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I use secondhand Thinkpads.

Always a keyboard and screen ready. And battery saved me a number of times when power needed to be cut in th house for maintenance.

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That's great, and yeah I've thought about how much sense this makes too, but how can I attach 4x HDDs using SATA3 to an old laptop to function as a NAS? That's my only dilemma.

4xhdd on a nas deserves pro level equipment. Not secondhand knock offs. Either do it well, or do it simple. I choose simple.

I don't know. I run 6x cheap SSD's on and old LSI card plugged into my ancient i5. Works fine.

Maybe look at second hand HP Microserver's on Ebay (or similar)?

The ancient G7 ("Generation 7") ones are dirty cheap, fit 4X SATA hard drives, and use something like 12 watts of power.

The newer G8 ("Generation 8") ones are significantly higher performance, but also draw a lot more power. Socketed cpu's though, so they can be changed (as I've done). :)

They don't have in-built battery backup though, unlike laptops.

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