I had a 10Gb USB Icy Box enclosure, speeds were ok but cooling was simply inadequate. Now I just build a pc with an Asus B550-Plus and a 5600G, idles at 19W with the drives in standby but with three Fans active. I though about going with a mini pc and a better external enclosure, but that would’ve been much more expensive and I doubt that I would’ve saved that much power with that anyway
For that the laptop has to support a charge level on a hardware level though, just setting a limit will cause it to constantly switch between using the battery and charging the battery which would be much worse than keeping it at 100%. Most older and budget systems don’t support that
Using the laptops battery isn’t a good long term solution though as having it plugged in all the time will wear it down fast, not to mention that the battery is build for maximum energy density and not durability/safety. It just simply not working when it is finally needed is almost a pretty light issue when it can just also inflate and pose a huge fire risk next to all of your data. Laptops are great power efficient platforms though for servers
Consumer external hard drive enclosures may offer a JBOD mode, I had one from Icy Box for a few days, the transfer rates were good but the little fan didn’t cool the hard drives well enough while accessing them. Ended up buying a Define R5 instead
I think just mentioning the LFA suffices