I built a maxed-out Raspberry 5 mini PC with an SSD for under $200. You can too
Here you have two options. If you have a USB adapter for M.2 SSDs, you can plug your SSD into it and install the system ...
GitHub5d
eeprom-memory
The EEPROM Storage library provides the ability to access variables stored in EEPROM just as if they were stored in RAM.