Old laptop + lots of sata drives. Possible?

I have an old laptop, I want to turn it into a media server, possibly some software raid. Make a custom cooling case for the HDDs, maybe 8 of them plus a power supply for just the HDDs.

Is there any way I can attach the SATA drives (not USB, since it only has USB 1.1)?

Only thing you can do is use SATA PCMCIA adapter, it will give you two SATA ports. But you must have PCMCIA slot.

Not really. There are probably some eSATA PCMCIA cards available, but those would only have one or two ports on 'em.

Prolly about the best you could do with it is use it as a terminal for a NAS box... i.e., hook the hard drives up in a separate network enclosure and map the array to the laptop. If you're going to go to that trouble though, you'd probably be better off just putting together a cheap machine that has SATA ports onboard.