a NanoPi Neo NAS

>- won't auto start in case of power loss (and if battery runs out
UPS plus internal battery lasts for quite long, also how is it a problem in the first place, nobody has outages that long anymore and pressing a button is easy. Also WOL exists.

>- hdd's cooking with no air flow
USB 3.0 external drives.

>Just don't expect it to be faster than 100Mbps
My HP C2D is at 1000 Mbps, I get 120MB/s transfer speeds to USB drives.

Why do you caps? Pi is shit, specially if you're going to share the USB based ethernet port with a hard drive. It's only USB 2.0 also.

No. No reason not to.
Beats a Pi any time.

I've used this one for a few years as a media/file/torrent server.
Mediocre C2D, internal SSD for the system, gigabit ethernet, external USB drives for storage. Battery still holds over 30 minutes even though it's always plugged in.
Stand makes a nice place to hide external drives under.

Don't mind the dust, I haven't moved it in ages.

People need to stop recommending the stupid idea. The RPI has a 100mbps lan shared with the USB bus, so not only is the LAN not gigabit, read/ writes to USB slow both down.

The pi is not designed to do this, there are plenty of sbc's that are cheaper and have gigabit LAN on a dedicated bus.

It makes me cringe how inefficient it is as a setup, so much...

get a thinkpad then. they have a bios option to start when the power cable is plugged so it will start when the power comes back.

this. and someone using these things as server arent probably storing petabytes of 4K anime on them. most people cant even fill the tiny disk that comes with their device.

you can get a ups for less than a new laptop battery now. i got one for $60 and its good enough for keeping my modem running for many hours and desktop for 30min.

>there are plenty of sbc's that are cheaper and have gigabit LAN on a dedicated bus.

Any particular recommendations?

...

Does anyone know when the Odroid HC2 is released?

all these niggers still live with their parents who pay their electricity

all these niggers don't understand the point of embedded devices

all these niggers did in tech is connect their gpu to their motherboard

all these niggers want to use that 400w machine over a 1w machine for that 1s execution time

all these niggers are unemployed crackheads or have a codemonkey pajeet job

all these niggers make me sad

all these niggers are pic related

What would you want in an HC2? If you need even more power in an ARM SoC you'd have to get an NVidia Jetson or Marvel Armada kind of sbc.

It depends what you want, in my case I run a Linksys wrt1900ac on lede/ openwrt, filling the typical use cases on SBCs on a LAN but without needing one.

It has external SATA and usb3 ports, with 4 proper gigabit lan ports, I have a server via Ethernet and Im getting 50MBps read/writes over WiFi.

If definitely a SBC you need, checkout what banana pi have, lots of options.

i keep my i5 2500k home server on 24/7 and have never got a power bill that is too big for me. i had a power meter on it for a while and it was never using over 100w and is usually using about 60w thats about as much as keeping a light on.

That's a Compaq N serioes right?
pretty neat machines, my dad been using one (NC6400) for almost a decade before he replaced it with a chinkpad.

Pretty much fucking this.

Good.

>inefficient
?

Sounds like my Toshiba is a piece of shit then.
That's not news to me desu.
Either way, 12MB/s that I get out of it is fine for anime dump and generic media storage.

I love me some NUC. I use mine as a XenServer VM box. m.2 drive + 500g ssd and 16GB of ram its a nice little box to experiment on (and low power). The lack of expandable storage is sucky, making it a poor choice for file server, and dual core means it can only handle so many VMs. I'm looking forward to the quad core thats rumored for Q2 of next year.

In order to achieve its main purpose, as in file storage, a file server first of all needs HDDs, using a computer where your expansion is limited to USB (especially if it's old shit with USB 2.0) isn't the best choice unless you just want some low-tier stuff and don't care about large storage capacity or having any appreciable safety for your data in case of HDD failure.

>going to share the USB based ethernet port with a hard drive. It's only USB 2.0 also.
Same shit like old laptop but cheeper and more relaible

ensure good low spec: currently I have a laptop as a server, now need more ram to host everything I need as a single programmer with customer visiting my own server to show projects. Everything is ok with it, no fails, even with lid closed, own laptop battery as ups, you can change dvd drive by another hdd with proper addon, or via usb. Just ensure a ventilated area and a ethernet 10/100/1000, others spec are up to you, like Virtualization support in CPU
Good luck

tell me again how it's cheaper and more reliable than a old laptop when you can get a old laptop with gigabit ethernet and USB 3.0 for 40€ that also still have a battery that keeps a charge for 15 minutes
sure, buy your Pi and enjoy those 20MB/s speeds instead paying the same and enjoying 120MB/s

>Is there any reason I shouldn't buy a used laptop
x86/x64 tablets exist

>Didn't even read OP's post

Always RAID matey that's like rule one. Servers is RAID. No RAID? You doing it wrong.

Yes, used dell optiplexs are cheaper, more powerful, don't need batteries, easier to upgrade etc.