So, I have an old 3rd or 4th gen Intel NUC that’s I used to use to run Kodibuntu back in the day. I’m thinking of repurposing it into a low power home server to run the *arr suite, Jellyfin and nextcloud plus maybe some other bits. Nothing too taxing that I can see.
Obviously I need hard drive space to go with this. Is a USB enclosure, directly attached, going to be fast enough? Or do I need to go to a NAS of some kind? Alternatively, my router has a USB connection for a HDD - would that be better?
Disclaimer: this is not from experience so perhaps someone who do run servers with USB HDDs can comment on long term stability of USB as an interface.
Technically speaking, even USB 3 gen 1 (5Gb/s (gigabits per sec)) is far more than enough to saturate a broadband connection (probably under 1Gb/s). Assuming you’re going to use mechanical HDDs, best case they can transfer around 200MB/s (that’s megabytes per sec)), so no problem there either.
You might want to use external 3.5 inch HDDs as they have separate power supplies (less picky on power supplied from USB) and are much more likely to be CMR (which performs better than SMR, best if you check the specific model’s spec to make sure it is CMR) than 2.5 inch ones.
I’ve had a USB drive connected to my server for years with no issues other than being slow. It’s a 5400 rpm 2.5" drive connected over USB2.