this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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Selfhosted

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Can I use external hard drive with laptop for self hosting? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/selfhosted
38 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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?

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[–] darkan15 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

That's a MacBook in the image, you can't do that on macOS. :^)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes you can: sudo pmset disablesleep 1

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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 :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Sounds like it needs a Linux Upgrade. I run a MacBookpro with Ubuntu for one of my servers

[–] AbidanYre 2 points 1 year ago

Some laptops get pretty overheated when you do that.