>>1396315 It depends on your connection speed, some USB boxes also go to sleep If you only use the laptop for that, put it internally and do a minimal Linux/Windows installation
I was looking at a basic linux install with the ethermet port configured for 10 Mb as I only have 30Mb upload.
My hope with the external stotage is to use hardware I already have. I will keep the point about external boxes sleeping in mind if I end up with weird behaviour.
HP Z600 dual Xeon thing running Ubuntu with two external SAS RAID 10 arrays. Two arrays each of 4 x 4TB HDD's. I've also got a less power hungry Z400 single Xeon with a quad external HBA card so I'm going to move the arrays onto that to free up the Z600. The second Z600 is a Windows 11 box that never gets switched on.
Z400 already has seven internal drives and there's two more SAS drives waiting to join the arrays so it will be mounting a total of 17 HDD's. Eventually.