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The NUC is about 100mm square with the thickness varying depending on the model. Units for USATA drive are about 40mm thick and ones designed to take a 2.5" SATA drive are about 55mm. You could run some OS's on them from a USB stick (I did that in fact with Distro Astro to have a look at it and people use USB sticks to run media centre software on them)
I tend to use proper drives as they are a lot snappier to use that way.
The other unit I wondered about was the RPi that Julian is using, it has the advantage of being even cheaper and even lower power draw but I would assume the performance would not be as good and if I wanted it to connect to Wifi then more hardware is required, plus I already have this NUC spare.
I originally bought it to run IP PABX software on to get a home intercom working, but then found I could run that software on my NAS so it became spare and I found another use for it. in typical style an update then broke the PABX software on my NAS but the NUC was already occupied so the intercom (And Wifi management software) are now running on a Raspberry Pi and the NUC is spare as the other job it was doing has gone away!
On topic, I have the NUC running Disto Astro headless and can manage it over Wifi from an ipad or other PC using VNC. It is not perfect yet but functions. time to buy an EQmod cable (Or maybe Bluetooth kit, less cables on my mount) and see if I can get it driving my mount through Stellarium.
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