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?
well, yes and no. It’s definitely behind on updates, but it’s running linux and isn’t web facing. Security is outsourced to the firewalls/IDS etc. If someone is trying to hack it, they’re already past the firewalls so we’re fucked by default even if the server is 100% secure.