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?
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 :)