I have been trying to run my own node with an external drive for a while now. Almost a year. On a pretty beefy chromebox turned linux box.

In that time, the external USB drive randomly disconnected 3 times and needed me to manually fix it. Worse still, Fulcrum, the electrum server I was recommended, just refuses to function after that and I need to restart the whole indexing.

I have retired the node temporarily and will replace it with an internal drive going forward. I don't recommend an external drive in general.

In the past I had an external drive (NVME inside an enclosure) connected to a raspberry pi and that straight up died. The NVME wouldn't function as a drive at all, so I couldn't even recover any of the data including Lightning channel states. Fortunately I was still able to recover most of the funds.