I got a Presario R4000 laptop last week and have since been migrating our old server over to it. In the past I have always used a traditional full tower with a bunch of internal drives for the server. But with the advent of 64 bit laptops and large external USB2 high-speed drives it occured to me that a laptop would have a number of advantages. The system I ended up getting was a Compaq R4000 with a 2.2 ghz Amd64 cpu, 1gb of ram ($1100). Then I got two 1tb Lacie external usb2 drives ($740 each). One for the mail fileserver and one to back it up to nightly. I put Kubuntu 64 on it and so far it seems to be working well. The advantages I thought of were as follows:

Price: While I could have saved a few hundred on the equivelent hardware, if you consider a lcd screen, ups, keyboard, mouse, etc. A tower was about the same price. Plus laptops seem to retain their value a little better over time. When it comes time to upgrade, this will make a nice portable workstation.

Size: Well...

Power/Heat: The laptop uses cpu scaling and shuts off the video card when the lid is closed. When it is not being heavily used the thermal fan does not even come on. Since the main problems with the towers have been dust in the fans it seems that this will work a little better as the power supply does not have a fan and the cpu-fan is rarely on. Plus having a built in UPS that will last several hours is kind of nice.

Speed: The memory is not as fast (in this particular laptop) as it would be in a equivalent desktop. I am not sure how much of a difference this will actually make.

Anyway... I looked around on google and the concencus was that using a laptop as a server was a terrible idea. But I don't know if their main complaints are an issue any longer now that laptops have powerful cpu's and external drives are fast and cheep. I was wondering if anyone knows of any other reason that this is not done, or if others are sucessfully doing the same thing.

I always thought using laptops for servers was discouraged due to heating problems. You should really try to cool it more, but if you say the fan rarely comes on, it shouldn't be a problem...

Cooling and expense have always been major concerns.

Beyond that, there is also the problem of expandability.

On a normal server, you could easily add more/bigger drives, a tape drive, etc. With a laptop, you are looking at a potential Medusa of external drives and USB hubs. Plus when you start really pounding the USB, you could run into bandwidth problems.

Reliability is also a problem.

If you are running a normal server, and your PSU/RAM/CPU/whatever goes out, you would be able to throw in a spare part for a temporary fix, or even run out to a local PC supply store to buy a replacement.

With a laptop, this just isn't possible. You can't easily open the machine up, and even if you could, it's unlikely you are going to have many spare laptop parts laying around, and likewise, finding laptop parts locally would be a challenge.

That can lead to unacceptable downtime.

Also, while the built in screen may seem like an advantage, 95% of the time, the is no need for a display on a dedicated server, and even when you do need to actually get onto the system to do work, you could easily do it remotely from any machine on the LAN. Many people don't even have video cards in their servers. They run them remotely, and install on a serial console.

So in reality, the video hardware in the laptop is going to waste, and is just an added expense you don't need (though as you said, when the server is retired, it could be used as a laptop again).

Overall, laptops are not suitable for any serious and mission-critical server applications. For personal use, it is passable, but given the cheap prices for normal PC hardware, and the small motherboards and cases that are now available it doesn't provide much of an advantage.

It's also worth pointing out that laptop chipsets are not optimized for server use; they're optimized to extend battery life as much as possible and throughput is not very good.

Even if you buy a laptop that happens to use a true desktop chipset, you are severely limiting performance and expandability. The best you'll see is a laptop with a software-based RAID 0/1 controller (on a server you want^H^H^H^Hneed hardware RAID for decent performance) limiting storage to 200GB maximum (unless you want to run external drives via USB or Firewire. On a server, you don't. No, you don't. Really.), expandability to 4GB exists on *some* laptops, but those SO-DIMMs generally offer less performance than the desktop counterparts, not to mention the total lack of any Xeon-based laptops; the best you will get right now is an Athlon 64 or a Pentium 4.

Also, laptop hard drives, with VERY rare (and EXPENSIVE: 5x the cost of equivalent 3.5" models) exception, are much slower than hard drives for desktops. In general, hard drives for laptops are 4800rpm or 5400rpm with high access times, and while *some* laptop hard drives running at 7200rpm exist, they're extremely expensive; it's actually cheaper to buy SCSI hard drives than fast 2.5" IDE drives for laptops.

Tasks for a laptop with a desktop chipset: non-linear video editing on the go (if you're making a movie or other video production it might be great to prototype some of your scenes right on the set), CAD out in the field, and graphic design on the go.

Tasks NOT suitable for ANY laptop: file serving, web serving, backup server, DBMS, or any other kind of server task where performance matters at all. There are one or two laptop motherboards which offer the kind of performance you want for a server, but you'll end up spending more on the laptop and 7200RPM drives in software-based RAID0 configuration than you would to get an entry-level single Xeon server with hardware-based SATA RAID5 storage, and you'd have a fault-tolerant storage subsystem to boot (no pun intended). Again, even with those exceptional laptop motherboards, expansion is extremely limited in comparison to even entry-level server motherboards.

Well... it seems that everyone agrees that this was a pretty bad idea. Maybe I should have asked this before I bought it.

The reliability issue seems like a good point. My solution was to buy two identical laptops and use the extra as a spare workstation. If the server fails then swap the hdd with the backup and plug it back in, then send the broken one in for repair.

I can't say I have seen a problem with the external hard-drives. The LACIE's have usb2 firewire and firewire800 interfaces. If we needed a lot of them we could daisy chain them with the firewire interface.

Heat has not been an issue so far. I have had it going at 100% for about a week now (running xaos) and making thumbnails out of about 400gb of images. It blows a lot of hot air under load, but has not gotten excessively hot.

I should note that this is for a small video/print advertising business (14 employees) and is used for email, samba, postgres, apache, and ftp. Load comes in periodic spikes which are not constant so what may be more on an issue in large networks is less so in this case.

In any case, thanks for the advice.

If its not under constant load, that I cant see there being a problem.

But another part of me keeps reminding me that a laptop isnt built to be powered on 24/7. When I come to think about it though, laptops run at a lower voltage to keep the heat down, so its not likely that the parts should wear out that quick.

In my personal opinion you might of been best off buying a 1u rack case, they're only about 1.5 inches high, you would have been able to fix it to the side of your desk and then maybe purchase a VGA splitter switch so you can switch your monitor between your server and your desktop, or simply use SSH on your desktop. The advantage with 1u cases and power packs is that they are designed to be on ALL the time.