How to turn an old Laptop or PC into a NAS

Your Laptop may be old. But this way, it’s not useless.

By Prajith
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Got an old laptop? No, don’t throw it in the closet yet. There are innumerable things that you could do with it where it doesn’t have to be the useless chunky box (which would be the case otherwise), and NAS is definitely one of them.

 
How to turn an old Laptop or PC into a NAS

Okay, but NAS? What is it?

 

NAS is an acronym for network-attached storage. It’s basically turning your laptop into a network-based hard drive which can be accessed by other devices by connecting to the network created.

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Sounds good! How do I convert my old laptop into a NAS? Well, follow the below steps.

Step 1: Head straight to FreeNAS’s website and download (here’s the link) the current stable release of the technology, i.e., FreeNAS 9.10 onto your old laptop. Do make a note that the FreeNAS’s latest stable release requires a 64-bit hardware and 8GB of RAM.

Step 2: Now, after downloading FreeNAS 9.10 onto your old laptop, unzip it. You’ll find a .iso file, create a USB bootable drive using the Microsoft Windows USB/DVD download tool.

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Step 3: Then, restart your laptop and boot it from the USB bootable drive with the FreeNAS installer in it. In case you are wondering how to boot your laptop from a USD drive, search on the internet with your particular laptop model number or the current operating system it is running since the process can differ from one laptop to the other.

Step 4: Now, if you have followed the above steps correctly, you will be asked to install the FreeNAS technology as a partition or embedded install. Although embedded install is preferable, it totally depends on your preferences. Choose either one of them to finish the installation process.

Step 5: Once you are done with the installation process, you should see a server interface on the laptop screen where you can set the username and passwords to connect from other devices. Also, look out for the IP address of the current server, you’ll need it to access the NAS from other devices.

Step 6: Now, open a browser on your new laptop (or PC), enter the IP address of the NAS server and input the username and password and voila! You can now access the content on your old laptop.

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