The old laptop sounds ideal if you already have it plugged in, I’d start with that.
If you are buying a new device I’d look at the Cubietruck or the Odroid
I think I’m right that the time to serve the data will be an important metric, so vaults that reply with data quickly will do well. I think a 7200rpm disk will be worth having.
- Fast internet upload
- RAM
- Read speed of the disk/ card
- Enough CPU
But extra CPU won’t help if your internet upload, RAM, or disk read is slow. I plan on attaching a 1Tb drive to a Cubietruck via SATA 2. Probably splitting the drive into eight or ten seperate vaults.
I hope this will give quicker response time than an Odroid due to the fact the Odroid only has USB2. The Cubietruck is also fanless and so the noise won’t annoy me. Cubietruck also has Open Source firmware, so less chance of a hardware backdoor.
This is all pretty much just speculation at this point. No one knows for sure.