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One aspect about my PC I have never upgraded in the years I've owned it is the storage. I've actually just been living off of the 1TB of storage this PC came with when my father bought it for me back during college. Unsurprisingly I have to constantly delete and reinstall stuff every so often because of this. Reason I never bothered upgrading the storage is simple: been broke as fuck for years and when I often weighed my priorities on what I did want to spend money on I never put a new HDD near the top because I just kept sticking to my habit of "delete some stuff to install other stuff and just keep doing that on and on." What's made me change my mind is back in 2019 I did get an external HDD for my PS4 that is 4TB in size and yeah it's made a pretty huge difference in how I enjoy using that console since I can keep pretty much every game I own installed and I've never had to "clean out the fridge" since getting it. About time I do the same for my PC so I'll never feel like I need to uninstall larger games like Assassin's Creed or GTA5 in order to make room for Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal.

Not interested in SSD at the moment, would rather wait until they're less pricey. Mainly just want some opinions on if I should get an internal drive or an external one (internal looks fairly easy to install, but external seems like it'd be even less of a hassle and would make transferring data easier if I ever get a new PC in the future).

Yeah, I got an External 1TB for my old PC because I needed more space and the internal I tried to install didn't work. I've been storing everything I'm especially sure I want to keep on it and it makes migrating between PCs easier. As long as you have enough USB ports, I'd go for it. The first one Google shows me is listed at $47.99-$99.99 depending on if it's 1TB-5TB.

I don't know much about speed, but I've never noticed anything being especially slow and mine's USB 3.0 in a 3.0 port.

I've had a good experience overall.

If your HDDs are on the older side your motherboard may be using that old ribbon cable in a master/slave configuration instead of SATA. The two don't get along well, but you'll have to look up your motherboard to see what you have.

Oh, and as always check your power consumption before adding a new component. Stressing your power supply is one of those "oh look everything's fried" moment.

I'd go with an external HDD if I were you, they're less of a hassle to install and you can find 4TB ones for between $60 to $100 on Amazon.