2y ago

Can I use external hard drive with laptop for self hosting?

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?

38 comments

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. :^)
  
  Some laptops get pretty overheated when you do that.
- 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
  
  I don’t think it would be a problem. I have 4 usb drives hooked up to a Mac mini M1 that I use for coding and running Plex. Very rarely do I have any issues.

USB to SATA connectors as found in these external hard-drive enclosures are often very bad. You can try to get some better ones and pry the hard-drive out of the case, or if that Laptop still has a DVD drive, you can get an adapter to replace it with a hard-drive that connects directly via SATA.
- Shucking is the way

Can do but be aware that the drive will eventually die, so backup backup backup

256 GB is plenty. I start most of my servers at 30 GB and add space as necessary. Less for Linux.
- I guess it shows what a noob am I, planning to use Windows lmao. Never used Linux tbh but I get it in these cases
  
  Choosing linux is way more important than choosing the right server. Linux and docker compose is the way to go. With that, if you want to migrate to a new server it's super easy.
  
  Highly recommend installing Proxmox or just a server version of a distribution. Much lower OS resource requirement means more available for everything else.
  In the end, you can chuck Windows back on if the experiment doesn't work out.

It will work really well, but the difference between a laptop and a server is operational longevity. Laptops are meant to work for workloads for a few hours, whereas dedicated servers can work 24/7 for years sometimes because of how they are made and tested.
However, if the intensity of workload is light, a laptop can also run for a few months provided temps are well maintained. My tiny RPi ran for a few months till I manually shut it down.
Also, backups and backups.
- My tiny RPi ran for a few months till I manually shut it down.
  ...for a couple months? Huh, I've got a rpi 4 and the little bastard has been running "almost nonstop" for 3 years and a half. And he is still kicking.
  
  I love my Pi too much to let it run for so long 🥰
  Plus I don't have a power backup; uptime is only as good as my power (which goes out once every 4 months)
- Just for fun I thought I'd check the uptime of the server I'm logged into at work. 1391 days.
  
  That sounds like a security nightmare.

I did this for my first year and a bit for self hosting. It worked great! Really no problems with a USB 3.0 HDD station.
I actually used an HP probook 450 G1 IIRC.
- @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.
  
  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

Go for it. the specs on the laptop are good enough to run plenty of stuff as a server. As long as the drive can be mounted you should be good. Your backups should be somewhere else.

No reason why it wouldn't work! Worst case the drive is pretty slow, but you do have an internal SSD so you can put OS and databases on the SSD and use the external drive for bulk storage.
I had a RPi set up that way for a couple years, worked fine as a simple NAS and Kodi for the TV!

There are certainly better ways to do it, but lots of people use external disks. I would put anything that needs speed on the SSD (so like a database or whatever) and anything else (media, isos, etc) on the external drive. It's probably also worth thinking about a backup strategy, at least for anything there that matters.

I'm using a name brand external HDD for mass storage. Still using the internal ssd for everything else but I'm not interested in the cost of a multi-terrabyte SSD to do it internally.
Just have a backup plan in place because drives fail.

Is the internal drive replaceable? That might be a better option. Alternatively, 256gb is more than enough to install Linux (or proxmox) and serve a lot of useful apps. You only need a ton of space if you are planning on storing media.

That's the setup when I started.
I picked up an x230 with a broken screen and used it as a hypervisor (proxmox 5.4).
I used whatever resources available to me at the time and learned weird networking (passing through nics for a router on a stick configuration).
I used that x230 until the mobo gave up.
- I have some basic stuff (VPN gateway, a web server etc) on my X230 as well

Sounds fun. But as others have said, plan a backup strategy like in the cloud or something.

38 comments