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?
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.