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. :^)
Yes you can: sudo pmset disablesleep 1
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