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To NAS or not to NAS?
(alien.top)
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this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
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I mean, a NAS is literally Network Attached Storage. Your old laptop has storage and, presumably, is on the network; that's a NAS.
The reason why people have standalone NAS boxes is because a laptop usually can't hold all that much in the way of storage. My NAS has 42 TB of addressable storage; that's not really viable on a laptop. Add in any form of redundancy (my 42 TB of storage comes from five hard drives), caching (32 GB of RAM helping with a read cache), or other services and people quickly outgrow a laptop or even a miniPC.
I'm generally of the camp that only have storage and storage-based services on my NAS, so the CPU of my NAS is super weak compared to my actual home server. There is a good chance the CPU in your laptop might be stronger than my NAS's CPU even. Other people combine their NAS with their home server, needing a stronger CPU as a result.
As for why a prebuilt? Some people don't want to delve into that and just want Storage That Works (tm). I don't dive into networking content all that much, hence a prebuilt router instead of something using opnSense or something. I'm happy playing around in the guts of a storage box (it really isn't all that complicated), so I roll my own.