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?
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