I’d avoid super short USB drives if you can as they tend just to be SD cards in disguise.

If possible for dB stuff I would recommend using actual drives as lots of reads and writes will very quickly wear out most removable storage devices.

Proxmox and truenas for all my physical boxes and then Debian for all my VMs and LXCs. I’m not all that adventurous when it comes to OS choice as I found things that worked years ago and I’ve stick with them ever since as I’ve not seen anything that really looks like it does anything interesting/new that makes it worth switching.