I have a lot to say about this so bear with me as I lay it all out. I just went through a lot of changes trying to manage images and I have learned a lot of hard lessons in the past few months. I just got done revising everything so I am laying out some of what I learned. Most of what I learned I gained from others on this site.
you have also to consider backing up your images. Hard drives can fail and if you have it all on one drive you can lose everything. Typically they recommend something like at least two local sites for your data plus one remote site.
A lot depends on your shooting style and your camera. Here many of us shoot with a 47 megapixel camera, we shoot in RAW and we often do 20fps bursts when shooting under difficult conditions to maximize the potential for a good result. Shoot that way and even though you weed things out and discard a lot, you still build up a rather large pile of images.
The recommendation as I recall is to have at a minimum two local sites for storage plus one remote.
In your case 256gb is nowhere big enough for storing photos for most of us these days. You should store your photos on a high speed external drive. I just bought a super high speed 4 tb Crucial drive and I paid under $300 for it.
So even with that I need a second drive to back up my photos locally. This could be accomplished with a second external drive. It does not need to be as fast as your primary photo drive but it should be as big.
Beyond that you can do cloud storage for your remote site.
So, in your setting I would recommend the following:
1. Buy AT LEAST two external hard drives, one of them fast;
2. Get a backup program that automatically backs up your photo drive to the second external drive
3. Consider getting a third external drive for redundant local backup;
3. Subscribe to a cloud storage solution that automatically backs up your photos to the cloud.
Now a word of warning, be careful what you use for cloud storage. I learned this lesson the hard way. I am assuming you have a PC. I was using Microsoft Onedrive for cloud storage. that proved to be a nightmare because Onedrive syncs all the time and when you import photos it suddenly grabs everything and starts dragging copies off site. That slowed down Lightroom and also began overloading my hard drive. Try to get rid of Lightroom and it resists you. You are supposed to be able to limit folders it will copy but it won't let you get rid of the photo folder on your main hard drive. I could go on and on.
Backblaze is a good backup system that works with photography storage.
Now there are more complicated storage solutions that will cost more. You could go for an array of drives (RAID) which can serve various purposes. RAID arrays can be internal drives, external attached directly to your computer or located in a network and connected by ethernet or wifi.
The other big issue is your computer itself. How fast a connection you can get with an external drive depends on your computer's capability. If all you have is USB A or b your speed may be limited. USB C connections are faster and there are also levels of USB C speed. Thunderbolt is even faster and there are levels of those as well.
I am sure I am overly simplifying some of the technical details here and there are a lot of people on this site that know more than I do. I am just someone reporting lessons I have so you don't have to go through what I went through.
