Making a Old Laptop a Server

[Nano Adam]

I have a old laptop that is a i3 with a 500gb hard drive and 4gb ram. I was wondering what would happen if I made into a server and made it run 24/7. I was just thinking about maybe like an archive server with not that important data. 

 

Thanks

[Inversion]

I'm no expert but I'm not sure that's the best idea in the world. The fact that it only has a 500GB hard drive means that transfer times will be slow, it also means that you'll be running the OS from the same drive as you're storing the data which is not ideal. You'll have no redundancy at all which is kinda the point of the server (I know you said the data isn't that important but still). If you need to access the data from other devices in the house then just making your main PC accessible over the network or plugging an external HDD into the back of a router (a lot have USB ports) would probably be better, not to mention that old laptops aren't very power efficient.

[Nano Adam]

Would anything happen to the battery? And also, I would use the "server" for installing like Apache and PhpMyAdmin on it. 

39 minutes ago, Inversion said:

I'm no expert but I'm not sure that's the best idea in the world. The fact that it only has a 500GB hard drive means that transfer times will be slow, it also means that you'll be running the OS from the same drive as you're storing the data which is not ideal. You'll have no redundancy at all which is kinda the point of the server (I know you said the data isn't that important but still). If you need to access the data from other devices in the house then just making your main PC accessible over the network or plugging an external HDD into the back of a router (a lot have USB ports) would probably be better, not to mention that old laptops aren't very power efficient.

 

[Inversion]

12 hours ago, ammar_code said:

Would anything happen to the battery? And also, I would use the "server" for installing like Apache and PhpMyAdmin on it. 

 

Unsure on the battery thing, it would probably ruin it being on all the time and plugged in but I'm unsure if it would become unsafe. It's not an impossibility

[Nano Adam]

8 hours ago, Inversion said:

Unsure on the battery thing, it would probably ruin it being on all the time and plugged in but I'm unsure if it would become unsafe. It's not an impossibility

How about taking the battery out of the laptop plugged into a UPS 

[Boomwebsearch]

22 hours ago, ammar_code said:

I have a old laptop that is a i3 with a 500gb hard drive and 4gb ram. I was wondering what would happen if I made into a server and made it run 24/7

Most of the concerns would be that the computer's drive would fail faster than with normal hard drives since having to take on a load which it was not designed to handle. I would recommend NAS or server grade drives that are good to run 24/7.

7 minutes ago, ammar_code said:

How about taking the battery out of the laptop plugged into a UPS 

Its not a good idea to run the computer without a battery, directly into a wall outlet, since the battery does help with filtering out some surges and under-voltage situations. But, the battery will most likely fail very soon, since they are not meant to be used as being a UPS power source. If you would need to proceed with using the laptop as a server, take the battery out and store in a cool, low moisture, and nonflammable environment (if you do want to use it in the future), and use a good UPS with line-interactive technology instead of standby, or use an UPS with online power technology for protecting against over-voltages and under-voltages, and delivering power to the load sooner than with a UPS that relies on standby technology.

 

Because of the overall reliability, power efficiency, and longevity factors associated with running a laptop as a server, I would rather recommend a redundant NAS server solution, but if you do opt to use a laptop with non-redundant storage, please make sure that you keep your data backed up in the case of hardware failure making your data inaccessible.