Published May 10, 2026, 8:00 PM EDT Ayush Pande is a PC hardware and gaming writer. When he's not working on a new article, you can find him with his head stuck inside a PC or tinkering with a server operating system. Besides computing, his interests include spending hours in long RPGs, yelling at his friends in co-op games, and practicing guitar. Building a Network-Attached Storage server from old hardware is the best way to repurpose systems that would otherwise gather dust into reliable backup solutions. While you could go for weaker systems released over a decade ago, most DIY NAS setups typically involve x86 machines capable of supporting at least a handful of storage drives. Contrast that with Raspberry Pi units, which are not only limited on the OS front, but are also incapable of powering 2–3 drives (unless you invest in expensive HATs and adapters), and you can see why these ARM-based single-board computers aren’t ideal for NAS tasks.…