I have used USB attached storage for media center purposes since the RPi1. I have never had issues. Since the Pi2, the Raspberries could power hdds just fine without having to attach an adapter to the HDD.
Since I have had the Vero4K, 2 harddrives stopped working and today I believe the 3rd is dying, because every 5-10min I hear a loud “bzzt” and streaming to my phone or even playback on the tv is becoming choppy (lot’s of reasons why that is happening but I can play them just fine from internal memory).
I wonder whether the USB port is capable of actually providing a stable current to the HDD. A few months ago, after an update, I also heard noises, as if the HDD was constantly spinning up. I didn’t pay much attention and it disappeared after a reboot.
Maybe it’s just my Vero4k, maybe it is an issue that has gone undetected since everyone has a different setup and a real hardware issue like this is usually not something you investigate because soo many other reasons could cause the symptoms.
I never wanted a real NAS because I didn’t see the point of it. But it has become clear now I cannot simply have 2 HDDs in my house: one connected to the Vero4K with all my photo albums, music and video media and an offline backup with everything except video media. Because I am relying on that backup way too much (and loosing all video media multiple times is becoming very annoying).
I hope during the design of the next Vero, keep in mind most people do need storage and not everyone has a NAS. Not everyone is that geeky 
Here is hoping for proper HDD connections (SATA or whatever) and perhaps monitoring (+ warning) of drive health.
edit: moved to Feature Requests because there is nothing to investigate at this point. There are no logs that descibe the status of the harddrive. At some point the system just cannot mount it or doesn’t even recognize anything.