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.
That’s a MacBook in the image, you can’t do that on macOS. :^)
Yes you can: sudo pmset disablesleep 1
Ah, okay! I remember this being discussed when I saw this image posted for the first time, and that’s where I got that info from.
I took the screen off my old dell laptop and turned it into a mini blade server with built in UPS. It ran for years. I have no doubt the battery was knackered by the end.
The only reason I replaced it with a Mac Mini 2012 was because it didn’t support usb3 and 4K video saturated the usb bandwidth.
Now my 2012 runs Ubuntu server + docker for those interested :)
Some laptops get pretty overheated when you do that.