#Hello I have never used Home Assistant
uneven crow
The NAS has to be reliable, and I cannot accept losing my files anyhow since those are used by me to get a living.
Then you need to use RAID (not RAID0) and you need to have backups
A used laptop will not make for a great NAS, and is not going to give you the best performance
I'd suggest you start by considering how to make a great NAS build that you can run HA on, not the other way around
If you want something off the shelf you can work with, the Terramaster range can run something other than their OS, and gives you a fairly decent platform
pale nimbus
Isn't a dedicated 'nas server' just a low power computer?
I mean, I can clearly read that it is a 2 or 4 core 1.4GHz cpu, and 500 or 2gb of ram, how is that more performant that what can a random laptop give me, often with a 2-3GHz+ cpu and 8gb ram+?
Anyways, I sure have a lecture about nas servers ahead of me.
uneven crow
Well, a NAS should support multiple hard disks for RAID, and it should support hot-swap
They're also... if done correctly and not cheaped out ... going to include proper cooling and what have you, and decent bandwidth for the disks
A laptop is usually about lower power. The internal hard disk (usually one) will be slower - unless it's an SSD.
The laptops only way of connecting other hard disks is USB, which is ... not ideal
NAS...
Also, low power != performance
You need to pick which one you want
(though, never generations of chips tend to perform better for the same level of power use)
If you just want a great HA experience then a laptop will be fine
pale nimbus
The laptops only way of connecting other hard disks is USB, which is ... not ide...
I can plug at least 2 disks in an average laptop by removing it's disk drive and freeing up one SATA slot.
My NAS requirement aren't to have terabytes of storage. I just need another place to put a copy of my most important files, and family photos. (right now my important, yet lightweight files are on GitHub)
Hot-Swap is also not something I am interested in since I don't mind powering the system down for a while to maintain it.
Btw. I have heard that Home Assistant cannot use internal disk space and can only use disk space from USB, or am I confusing it with the Raspberry Pi's limitations?
uneven crow
Well Home Assistant OS isn't a general purpose OS ... it uses one disk
I've made my recommendations for doing this right above ... up to you if you listen or not
visual vapor
If you're looking at something business critical I would recommend using something hosted by someone else (aka a cloud solution)
Or at the very least offsite backups to a cloud server
uneven crow
I mean... not cheaping out would be high on my list, but apparently not...
This data is critical while also who cares 
visual vapor
As soon as the word business critical and essential to get money then you shouldn't just make do
I have my Nas treated shittily right now, but that's because I'm happy to download everything again if shit hits the fan
I've still got plans to upgrade to something proper, and have cloud backups anyway because useful
Long term off site cheap storage also exists
uneven crow
Yup... RAID (well, ZFS) for all my key data, local+ cloud (encrypted) backups for everything
pale nimbus
As I said, I'm hosting my files on GitHub, Google cloud storage and I want to add NAS as another place.
Those files are indeed critical and I definitely do care. No reason to make fun of me for trying to get stuff in place in a cheaper/different way. (Since it would cost me the same, just a different way).
uneven crow
The NAS has to be reliable, and I cannot accept losing my files anyhow since those are used by me to get a living
Then you tell us something different ... it's hard to recommend anything if you don't know what you want 😉
If you don't mean what you first wrote then the laptop is fine
If you do mean it then it's not fine
pale nimbus
Still, why is a dedicated nas better than a laptop? Is it due to a raid support? From my knowledge, raid is a solution that can increase reliability, right?
uneven crow
- It's designed to be on 24x365
- Multiple disks means RAID means protection from disk failure
- You can swap a failed disk while it's running, which reduces the risks of further hardware failure and total data loss
Laptops aren't intended for 24x7 use - sure you can but the odds of them failing are higher