Can I use external hard drive with laptop for self hosting?
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?
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.
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.
USB to SATA connectors as found in these external hard-drive enclosures are often very bad. You can try to get some better ones and pry the hard-drive out of the case, or if that Laptop still has a DVD drive, you can get an adapter to replace it with a hard-drive that connects directly via SATA.
Choosing linux is way more important than choosing the right server. Linux and docker compose is the way to go. With that, if you want to migrate to a new server it's super easy.
It will work really well, but the difference between a laptop and a server is operational longevity. Laptops are meant to work for workloads for a few hours, whereas dedicated servers can work 24/7 for years sometimes because of how they are made and tested.
However, if the intensity of workload is light, a laptop can also run for a few months provided temps are well maintained. My tiny RPi ran for a few months till I manually shut it down.
My tiny RPi ran for a few months till I manually shut it down.
...for a couple months? Huh, I've got a rpi 4 and the little bastard has been running "almost nonstop" for 3 years and a half. And he is still kicking.
There are certainly better ways to do it, but lots of people use external disks. I would put anything that needs speed on the SSD (so like a database or whatever) and anything else (media, isos, etc) on the external drive. It's probably also worth thinking about a backup strategy, at least for anything there that matters.
@JustEnoughDucks I started with this setup. Proxmox on my laptop with an external 1 TB USB 3 drive added to proxmox as storage. It would work great for getting started and learning. I/O via USB 3 could be an issue so make sure you don't use this setup for intensive Read/Write operations. But use it as a lab setup and it would work great.
PS: Once I moved to bigger servers, I still use my laptop proxmox for testing services before I roll them out to my production servers.
The difference between them is surprisingly small. 35% maximum.
I have my new server still using the USB3.0 hub while I am designing and printing a case for my main PC.
Flexense did an analysis on 1-4 threads of file copy and other things.
Performance only started to really degrade at 3 thread count medium and large files.
File searching, file delete, duplication searching, disk space analysis, etc.. were all almost identical.
Though it pretty much negates all read benefit of ZFS mirrors and raid1, it is definitely fine for a home server with only 1-2 media streams. I definitely have run into IO bottlenecks, but not frequently. Though that was without a GPU and direct streaming. With storing everything in AV1 and h265 with an AV1 enabled GPU like the Arc380, actually it will be able to handle the IO needs, though I still am upgrading to sata
I'm using a name brand external HDD for mass storage. Still using the internal ssd for everything else but I'm not interested in the cost of a multi-terrabyte SSD to do it internally.
Just have a backup plan in place because drives fail.
Go for it. the specs on the laptop are good enough to run plenty of stuff as a server. As long as the drive can be mounted you should be good. Your backups should be somewhere else.
No reason why it wouldn't work! Worst case the drive is pretty slow, but you do have an internal SSD so you can put OS and databases on the SSD and use the external drive for bulk storage.
I had a RPi set up that way for a couple years, worked fine as a simple NAS and Kodi for the TV!
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.