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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We welcome posts that include suggestions for good self-hosted alternatives to popular online services, how they are better, or how they give back control of your data. Also include hints and tips for less technical readers.
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An old laptop is a great way to run a server. They can be reasonably energy efficient and have their own built-in UPS, to protect against momentary power outages.
I replaced my laptop's old HDD with an SSD and added a 5tb external SSD for data storage. So far it's been excellent and a fun and useful learning experience.
Depending on your laptop's battery management system, keeping the laptop constantly connected to your charger could damage the battery and severely reduce its capacity. That happened to 2 batteries on my Dell xps 13
Very true, I’ve had several older laptops that this happened with as well. My current laptop will charge to 80% if it’s plugged in for too long.
I was thinking of creating a power management module myself that would have had a raspberry pi receiving periodic battery level readings and controlling a relay accordingly but the battery on the laptop was already messed up.
I don't know whether it's possible to recondition a messed up battery by managing the charge cycles.
Laptops tend to be energy efficient. Generally speaking the energy savings are not that great with it being turned off. You can check the power brick specifications. Take the watttage of the brick and multiply it by 8 (or however long you plan to keep it off during the night). Now divide that by 1000 and multiply by your electricity price (generally it's given out by kWh so if it's different where you live adjust the numbers accordingly). That's how much money you save per night
For example where I live from one of the providers the cost is 0.227 EUR/kWh (we could go down to 0.158 EUR/kWh if we use 2 timezone pricing since we only need the nighttime).
((60W × 8h) / 1000) × 0.227 EUR/kWh = 0.10896 EUR
So each day I turn off a 60W brick off for the night the maximum savings is ~11 cents or ~39 EUR per year. So that would answer your question of is it worth it. There is no real damage to the device for being plugged in 24/7. The battery may degrade, but at this stage battery capacity is irrelevant.
As for storage, external storage via USB is not going to be as fast, but in this case I doubt it will matter much, any peformance loss is likely to be negligable, though I can't be 100% certain. Try it out, worst case replace the internal drive later down the line if performance is an issue, though make sure that it's the I/O that is hampering performance and not let's say CPU or memory.