A few years ago, after reading everything in the Hainish Cycle, I decided I'd try and get the whole thing in print. I'm not a serious collector, not necessarily after first editions or otherwise rare editions; but I did want hard covers, and I wanted editions that had dust jackets with all that funky scifi art of the 60's/70's/80's. So far the Hainish books have been good to me in the sense that none of it has been really rare and it's mostly under the 100 usd/eur point as long as you're not looking for signed stuff.
Unfortunately it gets a little weird with The Word for World Is Forest: The only good looking hard cover happens to be on one of the earlier editions and while I doubt it's truly rare, it's rare enough people start asking a lot for it. I finally got lucky and some kind bookshop on ebay put it up for less than 100, dust jacket and all, and I finally get to add it to the shelf.
It's not my favorite of the Hainish Cycle, but it's an easy recommend (I recommend everything and anything from Le Guin). I know it's a favorite for a lot of folks. Anyways, if you're just getting into collecting print scifi, bookfinder.com is fantastic for what it is (aggregator for the inventories of the big used book operations), and I guess every once in a while ebay can work out.
I've been using backblaze b2 (via s3fs-fuse container + bidirectional mount propagation to a host path) and a little bit of google drive (via rclone mount + the same mounting business) within kubernetes. I only use this for tubearchivist which I consider to be disposable. No way I'm using these "devices" for anything I really care about. I haven't tried gauging the performance of either of these, but I can say, anecdotally, that both are fine for tubearchivist to write to in a reasonable amount of time (the bottleneck is yt-dlp ingesting from youtube) and playback seems to be on par with local storage with the embedded tubearchivist player and jellyfin. I've had no issues with this, been using it about a year now, and overall I feel it's a decent solution if you need a lot of cheap-ish storage that you are okay with not trusting.