Selfhosted

Ok first of all disregard any advice to connect a permanent drive with USB. It will suck. You will get disconnects and maybe even filesystem failures. And yes you can recover from failures (most of the time) but why polish a turd?

If you can add an internal hdd to the NUC that's all you need. Get one in whatever size you need and you're good to go.

If you want to safeguard against that HDD crapping itself then you can use a secondary HDD on USB. Connecting a HDD occasionally to USB for backups is ok. Keeping it connected 24/7 isn't. Use a specialized backup software like Borg Backup, take a backup of whatever you consider essential data, and keep the backup HDD in the drawer the rest of the time.

You don't have to get an external HDD btw, you get a crappy USB enclosure and a crappy HDD with a shiny brand on it. Get a regular HDD from a good brand, it can also be a 2.5" (laptop) HDD, and an USB SATA adapter. Also, Orico makes some nice HDD cases for drawer storage.

If a second HDD is too expensive for you get an optical unit (can be USB, can be internal + USB-SATA adapter) and burn backups to Blu Ray discs from Verbatim with parity data created with par2. Store the written discs in zip-up CD wallets or jewel cases, not in bulk spindles. You can also burn DVDs if BRs are too expensive where you live. DVDs can also be long-lived if stored properly and any backup is better than no backup. But BR are really best for durability.

Don't listen to advice about making RAID this and RAID that. How much space do you need? They make 20TB HDDs nowadays. Get one HDD and be done with it. Do you want to spend 5x more and also have to buy a NAS to store them, and learn about RAID levels and in how many ways they can fail? Do you need 100 TB? Do yourself a favor and get one single drive and take periodical backups and you'll be golden.

8TB SATA SSD can be had for less than $300

My home server is also on a NUC and I just connected a 2TB SSD to it via a USB cable. I know that's not ideal but I didn't want to become like an enterprise IT guy at home. Jellyfin rocks with this setup. YMMV.

if the cpu performance and memory capacity is still enough, i'd recommend upgrading the storage. SSDs are reportedly getting more expensive, but it isn't that bad yet.

running an external drive through some kind of USB 3.X connection would also be possible, although at reduced speed. (won't matter with a HDD, obviously)

I'm strongly in favor of keeping things compartmentalized. I have two main servers: One is a Proxmox host with a powerful CPU and a few hard drives set up in a fast but not-so redundant array (I use ZFS, but my setup is similar to RAID10). Then a have second server that runs TrueNAS; the CPU is slower, but it has a large amount of storage (120TB physical) arrayed in an extremely fault-tolerant configuration.

My Proxmox box runs every service on my network, but all that gets stored the hard drives are the main boot disks. It backs up daily, so I'm not so concerned about drive failure. All my data is stored on the NAS, and it's shared with the VMs via NFS, SMB, or iSCSI, depending on which is more appropriate.

For you, I'd recommend building a NAS, and keep all your important data there. Your NUC can host your services, and they can pull data from the NAS. The 256GB on your NUC will be more than enough to host whatever services you need.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

7 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 12 acronyms.

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Get a decent machine and run true as scale.

All of these things can be installed as helm/k8s “apps” and they almost self configure.

They update aswell.

It’s spectacular.

Then throw drives at it.

I have one “pool” of storage that’s a raid 10 for things I care about and then a giant zfs “jbod “ that has no backups for just mass storage of things that I don’t really care about.

Attach 2 external disks via USB 3. Add them to a ZFS mirror. Use the mirror for storage. Buy a third one for backups.

Performance is great and reliability should be pretty good assuming your disk enclosures aren't junk. I'm using WD Elements and WD MyBook. I've had some problems with one WD Elements where its SATA to USB controller was overheating causing it to disconnect under extreme prolonged load. I solved that by slapping a small heatsink on it and drilling a hole in the case immediately above it for ventilation. I haven't had failures on this pool since then. The other pool I run hasn't had failures since inception circa 2019. Not a single squeak. It even uses a USB hub to split one port between 2 disks. 🥹

I'm also using a couple of these and they've been supremely reliable. They're identical to this.