When I think NAS, I think lots and lots of storage, with SATA or SAS or NVMe if money is no object. I don't see the value in a NAS using external drives... and if you do, maybe your wifi router can do it, mine all have USB ports that I think they can use as storage to run samba, if that floats your boat.
Should be more than enough for a simple Linux NAS looking at the passmark of that cpu, it does not require much ram, OS drive size, etc...
Raspberry pi with external USB drive is quite common, most of the advantage of a more fancy NAS (file available everywhere in your network and outside if you want it regardless of what else is going on with your other device) will be there and if the performance-storage size is big enough for your need, there you go, excellent use of old laptop and a NAS with not a bad power usage, mouse-keyboard-monitor directly available.