The solution works really well though - a reliable, name-brand SSD (sic) in an old $100 Dell Latitude as the workhorse. The Latitudes allow changing the charging profile in BIOS to "always plugged in" amongst the other power friendly things (disable TurboBoost, etc.). Built in UPS, keyboard, monitor, wifi/eth; portable, quiet and with the right tuning (disabling a lot of modules in GRUB or module blacklists) runs most of the time without kicking the fan on. I run 2, one doing all the work and another backing it up. I run with only a partition encrypted (requires manual unlock after boot, my choice) so that I can remote login after boot to mount that, never have to actually open the laptop unless, say, wifi goes south. Laptop dies (they never do), just pull the SSD and slap in another one it's Linux it'll boot.