I’ve been selfhosting a while. I run around 15 distinct services in docker containers, all on a single machine with a medium sized disk. It’s a small form factor, and I recently had to add space, so I’ve attached an external USB storage device.
It feels clunky.
At what point does a performant SAN/NAS make sense more than local storage? When did you make the jump?


When you run out of local storage…
If you have a single node, external USB storage is 100% fine. Even if you have more machines, if you don’t actually need a massive amount of storage, you can share that external drive as NFS.