Trunas with Tailscale/headscale/NetBird as far as software and security. As far as hardware, you want storage that is not attached via usb. Either an off the shelf nas solution or a diy nas would work. There are a few YouTubers that touched on this, hardware haven and raidowl I think.
Reliability of connection to the drives, especially during unscheduled power cycles. USB is known for random drops, or not picking the drive up before all your other services have started, and can cause the need for extra troubleshooting. Can run fine… or it could not. This is in reference to storage drives, not OS drives.