Thanks a lot! I was thinking the old laptop would be more powerful, but an extra card to pci-e and sata interface is worse from a reliability standpoint. I’ll go check out the selfhosting communities :)

This may be a good place to ask for advice, since I’m new to running a server myself and am now looking to set one up with old hardware I have lying around. I have a raspberry pi 5 lying around and an x230 laptop + an expresscard to pci-e x16 converter (I used it to run games with a GPU), which of these would be more worth it to invest in? I would like to run a file server with some hdd’s in raid 5, and use it to stream media and maybe run a Minecraft server. I would need a pi sata hat or a pci-e sata card.

Xavier renegade angel