Or is this a bad idea?
Reading through !selfhosted, I think I have found a new hobby. I have an old laptop HP ProBook 450 G5 4WU81ES.
16gb ram, solid CPU, shitty integrated gpu, and only 256gb ssd. Barely enough for system and some apps. Battery life maybe 30min unplugged so I take it as an UPS.
So the question again is, can I have permanently plugged external hdd to use as extension for this purpose?
People host stuff on Raspberry Pis, so why not a laptop. One limit you might have is USB speeds, especially if you want to add more drives.
Just so you know it is possible, you can probably disable sleep or other things the laptop does by default when you close the lid, so you can leave it running while the lid is closed.
Did this with my old Dell laptop (that is running Debian server now), and now I access it over ssh while the lid is closed and very rarely open the lid and do stuff on the actual device directly.
That’s a MacBook in the image, you can’t do that on macOS. :^)
Some laptops get pretty overheated when you do that.
Yeah I know laptop itself is not a problem just wondering about stability of USB connected disk. Got some good replies already I will give it a shot
I don’t think it would be a problem. I have 4 usb drives hooked up to a Mac mini M1 that I use for coding and running Plex. Very rarely do I have any issues.
256 GB is plenty. I start most of my servers at 30 GB and add space as necessary. Less for Linux.
I guess it shows what a noob am I, planning to use Windows lmao. Never used Linux tbh but I get it in these cases
Highly recommend installing Proxmox or just a server version of a distribution. Much lower OS resource requirement means more available for everything else.
In the end, you can chuck Windows back on if the experiment doesn’t work out.
Is the internal drive replaceable? That might be a better option. Alternatively, 256gb is more than enough to install Linux (or proxmox) and serve a lot of useful apps. You only need a ton of space if you are planning on storing media.
