I once did a whole bunch of research looking into turning my old gaming laptop into a Nas/Homeserver.

And buying the supporting hardware to get more than the three SATA ports it had (mcpie adapter and SATA card and a power supply) would have been more jank and expensive than buying a used desktop in a big case and using that instead.

I’d say it does make sense, the only thing I lost is power efficiency, but I’m trying to not think too hard about that :D

With the right software most consumer hardware can be a decent server, although not having ECC ram kinda sucks. Usually most motherboards have enough SATA ports for a few drives and if not, just add a PCIE card that does.