The model is an HP Presario CQ57 Notebook PC:
- AMD C-50 Processor (1 GHz)
- 2 GB of DDR3 RAM (obviously I need more)
- 64-bit
- Ralink RT5390 802.11b/g/n WiFi Adapter (It also has an Ethernet port but I’m unsure of how to find the details for it)
Currently I’m running Cockpit in Proxmox, which works fantastic by the way. But I saw this guide where they suggest splitting your compute and NAS, so I figured I could finally put this dusty win7 laptop to work.
The battery definitely has an issue, as it only works when plugged in. Should I bother with this laptop, or should I just buy a Pi or something? If I do use this, should I stick with Cockpit, or switch to something else like TrueNAS or Openmediavault? I have my 4 drives in a ZFS striped mirror configuration, with data traveling over USB (which sucks considering the non-USB 3.0 ports on the laptop…)
Once again, thanks for your guidance!


It’s not going to make a very good NAS. It looks like it only has USB 2 and 100M ethernet. That’s going to be slower than the NAS I built with the Pentium 4 desktop I got for free in 2007.