Run a NAS OS on an old Compaq laptop?
from Imaginary_Stand4909@lemmy.blahaj.zone to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 26 Jan 04:08
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/37563306

The model is an HP Presario CQ57 Notebook PC:

Currently I’m running Cockpit in Proxmox, which works fantastic by the way. But I saw this guide where they suggest splitting your compute and NAS, so I figured I could finally put this dusty win7 laptop to work.

The battery definitely has an issue, as it only works when plugged in. Should I bother with this laptop, or should I just buy a Pi or something? If I do use this, should I stick with Cockpit, or switch to something else like TrueNAS or Openmediavault? I have my 4 drives in a ZFS striped mirror configuration, with data traveling over USB (which sucks considering the non-USB 3.0 ports on the laptop…)

Once again, thanks for your guidance!

#selfhosted

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Sanctus@anarchist.nexus on 26 Jan 04:18 next collapse

Whats your use case for the NAS? Mine is a media library and anything over USB would really suck. But I have a oldish TerraStation running a modified version of debian for my NAS. It’d probably be easiest using an old desktop and just throwing whatever debian stable is on it.

frongt@lemmy.zip on 26 Jan 04:25 next collapse

There is no need to separate compute and storage unless there’s a reason for separating them. Usually that reason is redundancy and high availability, so that you can take down a compute node or storage node and still keep everything running.

cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de on 26 Jan 05:22 next collapse

It’s not going to make a very good NAS. It looks like it only has USB 2 and 100M ethernet. That’s going to be slower than the NAS I built with the Pentium 4 desktop I got for free in 2007.

anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz on 26 Jan 06:46 next collapse

While splitting Compute and Storage is nice I think the main takeaway should be having your opnsense/router on it’s own physical hardware.
Having your storage separated won’t stop a Jellyfin interruption if you reboot your compute.

For a NAS solution the cheap way would be a used desktop with at least 4 SATA ports, a Linux distro you’re used to and Cockpit installed.

Imaginary_Stand4909@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 26 Jan 16:24 collapse

Oh I definitely want to have a dedicated machine for the opnsense, I was planning that and a small switch as a gift to myself for my birthday. I just wanted to figure out if I could do something with this poor laptop lol.

I’ll keep your NAS setup in mind.

tvcvt@lemmy.ml on 26 Jan 12:41 next collapse

I’d recommend against separating storage and compute in most small environments. Separating them means you suddenly have higher latency and less bandwidth between your data and whatever you want to do with it. Sure, there are good reasons to do it (centralizing storage for multiple nodes, for example), but go into with your eyes open to the trade-offs.

PabloSexcrowbar@piefed.social on 26 Jan 18:17 collapse

While I agree with you in principle, I separated mine because I use mini PCs for compute and there’s not a lot of room for storage in any of them.

tvcvt@lemmy.ml on 26 Jan 19:50 collapse

Sure. For full disclosure, I also run separate compute and storage. I do think separating storage from a compute cluster can be a good option, but not necessarily for the use case described in the original question.

zebidiah@lemmy.ca on 27 Jan 17:37 collapse

Compaq… Now that is a name I haven’t heard in a loooong time