I know you said you decided against it, but perhaps reconsider USB?

I was facing the same dilemma a few months ago, and ultimately decided that trying to break out those internal connections wasn't worth it. The problem with these tiny PCS is that they are not designed with arrays of drives in mind. There's typically not enough room in the case to properly add an additional drive, so you end up running the sata cord through a hole in the case and using an external drive and power supply anyway.

USB on the other hand, is intended to connect to an external device. The connectors themselves are more robust and they can even supply power.

I use my external drive for data I don't have to access constantly, like templates and backups. 90% of the time it's just sitting in standby. If you need to access a lot of data constantly, you might start to notice the slower USB speeds; if you can segment your data, keeping your "working" files on the internal drive and just use the external for storage, you probably won't notice the USB at all. It's certainly not the perfect solution, but with your particular restrictions, it might be the better tool for the job.

The other option would be Network Attached Storage, essentially a low power computer that just exists to allow other computers to access its storage. You can probably find an old, cheap desktop PC for sale locally, likely for less than it would cost you to bring out those internal ports and buy a drive enclosure and power supply.

I'm using cloudflare as my nameserver and the free API seems to work just fine with ddclient.

Steam controller or PlayStation, depending on the game.

I have a couple Libre Office files where I document the non-technical stuff for my own quick reference, like network layout in Draw, or IP and port assignments in Calc. I use a git repo to store and organize podman scripts, systemd unit files, configs, etc. Probably not the most elegant solution, but it's simple and FOSS.

Reverse proxy is Nginx Proxy Manager.

This might be a good start: https://github.com/ecdye/zram-config

Libre Office "Base"

Someone probably just dropped a reel while swapping the tape on their mainframe and has spent the last week trying to roll it all back up.

Another option would be to redirect logs to a ramdisk. That's what I'm doing on a RPI to try to minimize writes on the sd card. The biggest downside is that you lose your logs when you power off the device, but if the alternative is not having logs at all, I think it's still a better option.

Of course, installing a proper drive is still the best solution.

It never stopped working for me, besides the outage the other day. I'm guessing it's because I'm a mod for a sub. They said from the beginning that they wouldn't break things for mods, and surprisingly, it seems that they've kept their word on that.

Not much any more. I brought it to PAX this year to keep me entertained while waiting in lines, but otherwise it's barely come out of its case this year.

I don't blame the deck, though I've scarcely played any video games this year, in general. When I got it, I played a bunch of the Witcher 3, but then they released an update that completely broke the game on decks. After that, my go-to game (when I play) became Cities Skylines, which just feels far more natural with a mouse.

Just bought Palworld, but haven't had a chance to play yet.

Jerboa for now.

Definitely switching to Boost ASAP, though.