I'm interested in repurposing the old laptop too - mostly for the Surveillance system add-in.
But I'm not sure I totally understand the above comment . . .
1. For an esata external drive box, using port mulitplier, it seems to be that it totally depends on whether the laptop's esata port is port mulitplier compatible.
If not, then what happens ? If you had two 1T drives, would it see just one big 2T drive ?
For example, what's going to happen if you attach this Rosewill box w/ or w/o port mulitplier compatibility, with four 1T drives:
Rosewill RSV-S4-X - 4-Bay
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816132029&cm_re=esata_storage-_-16-132-029-_-Product
They are including a port mulitplier compatible SATA card in that bundle, but of course that wouldn't end up being part of the equation with a laptop.
2. USB connected drives
Will Xpenology recognize USB attached drives in general ? just not as part of a RAID array ?