It's not the drive space that's the issue, but rather holding >8GB of UTXOs (thanks to ordinals, monkey jpegs, stamps, etc) in 8GB of RAM and needing to verify it all, not being able to, and then needing to thrash a slow external and poorly powered USB drive in the attempt. A new sync is now probably out of the question. Continuing with one already synced will be a struggle up until each block takes >10mins to verify, at which point... dead.