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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.
I have been running two usb3 based raid-1 arrays for over 10 years and I had zero failures, zero corruption's and plenty of speed (ssd's over dedicated usb3 ports).
The disks are on a UPS (a very small one) to avoid powerlosses due to power failures.
SSDs draw less power than HDDs, first of all. But regardless, if the enclosure chipset is poor quality and/or hasn't been designed to run 24/7 it can overheat and disconnect intermittently or permanently.
And that's without going into the quality of the USB and drivers on the host.
You either lucked out or you've been having silent file corruptions going for 10 years without realizing. What filesystems do you have on those disks?
I use an expensive JBOD USB/e-SATA BOX to host 4 ssd's (nowadays, but those has been hdd's until 2022) connected via usb3. The box has a huge fan too.
I think the issue is not USB itself but how cheap you go with your enclosure...
No, can confirm no data corruption. Can I be 100% sure? No I cannot of course.
I use EXT4, which again never gave me issues whatsoever. So far.
You are absolutely right! Thank you!
As much as I would have fun learning about RAID and stuff, I don’t think I need so much space and money spent right now. I will probably just buy one drive for now. If needed, I’ll buy another one.
Do you recommend any special HDDs? Or something to watch out for? As the drive is going to be running 24/7 basically.
There is one thing to watch out for called SMR and CMR technologies. CMR is the classic tech, SMR a recent one. SMR makes the tracks on the HDD platters overlap, allowing the manufacturer to pack more data on them, and to use fewer platters. But it comes at the cost of writing performance, basically SMR drives will take long pauses every once in a while when writing large amounts of data.
You don't want a SMR drive for a 24/7, instant access drive so you'll have to watch out for this spec. SMR is ok for a cold backup drive because it doesn't matter, you leave the backup program to do its thing however long it takes and you disconnect when it's done. But you don't want to take a long break while you're doing something with your main live drive.
Other than that anything from Seagate, WD or Toshiba will be ok. People will swear by one or other of these brands but it's pretty much the same.
This page will tell you if a drive is SMR or CMR by the model number: https://nascompares.com/answer/list-of-wd-cmr-and-smr-hard-drives-hdd/
Awesome, thanks!