A lot of external drives are just internal devices with another controller and casing around. I had a 4TB I used with my laptop, and tore apart the casing and just plugged it into my desktop when I built one. Unless you start hammering the external case around, the drive will be fine.
I love discord for small communities, not that I have that many I’m in though. But friend groups, and niche topics. Places where the chat generally is a single discussion or two at a single point in time. And the voice chat is superb. Just drop in and out is convenient.
But it sure as fuck doesn’t compete with what reddit and Lemmy is doing.
Skimmed comments, but if you download and manage your music on your own on a machine you can have a super simple setup like I do. All music is synced using Syncthing to my phone. So my phone gets local storage, and then I use Poweramp (android) to play it.
I pretty much have a folder for all the music though. But I assume you can sort music into folders to have them as playlists. But perhaps not as practical as desired.