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A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

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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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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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