I upgraded to the Pi4 but I use this case. It has a daughter board that lets me use an m.2 SATA SSD over USB. But any USB to SATA adapter should work fine

I’d bet $1 it’s the SD card. My 3B+ used to have the same problem. Been running pis off some sort of SSD ever since, no issues.

Would it be bad practice?

No, it’s fine. Especially for people who self host. Use what you have available to you as best you can

Why would it be bad practice?

Depends on your use case. A gigabit connection and hard drives are fine for something like a personal media server or simple file storage but if you wanted to edit video or play games from the NAS, you might look into upgrading to SSDs and getting a faster connection to the PC

I have ports open for Wireguard and Plex. So far, no issues that I’m aware of. Time will tell

rpilocator

Assuming you are in the US link

Edit: at the time of posting, the above store was in stock. They go fast