laptop nas, thunderbolt drives, opinions looking for on upgrade path

[Killer rock]

ok so what im rocking right now, is an ASUS E35M1-I DELUXE. with 3 hard drive, 10tb, 1tb, and 512 gb. the nas primary use was just network storage. and it does it well for my original needs, giving my chrome books actual storage space. But recently i've been playing around with plex and came to the hard relization that the AMD E-350 APU can't keep up with any real transcoding. and i must preprep all my video files with handbrake. thats fine but i like to cut out that hassle. so im looking at upgrading or reconfiguring my setup. what i have laying around my house are laptops of veries ages 5-10years old. newest has thunderbolts 3 and i thinks on i7 7th or 8th gen, next on a i5 5th-6th gen, others arn't worth mentioning, but exist. so id like to turn one of the laptops in to the next nas with 8-16 bays. but i heard usb hardware not much up to the task, then i though about thunderbot. and it would force me to upgrade my daily drive bout thats fine. kinda don't want to do a tower(new or used) but will if my arm is twisted enof.

This is kinda my planing step, the old one running core, i figure the next one will be running scale so thats why i posted here. so are there any ideas recommendations or suggestions? this is my planing step.

Please keep in mind that only one poweruser (me) will ever be useing it. and beside the chrome books and plex usage. This server will be spinding its life waiting and doing nothing. so most money will be spent on drive their back plain and with the networking being 1gb-2.5gb(i mean chromebook and plaex useage, if i underspent on that ill pay for it later in extra hardware or early upgrade.)your insite is thanks

 

[sretalla]

TrueNAS is open source and free to use as you want.

I don't think anyone who knows anything about it will want to help you go in the direction you're suggesting here.

A laptop is a terrible hardware choice for a reliable server.

Thunderbolt may or may not work, but has virtually 0 hours of testing in any meaningful sense to suggest that it won't break something down the road and lose your data.

As mentioned, do what you want, but you'll be on your own with that hardware choice.

 

[awil95]

I'm not an expert by any means but I have been using ZFS for about 5 years now between TrueNAS and Debian. I have experimented with ZFS pools on external USB hard drives with a Raspberry Pi 4 and only ran into issues. I constanly was getting pool and irreparable file errors. I've never used Thunderbolt but from my understanding it uses PCIe interface that is hot-pluggable. I would reckon to say that it could possible work better than USB since its using the PCIe bus, but it would be highly experimental. If you care about your data at all I would steer clear of external drives using USB or Thunderbolt.