how is the signal strength? did you open up the laptop to swap the ssd or something?

I’m a big fan of debian (with their netinstaller) for stuff like this, it allows you to pick the desktops you want to install during the install process and it does everything else for you

before you actually commit though, you should test the distros you’re interested in in a vm to get a gist for how it works

if this is a sata drive “SATA link power management” might work?

ik tomshardware reviews of SSDs have information on power consumption

one thing to consider is that some cheap SSDs don’t have power management, so they’ll consume way more power than others at idle.

For a server setup that’s always running you should consider if the slightly lower cost is worth the cost of electricity

organic maps ftw!