Of course, jovial comments... That'll be the day! We cannot allow those on our forum, hehe 
Our 'red button' is quite ruthless in its actions. But maybe the moderator in question was a bit too quick on his feet, or had too much coffee.
Try again if you want, we'll try to restrain ourselves while stopping all the more real spam messaging.
This is asking developers to post their progress in multiple locations. Which sounds like extra work for developers that already have not enough time on their hands.
If something like the database is suddenly missing, then there is probably some form of file corruption going on. Install a fresh copy of LibreELEC, and restore any of the backups you may have.
At the moment, the Raspberry Pi 3 box can only boot from the microSD card slot, and not from any of the USB port slots.
So use the USB-SD Creator to format a suitable microSD card for your RPi3, and have it boot from the microSD card.
Support or discussion, on our forum or IRC channel, of addons that are on Kodi's list of banned addons is not permitted. Any problems you may have with those addons, please contact its developers.
NUC and cheap? 
Try waiting for the next NUC series, something J35xx or J4205 chipsets, or something of the Baby Canyon (?) generation. They should have 10bit 4K HEVC, although Linux driver support is not always readily available.
Also, better to buy simple things that last 1-2 years, and not something expensive that needs to last 5-10 years. Technology can change fast.
I assume you will need to add a Norwegian capable font to the system as well.
AFAIK, no one has even started to attempt to consider an NS-TV build.
No one in the LibreELEC team is working on such a port.
I too have a Nvidia Shield, using SPMC as Kodi fork works just fine for me. And I like to play the odd Android game every now and then.
Back to the duct tape, I say.
It's possible that the RPi's firmware was updated and along with that the starting datetime was altered.
"and this was useful because it was easy to see how long the system had been on"
Really...? The RPi you bought somewhere between 2014 and 2016, that has an initial datetime of January 1970, will tell you its proper uptime? It's really beyond me why such an inconclusive statistic would be useful.
That was quite a story, but we still don't have the patient's name. I.e., what sort of LibreELEC device are you using? Also a Kodi.log for starters is always "nice to have" for machine details.
Put some black duct tape over them or its casing.
LibreELEC has put not any speed limitation on itself in any area. Only the 'Wait for network' option comes close, since LibreELEC can boot too fast before the network is actually up.
Comparing network speeds to Windows installation 'speeds' is like comparing apples and oranges. Different situations altogether.
Drive speeds and network speeds can be different for various reasons. Disks that get full will become slower in writing, different Linux kernels can have different network drivers, different usage of cache... I see differences in Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04: copying files over the network was fine with 14.04, now with 16.04 things have apparently changed and not for the better. (I might even go back to 14.04).
I see intel based stuff and you boot from an SD... What kind of (sourcery) box are you using?
Never mind, I see it's a NUC now... Sunday mornings have their effect on me 
Alternatively you could mount the HDD using its UUID. That will not be a random number after every boot.
"SALTS is one of the newest Kodi add-ons available, but it’s already one of the most popular. Developed by the same people that brought us 1channel.ch, SALTS stands for "Stream All The Sources"."
Congratulations, you are the next Kodi user that will be directed to the exit door. Support or discussion of addons deemed illegal by Kodi is prohibited.
I suggest contacting the Trakt addon developers (LibreELEC is not one of them) for more details.
Using /etc/fstab is perhaps a logical step in Linux, but not in LibreELEC as the system part of it is set up as an readonly system by design. Any changes you make in that section will be overwritten with the next update of LibreELEC.
I'm not quite sure why the automount is issuing random names after each boot/mount.
Which disk format does the internal hdd have? NTFS, EXT4, something else?
If you disable your manual mount in start.sh, and plug in your HDD and do reboot, then get us the results of the following commands (via SSH) of a 'clean' mount:
blkid | pastebinit
mount | pastebinit
dmesg | pastebinitAlso, mounting and sharing via Samba are two different things, so let's take one step at a time.
Try adding/putting the modifications to the /storage/.config/hosts.conf file.